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
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!
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.
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.
I think I might make this my fucking profile picture, I am so sick and tired of this.
The other day I finally got myself to join the discord of a small early access game to give some feedback/ideas I thought would fit the game really well.
I posted in the right ideas subchannel but then I also made the mistake of saying in the general “hey what do y’all think about this idea!”. I didn’t spam it, I spent awhile writing my idea out in a clear and concise fashion to post in the idea channel, tried to make it lighthearted and even made a bad photoshopped image to go along with it, and then I mentioned it ONCE in the general chat.
The only two people who responded either in the idea channel or in general were two people in general that immediately jumped down my throat, saying I was begging or advertising (by saying I wanted a feature in the wrong place once?)… and everybody else was just silent like that is a sane way to great people at the door to a community.
I hate discord so much, what an awful place to try to organize anything. Either there are only a couple of firehose channels where interesting conversations are diluted into inscrutability by low effort jokes and meme posts or someone taking up half the chat window to say something only to one person… or there develops an ever increasing suffocation of hyper over-organized channels where the only conversations allowed proceed along strict boundaries for what is considered “on topic” for that channel (and thus the possibility space of conversations becomes a series of tiny islands, unconnected from anywhere else conceptually).
This last point might seem like an oddly specific pet peeve, but I have noticed over and over again that the kinds of people who enjoy setting up discord communities and creating an extremely organized system of subchannels just don't understand how the way that feels good for them to structure the world actually critically fails to capture the organic, living aspects of it. In my opinion one of the major reasons people enjoy microblogging services like twitter so much is a structural resistance to "discord channel organizer brain" kinds of people taking hold of communities and making them into their personal pet organization project that makes them feel good at the end of the day when "everything" can now have a perfect spot. Human conversations and interactions derive their genius from being messy and stepping over boundaries, if you make it so every type of conversation has one precise corresponding spot in some mess of subchannels it is very difficult for it not to mortally wound the living fiber of conversation. The problem with Discord, is again, you HAVE to do this when you get any more than 15 people in a Discord channel or the whole thing becomes unmanageable.
It just doesn’t work for a software project ANYWHERE along the continuum of a handful of firehose channels to a confusing web of subchannels and I hate it. Either way, the search is utterly useless in terms of helping curate a body of expert conversations (like say a Reddit-like or forum) but that won’t stop people hanging out in discord all day yelling at you for asking a question that has already been asked before…. in a chat room…. where the whole point is conversations repeat as different social groups join and leave…?
Discord is only convenient for those already using it everyday. For everyone else this is a high barrier to entry, especially when you actually care what software you use.
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.
My biggest issue with discord is that I'll get pinged, and have no fucking clue what pinged me.
Even if I get to the notification, often I don't get it right away, and often I don't open it right away either. So when I click on it, which, in most chat like apps will take you to that post/mention/whatever, it just takes me to the channel where I was mentioned. I'm left with no earthly idea why I'm in this chat or what was said that prompted the notification.
When I'm actively in discord, this works okay, since the mention which prompted the notification is likely the most recent thing said, or at least, close to it. The problem is, I'm almost never actively in discord.
I find that if I use discord all the time, which is rare, but happens.... Then I don't mind it so much. However, if I don't use discord all the time, then it's less than useless. I get notifications all the time and I just end up dismissing them because by the time I get to it, there's no chance I'll be able to figure out why I got the notification in the first place.
DMs and very very small communities are an exception, since the volume of messages is so low that generally, even if I get to the notification hours later, the message that prompted the notification is still one of the most recent handful of messages.
To this end, my list of pros and cons for discord are:
Pros:
convenient (when in active use)
good voice chat
a lot of people use it
Cons:
slow notifications
bad notification handling
I feel like the people who run any given community, who are centered around discord, don't have problems with it, since they're pretty much always on it. For someone who isn't always plugged into discord, it's a horrendous nightmare of missed messages and notifications that take you somewhere unexpected. Any complaints about this generally falls on deaf ears because the people in charge, who picked that the community should be in discord, use it so much that they don't really have any issues with it.
Compare and contrast with a competing text-chat service like slack. In general slack doesn't do voice, so there's some differences there, but talking strictly about notifications and such: the notifications frequently arrive within seconds or minutes at most, when you select them, it takes you to the channel where the alert came from, scrolled to the post where the mention that prompted the notification is located, with the specific mention highlighted for clarity. From here, you can scroll back to get context, and scroll forward to see other replies. Contrasted with my experience in discord, you select the notification, you're taken to the channel where the notification originated, and scrolled to a random point in the recent history of the channel. Does this section contain the mention? Maybe, but probably not. Nothing is highlighted. Good luck.
I get frustrated with these platforms trying to turn into these 'do it all' applications. discord was fine before they started adding all the bullshit in everywhere. it was a great chat place with 'rooms' for different groups of people or friends. kinda like how spotify seems to be trying to morph into some social music sharing crap. i don't use spotify to be social, i use it to listen to fucking music.
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.
There's a growingly popular javascript schema validation library I avoid like the plague because its author was a whiny child on reddit who would get into flamewars with a bunch of people and then suddenly delete all his comments.
There's a lot of reasons not to trust a library with an unstable Code Owner.
I recently soured on Discord myself and here is my story. I have been part of the same private chatroom since 1999. We started on IRC as a Pokemon community and some of us just never left. We moved the chat off IRC to Discord in 2015? At first it was great, discord is miles ahead of IRC in terms of accessibility, now we were sharing photos and videos in chat and now we had it on our phones. We had seen myspace, facebook and countless other social networks go from good to terrible in our lifetimes and I guess we've always known the writing was on the wall for Discord. The end of last year we saw a few different things happen that really creeped me the fuck out.
USA government has access to unencrypted push notifications on Android and iOS. Discord does not offer any encryption. Wired Article
Discord moderating policy is becoming more ideological and political. TechCrunch
Tencent Ownership
General fear that our 25 year long running chat will be sold as AI training data or other BS against our will.
So we moved to a Matrix instance. It was a struggle, some people just flat out refused and to this day (months later) will probably never come. The tech is I'd say, 90% on par with discord. Element (the main Matrix client) sucks at voice chat. It is embarrassingly bad, WHY ISNT THERE PUSH TO TALK? HELLO? Youtube videos won't play in chat, which sucks too. Otherwise we gained encryption and a sense of independence I feel. Looking forward it is possible we will buy rack space for our own instance to further get off the grid. Definitely pros and cons overall but thats my experience. Anybody looking to try out Matrix hit me up you're welcome on my server.
Edit: I completely forgot about the mobile app redesign what a shit show that was! The devs attitude during that is what lead me find Matrix in the first place.
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.
I understand the mentality but depending on the project it can be a struggle. If I was going to set up a brand new software project then sure, I'd be going all in on Fediverse and open source platforms. Forge? Codeberg. Chat? Matrix. Forum? Discourse/Flarum or maybe just Lemmy. Microblog? Mastodon.
However it isn't easy to be that idealistic all the time and sometimes there is a degree of needing to do stuff against your ideals. I'm part of the Pulsar editor team which is a fork of the Atom text editor that got discontinued and we had to get things moving as quickly as possible in the time period that GitHub set until they pulled their services completely (along with their package backend). We needed the least friction possible to get things in motion and get as many people from the community involved as possible.
We needed GitHub - unsurprisingly Atom had close ties with GitHub anyway so moving away wasn't ever going to be quite that simple and we would have needed to migrate an awful lot of repos within the org. The entire Atom package system relies on GitHub - people published their packages to atom.io but the actual code was on GitHub - something not fixable in the short period we had. We also needed it because this is where the Atom community was gathered around - at a period where we needed things to be as simple as possible for people to find out about and get involved with the project, moving to another forge may have just been the end of it.
We also use GitHub Discussions for our forum - as we are already tied to GitHub for the time being we might as well use that platform as well - it is a lot easier than trying to maintain our own forums which wouldn't be seeing that much activity. The team behind Zed found this out; they set up a Discourse forum and barely anyone used it so they just went back to GitHub Discussions.
We needed Discord because it was simply the most commonly used platform. Pulsar split off from Atom-community which was already on Discord so it was a natural move that meant little disruption or friction to anyone wanting to get involved with the new project. We have been looking to make a Matrix bridge but honestly there doesn't seem to be all that much desire for it - we had some initial enthusiasm to create a Lemmy community but when we did it barely sees any activity (other than me posting updates there).
Would I love to move off of these platforms? Absolutely. However we simply have bigger fish to fry at this point in time for the project itself so it is going to be slow.
So whilst I love to be idealistic about what platforms we should be using I also heavily sympathise with those who use those "less than ideal" ones - there could well be some very good reasons behind it that might not be obvious to you.
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 hate discord as much as anyone else but it's where most people are already going to have an account. People don't want to create brand new accounts to ask a single question. That question will just not get asked, The question could be asked on Reddit which may or may not end in a good result. It could take hours, weeks or even days. Discord is already there, and if a discord community is large enough you may get a fast and knowledgeable response. I can see why people like discord, I just don't see any better alternatives or something that is as convenient.
Discord is a good service to engage with communities but what I hate most is when services, platforms and whatnot use Discord as their primary means of official communication like for announcements.
Having to be in a lot of servers purely to get announcements results in an already limited total sever count that one can join to be even more limited.
I personally don't mind Discord. I do in fact like it. (If you want to convince me otherwise, please don't)
But I really hate that OSS uses discord for their lack of documentation. I understand that documentation is hard and boring to create, but I don't want to go on some discord to ask a bunch of questions that thousands of others have before. Instead I will try and find something using search engines and I will read the open and closed issues. If I don't find anything, I give up on the software.
Is there a good federated "one click" insta community replacement for discord yet? Or rather, what is the most likely to evolve into something like that? I looked into matrix chat and elements.
I’m pretty sure the hype towards discord for programming is the convenience. A combination of gaming communities, content creators and I’ve actually seen it be used in professional environments.
Every time this kind of post comes up, I always ask what software is only supporting discord. The response has consistently been some niche software where it's only a handful of users. The other kind is devs trying to evade Nintendo lawyers because apparently that's a thing.
So...if you're going to post this meme, name and shame. Discord only support is bad. But I have never run into this in the wild.