person backing up his car exploitable with the following four panels:
- person looking ahead. the text below him says, “wow a cool software. let’s check out the community”
- screenshot with the text
Community
The main place where the community gathers is our Discord server. Feel free to join there to ask questions, help out others, share cool things you created with Typst, or just to chat. - hand on gear shift zoomed in, switching to reverse
- person looking behind with the text “nevermind”.
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Discord makes for a bad forum because it’s not a forum! Stop using it as one! It’s good for small groups that need realtime communication-- friend groups, project groups, even classes of students. If you’re using it as a public forum you’re using the wrong tool!
This, exactly.
Discord sucks at what it wasn’t designed to do… Shocker. That doesn’t make it bad.
It sucks at what it was designed to do also. One of the trashiest UIs I’ve seen, and buggy af. It’s barely gotten any better too.
i mean, it’s far from perfect, but as someone that’s been using video/voice clients since before there was a commercial solution, what is better? i haven’t found it.
Depends on what exact type of app you want, but as one example of something that can mostly replace discord and do a far better job-- Slack. There was an app in the early 2000’s for gaming voice chat which I thought worked far better too. It was called something like “Roger Wilco” I think. The only similar apps I’ve used which are obviously worse than discord? Teams, and once MS bought it, Skype.
Man Skype used to be so good when it was peer to peer… I don’t see anything that MS brought to that platform that improved it at all.
I hate Slack Overflow (using Slack as documentation) but it beats the pants off of Discord Overflow.
ah yes slack the app that won’t let you voice chat in groups or store chat history unless you pay $7 per user per month. I’m honestly amazed how they’ve been getting away with it this long when discord exists
won’t let you voice chat in groups
Weird, I guess I have been imagining doing that at work for the past couple of years. I do understand though, when you’re used to apps like discord, you forget it’s possible to not only gain new useful features, but have them actually work.
Slack’s pricing logic makes perfect sense to me there. It’s free and works for a large number of users, but the ones who actually need chat history probably can/should pay for it.
I’m honestly amazed how they’ve been getting away with it this long when discord exists
Yeah it’s totally crazy that an app can be considered good enough that many thousands of businesses find it worth paying for. I mean why isn’t every business using free Gmail accounts? Or for similar shittiness in the UI department, why isn’t everyone using Hotmail?
I was pretty clearly only complaining about the features offered by their free tier, which I just checked does still not let you voice chat with three or more people or search chat history. (The chat history issue is more significant by far).
And yes $7 per user per month is not reasonable for an open source project with a few hundred members that doesn’t have a budget, especially compared to discord that gives you unlimited chat history for free. All the open source projects I know that use chat use either matrix or discord.
Can you share some of the bugs you encounter? I actually find discord to be quite stable.
One of the trashiest UIs I’ve seen,
You must have seen only best of the best UIs.
and buggy af.
I don’t think fuck is as buggy as Discord.
Why do people do this when there are already Github discussions and issues?
Because having an active community on github or a forum is a very different feeling to having one on IRC or discord. They’re entirely different tools. IRC-style communities have always been more active than github, discord is just the latest iteration of that concept.
Hosting documentation or issue tracking on discord, though, I hate that. For tech support its… fine, for getting informal feedback or engaging with users its great. Anything archival its a goddamn crime.
The worst is when people try to use discords forum features, which are the worst of all possible worlds…
Yeha, it should be done only for support.
I still think that support stuff should be opened FIRST in the forum tool because it gives visibility for search engines. Just label it as “Support”.
That should automatically open a thread in the discord server where people can discuss. The discord server thread should be tagged in the forum. If any bug/features come from that chat, then they can be linked to the support ticket.
If anyone has a similar support related issue, they’ll find full traceability using a search engine instead of having to find the discord server to search stuff.
I brought this up in a project Discord once and they told me “this is just the way projects do it now, get used to it”.
I left that server right away.
They added forum-style posts a while ago, which greatly improves usability. But I won’t use it regardless, due to privacy issues.
Sounds like a very neat feature, but IMO still not great for people outside of the discord server esp. if the threads can’t show up in a search engine
True. That’s why I recommend Discourse if you can’t use a proper development forum like Codeberg or something.
Discord is great for friends, bad for projects. I’ll never have a discord for a project because I don’t want to answer the same questions over and over.
Same as Matrix tbh.
Awesome in FOSS matrix rooms: there are threads, but people never use them. Its horrible, they dont even jump on the boat. You could literally have one message = one topic and everything in a separate thread…
Users don’t move everything from an already existing forum to Discord. It’s not like people are going there because they want to use it as a forum, lots of forums have been replaced by discord (like in the screenshot of this post). To reiterate the metaphor someone used already, it’s like wanting to eat a steak but the only steakhouse gives you a plunger instead of a knife.
It makes for a bad forum sure, but why should it have to be a forum?
To be able to search through and find information in previous discussions.
You can do that.
Sorry, I forgot to add “easily”.
Time zones.
Who is saying this is using it as a forum?
I mean, I get it, but when the wrong tool is used so ubiquitously, you have to start asking questions about why people aren’t using the “right” tool. Forums seem to end up being hostile to newcomers, with all this “did you search the forum first you fucking noob?” mentality. Having a living place for real-time questions and discussion just feels better, same way email exchanges feel terrible after using Slack for so long. You can still have incredibly toxic people in real-time chat servers, obviously, but there just seems to be less overall stress to keep the posts in the forum “pristine” or… whatever that was.
Not being able to search for old content is a huge con to real-time chat. Even if the history is retained forever (in self-hosted instances), real-time messages just aren’t the best bits of data to recall later like forum posts. Clear drawback.
Still, people are using discord, not to spite forums, but because it works, is free, and is easy.
Everyone in this comment section is yelling about how bad discord is, telling people to use forums or matrix instead. No one is asking “why?”. Why aren’t people using forums or matrix? Because the path to user growth isn’t guilting people into the ‘morally correct’ choice, it’s making a product they want to use.
Why are small communities using discord over forums? Well, we’re talking about small projects, hobbies, and volunteer work. Hosting a forum costs both time and money - renting server space and configuring/managing both the forum and the server. Making a discord channel is instant and free. You want your favorite project to have a forum? Then take up the mantle of hosting and maintaining it yourself. You want all projects to use a forum? Develop a forum system that you absorb the hosting costs for. Neither of these exist, so communities use discord.
Why are small communities using discord over matrix? I’m in my 30s, I spend all day on my PC, I’ve taken a couple years of college courses in programming. Figuring out matrix was annoying for me. I had to figure out which client program to use, I had to navigate the less-than-ideal way of joining servers, and there was a difficulty curve for understanding the program’s features and how to use it. It wasn’t impossible, but it took effort. Discord doesn’t. For every step of friction, a product will bleed users. Matrix is cumbersome to set up and use, and it’s copying something that already exists and does it better for the end-user experience. It shouldn’t be surprising that people prefer discord. Want that to change? Start contributing code to matrix and refine the user on-boarding process.
Instead of stating opinions, ask questions. That’s how things get changed. No amount of moral grandstanding will change end-users, no matter how correct you might be.
Honestly a lemmy community wouldn’t be a bad format. It’s basically a forum
Normally I’d say that reddit/lemmy are poor choices for a community - but if the competitor is a live-chat like discord? Yeah. Lemmy is better.
Project leads would just need to make sure to direct users straight to a specific instance that allows instant/unmoderated sign-ups, or else that element of friction will occur – and certainly not start the whole “there’s many instances, pick the one that’s right for you!” spiel, or users will give up immediately. I thought similarly about matrix - on-boarding users to a matrix community would be helped by explicitly writing a guide for them to do so, but then we’re back to step 1, where making a discord channel is quicker than writing instructions.
There have been projects that skin Lemmy to be like a forum, based on phpBB code if I recall. Don’t think the projects are active though.
Technically it is ActivityPub actor
Matrix was confusing. Lemmy wasn’t. That should say something because Lemmy is already considered confusing by a lot of people.
I think another hinderance is that the people asking questions get ignored, dismissed or shouted at, even if they tried whatever it was they tried. The Linux community doesn’t do this as much when someone who tried Linux runs back to Windows, thankfully, but if you’re a Chromium user who tried Firefox, or a Bluesky user who tried fedi, and found that the former of those was better for your needs, prepare to have angry nerds flaming you for your blasphemous act.
Also people don’t want to make a new account to ask one question. Discord let’s you pop into a server, ask a question, and leave with ease.
Until this is enabled in some other platform, people won’t switch away from Reddit/Lemmy and discord. People don’t want to make accounts and that’s why these services took over.
A Lemmy community would be 1000x better than a discord community and there’s literally thousands of servers where you can create one of those.
I don’t get discord at all. It seems like the worst parts or IRC and the worst parts of webforums mashed together with no redeeming values added. I can’t find anything, I can’t tell what conversations are over, I can’t figure out any of the in-jokes. If the place is too dead it’s completely devoid of anything of value, if it’s too big everything of value gets buried.
I’ve tried to take part in a couple of servers, those attempts have never last more than a couple hours.
That’s was my exact experience on a pokemon go server. So many channels and conversations that notifications are useless and searching for the information I needed was difficult. Just one giant group chat which is awful for storing needed, retrievable, information imo.
Made me never want to step into discord again.
Same thing with EVERY SINGLE GORILLA TAG SERVER. Way too many mentions. Not straight forward enough. I can not express this enough. It’s insane!
It’s great for smallish groups of friends bs-ing or collaborating, but bigger than that I’ve always found it painful
But, some people can apparently keep up with the firehouse of comments on Twitch streams while they make me not want to bother with it at all, so…
Yeah. My D&D group uses it for audio and video feeds and a little bit of between session chat. I appreciate how good the audio settings are.
Yeah I just can’t even bother with those large twitch streams. It’s not that I couldn’t keep up with it if I really wanted to. It’s that when chats get that big they just become reactions and memes and there’s nothing of value to even keep track of.
It has probably the worst UI of any site or app. I can never find the settings I need to modify or what the heck I’m looking at. It tells me that there’s a new reply specifically to me but I can never find it because it has long scrolled up in the history.
I tried posting an image using the app on my phone but it kept ignoring it. Somehow I magically hit the right button and it included it in my reply. I had no idea.
The content is hidden from the world unless you sign up and join, so the knowledge captured on a discord server is essentially useless.
It’s definitely a mashup on irc and web forums, but infinitely worse.
I’ve always found that Discord’s search works pretty well!
Yeah that’s what I use most to see if people have asked the same question I have then I jump to the discussion they had and that leads me where I want to go, but I do get it would be really annoying for someone who isn’t logged into discord or uses it to chat with friends
Forums do it better, can be indexed by a search engine, can be bookmarked, and can be archived using the wayback machine or a similar service. Important information shouldn’t be buried in chat logs. And discord’s forum feature was an idea they tacked on and is a poor substitute for the real thing.
What do you mean find anything?
Discord is used like this:
Text message: you wanna play today? Yeah.
Discord: here’s the server address. Thanks
Discord voice chat: I made us a bunch of supplies. Cool I dug up a diamond.
And if we were talking about hooking up with our friends to play Minecraft, that’d be a great point.
Everyone is like "discord is a bad project discussion and documentation space! "
Which could be read as “it’s very hard to cut this steak with a plunger!”
People are complaining about using a tool incorrectly.
We’re complaining about having to use it incorrectly. We can’t help if the software project (that’s part of a software project, that’s part of a software project we need) only offers support via discord.
To belabor your metaphor, you’re saying that we shouldn’t complain if we want a steak and the only place to get steak only offers plungers as utensils.
You don’t have to. Fork it, make it better. Crush the existing developers, see them driven before you and hear the lamentations of their Patreon donators.
if you don’t like this restaurant, just open your own!
It’s open source software. Forking and improving is a core feature.
If people have a decent idea but a shit implementation, supercede them.
Sure. If you need software support, build a support system and get everyone else to use it. Makes perfect sense. I hope you live exclusively by this principal.
What? This is about documentation and maintenance of an open source project, this isn’t a SaaS situation.
If your documentation sucks, you’re no better than the discord hell the original project came from.
And yes, I only work with open source projects that are run well, or I fork them and maintain them for personal use.
Crush the existing developers, see them driven before you and hear the lamentations of their Patreon donators.
Conan the Developer has spoken!
Well the specific context here is software projects using it as the platform for their community… So it’s kind of like going to a steakhouse and being given a fork and plunger to eat with. It makes sense to both complain about the steakhouse, and remark on the shortcomings of using a plunger for the purpose it was imposed on you for.
Now of course, it’s wrong to say that Discord or a plunger are bad tools per se-- They are both occasionally useful for when I need to deal with some problematic shit. They are unpleasant, but I just hold my nose and thoroughly wash my hands after.
Actually the plunger analogy tracks better than I expected.
To which I’m saying anyone who engages with discord in a project space that is silly. Creators and users. Software dev happens elsewhere. Fork it and make it better.
Fork… what? The software project that you’re trying to get help with? The problem isn’t that you need to change the code, the problem is that you want to be able to leverage the community.
Oh sorry are you not familiar with GitHub or other branching code managers?
The barrier to entry for IRC is very high for non technical users. It’s also archaic, has little to no customisation and can be difficult to moderate at high volumes.
I’m not defending discord here, but the IRC comparisons are silly.
I am guessing they advertised the right time in the right place. I agree, it’s absolute trash
Are you old?
28yo here - Discord feels as if ADHD was a piece of software
I’m 25 and share all these woes, what is old to you?
I’m 21 and completely agree.
Old is when you don’t try to understand the interface anymore.
Discord enables so much that’s never been so convenient before. Can’t say I like the company, but it’s pretty much the best at what it does.
I can’t ditch discord. They won’t even let me in via browser because I “failed the captcha”.
(Not that they’d tell me this somewhere in their UI, this is the server response.)
my failed attempts at registering on discord:
- use temporary email: locked out
- use real email with VPN: locked out
- use real email without VPN and Firefox: locked out
- use real email, no VPN, le lion(brave): registered. join a community. community requires phone verification. deny it. locked out.
every damn time they require a phone number.
I’m not doubting that some servers do, but I’ve yet to run into one myself
Discord itself arbitrarily requires a phone number to register, which is already enough of a hurdle.
I’m pretty sure I never had to give them my phone number, though it has been more than a few years since I signed up
Only the big ones
Same. This happened to me so many times, I just can’t suffer it any more.
I don’t care if people use Discord to talk, it’s only when that’s where the documentation, faq, etc. is.
Yeah, even less nerdy people hate that. I’ve had friends who aren’t well-versed in fediverse/Linux culture complain about ROM hacks in particular doing this.
I do care about people using discord to talk when it’s the only place to talk and there’s 300 conversations on top of each other and 15000 messages/day. Also, Discord sucks for finding out who’s responding to you and its window seems to grab a random point in the chat and say “new messages”. I mean, I might have been 2000 messages behind but now I gotta scan them all to see if anybody actually responded.
I would take a busy forum any day.
Discord has threads and forums now. Most servers aren’t going to that many messages. I don’t think it is a real problem in the context of floss projects.
Until discord makes their search bearable to use, I would still rather use an actual forum over discord. It’s so irritating when I have to perform multiple searches to look up conversations people had on a topic because the stupid search function takes word order into consideration for what messages to show you. And since discord servers aren’t open to search engines, those can’t be used to alleviate that issue.
There’s also no easy way to narrow searches without memorizing their syntax, which of course they do not link to or make easy to find
Using DuckDuckGo and searching for „Discord Search“ or „Discord Search Syntax“ makes this official help website appear in the top results, even as first. Also the syntax is shown when using the search.
https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/115000468588-Using-Search
I am OOL, why so much discord hate lately? I have never used it…
Removed by mod
I think discord is primarily just useful for voice chat, yes.
But:
It’s a closed ecosystem that locks what would otherwise be searchable knowledge on the web, with an unsearchable, proprietary lockdown of that information.
Yeah, no. Proprietary, sure, but you can say that about almost communication mechanism that’s not a website with an API. It’s not like people would otherwise be posting these things somewhere else if discord didn’t exist. If it wasn’t discord it’d be slack or something. Discord is an entirely different medium and complaining that it isn’t a forum is just not a legitimate argument. They’re entirely different things.
Matrix, for example, is an open protocol for real-time messaging.
I think the problem here really is that people are using discord to fill a niche that they wouldn’t otherwise occupy if other options were as simple “make a server” (yes they aren’t actual servers but that’s not the point).
I will concede that it’s still weird to see any FOSS communities on there.
Discord is a real-time communication system that also has a built-in history feature. This type of communication promotes conversational interactions, which are really hard to search for complete ideas about problems and their solutions, and those solutions are not indexed by internet search engines, which makes it extremely difficult for people to discover useful information on the platform even with the available history.
The asynchronous nature of web based forums promotes communication in more complete ideas (though this is clearly not always how communication happens) and they are indexable by search engines.
Just look at how people discover solutions in Reddit posts so frequently when searching Google, but nobody finds solutions in chat logs, even IRC which has been around for decades and is often archived in a search indexable site where chat logs are posted.
Edit: I swear that wasn’t written even a bit by AI.
Edit: I swear that wasn’t written even a bit by AI.
That’s the beauty of it. Tomorrow, it will be.
(When an AI copy/pastes your answer to someone asking about choosing the correct iphone power brick, or something.)
Maybe that’s one thing people like about discord: AI can’t index their chat logs… unless discord starts selling that data.
I think they already do
They’re using AI to generate summaries of chat logs.
I don’t believe they’ve had an IPO yet, but it wouldn’t surprise me if they start selling that data to hit profitability.
“Starts” lol. They are way ahead of you, my friend.
I recommend reading Discord’s Terms of Use and Privacy Policy some time. It is… more eyebrow-raising than usual.
You don’t really address why having a “conversational” option is bad. I understand the advantages of searchable history but that’s not necessarily the right option for every community. Diversity is good.
It’s not bad to have the conversational option, but at a certain point in a project’s life cycle it probably shouldn’t be the only option.
A complex project like a government would have a hard time throwing out all their knowledge infrastructure and relying purely on Discord.
No one wants their private/semi-private chats to be indexable or searchable. The whole POINT is to not have what you say broadcast to all and sundry.
I hear what you’re saying, but that is exactly why Discord is shit for official communities like in the meme. There’s no reason why an open source project should rely on Discord for troubleshooting and feature requests and enthusiasm. Discord was meant for things like video games and friend chats, not instances where data discovery is paramount to growing the community.
There is a reason thar Discord communities trend toward toxic, and it is the insular weirdness that the platform enables and reinforces. Forums make much more sense for projects. Discord ends up with a bunch of no lifers ruining the communities. Been through it far too often with things like genre appreciation groups to open source projects. Reminds me of being a kid and encountering the, frankly, losers chasing people out of IRC.
For open-source projects and stuff that needs to be public, I can feel you.
What these chucklefucks are asking for is to make ALL Discord content indexable and searchable, even extremely private intimate things, and that’s absolutely unacceptable.
Assuming I’m one of the chucklefucks you’re talking about, that’s not what we’re saying. The meme and my comments are about software that somebody found. If somebody found it, it’s already public. Why should such a software community hold its discussions in private?
I’m very pro-privacy. The topic here is not private software, it’s public software.
Useful looking a software that somebody stumbles across and wants to learn more about is not what we’re talking about.
It’s your proposes solution that’s the problem. The answer isn’t to make Discord public, it’s to convince people to move off of it, and quite honestly, if you want people to leave Discord so badly, you’d be better off setting up separate public forums for the open source projects you are interested in on your own and convincing/bribing respected members of the Discord to post there, or copy/paste technical info there.
I feel the same way about Lemmy so I sympathize with you, honestly.
The answer isn’t to make Discord public
You’re absolutely right. Aside from me not caring at all what happens to discord, my explanation points out that even having IRC chat logs public doesn’t surface solutions in search engines, because chat isn’t good for that.
It sounds like you really misunderstood what I was saying. Public software that values community as a long lasting place for users to find solutions should not be promoting chat for those end-user facing discussions, they should be promoting forums.
This whole comment/complaint is just the pros and cons of different types of communication. None of this is discord specific, it’s just complaints that real time chat isn’t indexed by search engines and isn’t organized into clear topics.
Sure, some IRC chats were logged/posted, but that still has all the same searchability problems, and that process can still be used within discord search. It’s just not useful because real time chat doesn’t have any sort of topic organization.
This whole thing is like complaining that signal is worse than email because it’s not as organized. It’s not worse, it’s just a different medium with different goals and purpose. And you’re not giving any specifics as to why signal/discord is bad, just that you don’t like direct messaging/chat rooms.
I don’t think people hate discord as a host for some communities, but there definitely is a growing rejection of it among FOSS contributors.
It sucks as a place to store knowledge. The search sucks, it’s not indexable by search engines, and requires an account to use. As another commenter on this post said, it combines the worst parts of IRC and webforums.
There are better ways to organise a FOSS project, and people are unhappy that some projects still choose discord.
its not open source, meaning its spyware
now seriously, i think its only issue is that it doesnt run well, and its even worse on phones. it works very well as a tool to create communities and talk to people.
It would be nice if more people used Matrix. From my experience though it seems like not a lot of people check in on it regularly because the niche communities they follow are on Discord and even though bridges between Matrix and Discord do exist they are often neglected and fall of out sync.
It would be better if they used a web forum. It’s so easy to search in threads.
Like an independent forum or something like XDA Developers?
I feel like it really depends on the topic and level of engagement. I find traditional forums a bit hard to follow at times because of people branching off and bouncing around discussions. I might run into the same issue I do with Matrix channels where I’m not regularly checking in. Logging in is also another thing.
The issue with login ?
You just unlock your password vault and let it autofill.
I meant for people who use external password managers. Creating a new account and remembering to delete it if you ever stop using it is another issue though.
Worst example I’ve ever seen is 3dVista - a fucking facebook group. Discord would have been amazing in comparison.
Had to see it to believe it. On their website, under Support > Forum, you’re redirected to their Facebook group. This is criminal.
What are the preferred alternatives?
Mine is probably matrix, mostly because I can use the same account everywhere, but it also feels like there’s a lot of gotchas and all the phone apps are kinda meh each in their own unique way.
Personally, I’d prefer that projects use forums for community discussions rather than realtime chat platforms like Discord or Matrix. I think the bigger problem of projects using Discord is not that it’s closed source, but rather that it makes it difficult to search (since no indexing by search engines) and the format deprioritizes having discussion on a topic over a long period of time. Since Matrix is also intended for chat, it has these same issues (though at least you can preview a room without making an account).
I agree with you, but I also think people find Discord convenient because it’s just 1 account and free to use.
I wonder if Lemmy and the rest of the fediverse can work here, or just anything where smaller free projects don’t necessarily have to pay for and maintain their own community infrastructure, and still allow users to jump around without getting too locked in.
Yeah I think Lemmy would actually work pretty reasonably. It reminds me of how lots of software and projects have Reddit communities. I agree that being able to share 1 account over many services, and especially not having to pay for infrastructure is something that drives discord use over forum-based platforms.
matrix is adding sliding-sync functionality which is supposed to dramatically reduce startup times. you can try element x and see the difference.
I’m a bit annoyed with element X tbh, my home server only has sso logins, but they don’t support that and the error message doesn’t explain this at all, which means it’s up to me to figure out if I’m doing it wrong, my home server is doing something wrong, or the app is just bad at communicating errors.
Discord my have issues in terms of not being foss, data collection etc etc but other than that I think it’s a chat app that has no viable contender. Nothing comes close to the same out of the box functionality.
I think it’s a chat app that has no viable contender.
Telegram and even fucking VK.
Nothing comes close to the same out of the box functionality.
Matrix except most client’s UI.
Given that most of these projects are on GitHub, why not use the new GitHub discussions feature. MonoGame are ditching their forum in favour of it, because it’s cheaper (free) and easier to maintain. Though they still have a discord for chatting about game development and progress on their games.
Discord has recently introduced a forum-like thing but it’s not indexable by search engines and the built in search only works if you get the exact title. Basically rubbish.
ditch discord!
make me
we have a discord and a matrix server bridged to it
You can join the matrix room https://matrix.to/#/#typst:matrix.org
Or keep all communities public and stop using walled garden communities full stop. Along with keeping forum threads alive for easier documentation and searchability.
Wrong comment level?
Matrix is open, not closed. Also, chat is no forum and shouldn’t be used as such.
I think most of the problematic toxic mods from Reddit have started infecting Discord too. It’s been getting worse lately.
Don’t worry, most Discord servers are already infected with problematic toxic mods from Twitter.
Seems like a recipe for “drama”
