- cross-posted to:
- opensource@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- opensource@lemmy.ml
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i don’t understand discord’s popularity at all. it’s so annoying to use
It started getting popular years ago and that’s when me an my friends switched to it too (back when I didn’t know shit about privacy). You gotta keep in mind the alternatives back then were Skype, which was meant for 1 to 1 calls, had shit audio quality and issues all the time and TeamSpeak, which was complicated because you needed a server (we were kids, we only knew what a server was from Minecraft) and had a text chat that was only a small part of the bottom of the window that was full of connected and disconnected messages, so I actually didn’t even know you could write in that. TeamSpeak’s interface also isn’t exactly good-looking or very intuitive. Then came Discord, you could create a server for you and your friends for free, you saw who of your friends was online and playing what, you could see when someone was in a voice channel and could just join, you had multiple text chats where you could easily send a link or memes while playing and you could easily share your screen with the others. It was a major improvement over the other two. I know that it sucks from a privacy standpoint but there’s good reasons why people started using it.
It was my replacement of Skype, which was leaning hard into its enshittification around that time.
What? Skype is better than discord
Literally how
COVID got people used to video/audio communication, then the other platforms enshitified while discord remained as shit as they always were.
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How familiar are you with IRC?
I was told by someone that IRC is kind of what discord is built on. Maybe the answer is someone in that relation, if what i was told is accurate or not
Can someone point to the reasons why such talented people use discord for their projects?
Because it’s a decent all in one platform and they don’t want to deal with the alternatives.
The integrations and plugins, established workflows, support systems ticketing it’s all turnkey. I hate the platform and I wish people wouldn’t use it but I understand the draw.
Discord has a ticketing system?
There are ticketing bots, yes.
There are bots that tie in and store tickets several of my software vendors use them. When you have a problem you drop into a certain channel and make a request it issues you a ticket with a link creates a new channel that’s just a conversation between you and support. At first it seems clergy but after you use it a couple of times it’s reasonably slick
Why not just use Slack that likely has better integrations?
A lot of people have discord, a lot less people have slack.
Slack is also starting to charge for those workflows. My slack bill at work is gone up 50% past what it was. And I’m now getting monthly warnings from using my integrations. They would like me to put a credit card into handle more jira tickets.
You also need to pay to just have message history preserved on slack. Discord that information is there for free for as long as the server/discord exists.
I’m not saying people should use discord, but people are using it because it’s free to use.
Because if I didn’t use Discord then I would be the only one in the community. Discord has a massive userbase especially with gamers. You give them a Discord link and there’s a decent chance you’ll see them join and post a message. Give them any other link and they’ll never make an account, they probably won’t even click the link to see it.
I provide links for Discord, Lemmy, Kbin, Mastodon, Steam group, and GitHub. I see lots of people come in on Discord, but 0 on the others except for myself lol.
Only the few actual contributors use the GitHub, don’t think I’ve ever seen a non-programmer submit a bug report on my GitHub or use the discussions or leave any comments on releases or anything.
I’m also on Moddb and NexusMods, got a few comments on Moddb, none on Nexusmods yet.
I also have Twitch and YouTube of course, I get small numbers of people commenting on those.
Nobody has even asked for any other type of community, Discord is just want they want. If I just wanted to talk to myself then I wouldn’t bother creating a community/forum at all.
Essentially, Discord is convenient for them.
TBH forums really are for the technical people, at least for the use cases I’m imagining. What incentive could we give that they join forums too?
Devs ITT biting every single argument in the article and then saying “but it’s easy” is extremely ironic
I don’t mind Discord being a centralized platform for open source project discussion, if and only if the only roles it serves specifically play to its one strength, which is real time discussion. Asking for live support (from the dev if they are there, or the community if they are not) and doing live bug triage are the two big use cases.
Should contact for these things be real time? Maybe, maybe not. Async discussion like you get on forums or via email can do the job. But if you value real-time chat, Discord does it well.
Everything else? Do it elsewhere. Do not make Discord your only bug tracker. Do not make it your only wiki. Do not make it your only source of documentation. Do not make it the only place you broadcast updates or announcements. Do not make it your only distribution platform for critical downloads. And for the love of god please do not make it the only way to contact you. I don’t care if you allow Discord to additionally do these things using integrations, that’s fine, just stop trying to contort Discord into your only way of doing these.
Is Discord the only capable option for real time chat? No. But it has several things going in its favor, namely how one can reasonably expect a good sum of their target user base is already using it independently for other purposes, in addition to its numerous QoL features.
It can also better integrate into the dev’s personal routine if they already use it independently. Like, do I have an email address? Yeah. Do I read my email on any reasonable interval? Hell no. My email inbox is little more than a dustbin for registration confirmations and online order receipts. I’ve had email for decades and I think I can count the number of non-work, non-business conversations I’ve held over it in that whole span of time on one hand. Meanwhile, I’m terminally online on Discord. So if I’m gonna be a small independent FOSS project developer, am I gonna want to interface with everyone over email? No. I’ll still make it an option, because being only contactable on Discord is cringe, but it will not be fast. Discord will be my preferred channel.
Should I put more effort into being contactable on other platforms, because it’s the right thing to do? Meh. I have no duty of stewardship to be available on platforms available to anyone in particular. I maintain this hypothetical project for free, on my own time, of my own volition, and I provide it to you entirely warranty-free. I have the courtesy to make all static resources available in sensible public places, and I provide email as a slow, async way to reach me. But if you want to converse with me directly in real time, you can come to me where I’m hanging out.
How would you even use discord for that stuff? It sounds way harder than just using the proper tools.
You’d certainly think so. But never underestimate a user’s ability to jury-rig a piece of software into doing something it wasn’t designed to do, ignoring any and all obviously better solutions as they do so.
I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen documentation published on Discord and nowhere else. But I do very often see no documentation whatsoever except a “just ask around on the Discord” link serving the role.
Discord probably isn’t used as a robust ticketing system either; usually if anything it’s a bot that will push all tickets to an actual GitWhatever issue, which is fine. But again, what I do see often is projects with no ticketing system whatsoever, and a Discord link to just dump your problems at. If the issue tracker on the repo isn’t outright disabled, it’s a ghost town of open issues falling on deaf ears.
Announcements can be pretty bad. Devs can get into a habit of thinking the only people who care about periodic updates are already in the Discord server, so they don’t update READMEs, wikis, or docs on the repo as often as they should, allowing them to go out of date.
Fwiw I’ve also seen several projects that have Discord servers with none of these problems, because they handle all those other parts properly.
you can come to me where I’m hanging out.
This is the crux of the issue. Where you hang out is your choice.
Is the platform full of security and privacy flaws? Yes.
Will content on the platform be actively mined for training data for neural networks? Yes.
Are you obligated to use anything else to discuss your provided content that’s free of charge? Absolutely not.
Indeed, it is my choice. And as of now, even in light of all of this article’s information, I have chosen Discord. For now.
Deal breaking flaws to others are not necessarily deal breaking flaws to me. If their differences in principles prevent them from reaching me on my preferred platform, tough noogies for them.
🤮
If you’re desperate for a discord-like experience (because lets face it, irc and mailing lists arent very flashy anymore!) you can try:
- rocket chat - General purpose chat platform, very similar discord
- mattermost - developer-centric platform, similar to slack
- Matrix - open protocol, has a bunch of desktop clients
Yes you wont have voice/vodeo chat for these but IMO that’s rarely useful anyway. And if you DO need it then you can use stuff like teamspeak or zoom******yes i know the issues with these options but for devs you dont really ever need to use meetings for very long and sometimes using a shitty free service with all you need is better than self hosting your own. Maybe Nextcloud talk can work?Some good arguments made for FOSS voice/meeting apps, and why VC and meetings are more important to the FOSS workflow than I thought :)
Jitsi Meet for zoom replacement
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I think that’s actually what discord should be used for. It’s one of the better platforms for voice/video/text chat. It’s mostly just when people use discord for what should be a public forum or wiki that it becomes a problem.
And sure, it’s not a great place for open source developers to do all their communication in, because being able to reference things in the future if a project lead closes the server is important. But it’s probably fine for coding sprints and meetings here and there as long as someone is taking notes to be documented elsewhere. Discord is arguably better than zoom for that use case.
How about Revolt? It’s open source and it’s pretty much a Discord clone.
Stop recommending closed-source, paid solutions. It makes you look like a shill.
Matrix is the only suitable replacement for discord, as it is the only federated replacement.
Matrix was built by Israeli intelligence & consumes so many resources that it’s not feasible to self-host on most budgets. As such it’s highly centralized & the community is still largely being ran by Matrix.org as the keeper of the implementation server, the most popular client, the specification, the largest server- which syncs back the metadata.
Mattermost is by-design centralized but it’s self-hostable & AGPL so I’m not sure where the closed-source accusation is coming from. At least it’s less wasteful than trying to be decentralized & if you wanted lightweight decentralization, you would reach for XMPP.
Matrix was built by Israeli intelligence
Source?
Thanks for the interesting rabbithole.
Well, that’s something I didn’t know, but it seems like they’ve been in the process of removing or giving the ability to remove the parts that communicate back to the main Matrix coordinators since 2019. And it’s been 2017 since they had funding from Amdocs. I’d certainly listen if someone says they’ve recently analyzed that sort of data going back to the organizations servers. It doesn’t look like it though.
At this point, the fact that it’s all opensource and the self-hosting options/configurations let you keep things internal now would make the point of its origin moot. TOR is another example of something that may have suspicious origins but because it’s public and OS, most people trust the privacy of its implementation.
There are ways do funding while being in the shadows. It’s absolutely conspiracy, but something I can see being of importance to spy agencies as Matrix is defacto centralized with all metadata & assets syncing back to the mothership. Signal also had their server code closed for a while, & I wouldn’t be surprised if something regarding US intelligence wasn‘t involved. I think you can trust these platforms more than most, but I’d prefer keeping an arm’s length until we are years removed & see open governance (something Matrix is slowly (finally) transitioning too, but other chat protocols have done for much longer).
Yah, I have my doubts about Signal as well, given the insistence, even now that the username function has been added, of needing a phone number to register. That doesn’t seem to fit with an application that’s supposed purpose is to be a private communications network and has been promoted for political change purposes in developing countries.
irc and xmpp federate…xmpp is highly extensible.
Matrix is the only suitable replacement for discord, as it is the only federated replacement.
No, stop recommending questionable open-source. Matrix is a metadata disaster and XMPP is the true and the OG federated and truly open solution that is very extensible.
Can you explain xmpp? I’d like a federated discord replacement buddy if you could show me the way I’d greatly appreciate it :)
XMPP is like email, a very open standard that was designed for interoperability even with more closed servers that included proprietary features and extensions. You can message anyone by email no matter what’s or where’s their server and can be configured to be secure and private. Here a quick overview of the architecture.
XMPP is the only solution that treats messaging and video like email: just provide an address and the servers and clients will cooperate with each other in order to maintain a conversation. Everything else is just an attempt at yet another vendor lock-in.
This article has a few primary arguments for not using Discord—
- because it is proprietary software
- because it has poor accessibility
- because control over moderation and other administrative tools is ultimately in the hands of Discord rather than the community.
I know this opinion is going to be unpopular but here I go anyway.
Other than the accessibility argument, I find these arguments quite weak. Yes, Discord is proprietary software, but the reason it’s used is because a lot of people are familiar with it and many people already have Discord accounts.
Although I’m a firm supporter of free software, I also believe that it’s more important to use the right software for the job than to idealistically use inferior software just because it happens to be open-source. And yes, I regard most of the alternatives to Discord listed in the article to be inferior solely because they are unfamiliar to users. Sometimes, the superior choice happens to be proprietary and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. That’s the way it is sometimes; you can’t win every fight, as much as you’d like to.
If your goal is to foster a community of regular users and make it easy for normal users to interact with contributors, there is no choice that will hamper that goal more than using an obscure alternative software that nobody’s heard of.
With respect to chat logs and administration tools… for the most part, nobody cares. Discord’s tools are sufficient for most groups and few people consider the drawbacks to outweigh the other benefits.
True, but managing expectations is needed tho, mainly about exit strategy:
If a community needs to leave, the content on Discord must be considered “not important”, “not transferable” and “not archive worthy”.
If Discord changes freemium, limits users or otherwise applies enshittification just leave your stuff and start over.
It would be easier to leave if you started by using a platform that made that seamless. Freenode gets bought & communities say to point your bouncers/clients to Libera.chat or OFTC. If you were on XMPP on a decentralized account, your account stays, but now there’s a new MUC to join. With Discord, if Discord goes down, so does the client & the whole server… folks need to relearn a bunch of stuff & it’s not a clean break.
This is also inevitable as we are talking about a US-based, VC-funded service & we have the entire track record of these types of services declining. Why not start with something that’s more likely to not suck in 5 or 10 years even if it doesn’t have all the same features so long as you can still chat in realtime.
Agree, wholeheartedly and reasons I want to avoid Discord et al. I do communicate my expectations rather cynically in case a community is starting and does have a choice in the beginning.
you shouldn’t use discord at all … I think nowadays it’s the only app that uses plain text for all messages avoid discord
I use discord when playing video games with my daughter. It’s improved our experience immensely.
Audio chat, webcam and screen sharing are a great combination.
Can you recommend an alternative?
I’m not a fan of online games therefore can’t suggest you an alternative but I’m sure something better exists
chatting and making video with your daughter trough discord it’s the same like having any discord employee watching you (see privacy policy ) if you are confortable with that it’s fine . I’m supposing you are on lemmy to avoid reddit right ? do the same for discord.
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I have never used Discord and never will. No project has ever been able to change my stance on it.
On the other end I have a lot of first-hand experience of Discord’s abuses and that’s precisely why I have my stance on it.
Don’t talk to discord users, they have cooties.
I don’t talk to them. They’re always dead when I’m awake anyway.
But I also don’t want to make zillions accounts, one for each project, just for a quick question.
You mean pretty much a single GitHub account?
Also your quick question may have already been asked and answered but difficult to find on Discord. Or if it hasn’t been asked yet, now a future person can’t discover the same question easily. So either way you’re just wasting other people’s time.
That “Discord” can be replaced with any IM platforms. Slack, Martix, Gitter, you name it. They are still hard to search. By no means I like the idea of using IM platforms as a support portal/community. I still think forums-like platforms are the best, yet I don’t want to create another account to engage with a project that I use.
Github, Lemmy and Stack Exchange enables one account for multiple projects/topics, which I quite like. Or mailing lists. That can do as well.
Thanks for the clarification and I believe I misunderstood your original comment.
To add to your list there is an often underutilized feature of GitHub for discussions too.
Openstreetmap 👀 👀 👀 👀
Yes I know of and use the bridged Matrix Room. But bridges can’t mimic or replicate every function which has effect on dialogue between users on both sides.
This is why the ‘primary’ or ‘base’ server needs to be non-proprietary & open, not the other way around.
I created a discord server for an open source project of mine, but grew to dislike it. It got spammed multiple times, people are off topic and talking about their lives in channels that aren’t for that, and so I started pushing the community toward GitHub discussions.
Discord isn’t searchable, nor archivable, nor public, but GitHub is (I’m aware of another conflict with Microsoft for some people, but to me this is the easiest solution to get contributors and have an easy CI setup).
I haven’t had much success yet, but I’m slowly shutting down all links to the discord and will let it die (for outside contributors at least). I might keep it to stay in touch with a few developers, to refine issues and prepare migrations that aren’t ready to be turned into public discussions/ issues / pull requests.
Look at what just happened to Yuzu - Years of community just deleted because of a few lawyers.
I haven’t read the legal outcome, but wouldn’t this have happened anyways if the forums were in other places? The github got removed as well
basic news is: Yuzu and citra agreed to shut down with immediate effect incl. discords.
At least with an open platform youd have a chance to backup discussions or rehost. You’d probably still be dead in the water but it would beat the info being wiped.
This article is two years old, and perhaps discord have improved their accessibility, since this user find it more accessible then matrix. Yes, it’s a single usercase, but worth mentioning nonetheless.
I think there are other arguments against Discord that haven’t been mentioned: data privacy. I know there was an instance where Discord collected user without their consent, and that is enough for me to avoid the platform.
I much rather use matrix or the horridly old IRC protocol than Discord. Or forums. Or just plain old issues!
Discord is a wicked place, let us not go there
