ditch discord!

person backing up his car exploitable with the following four panels:

  1. person looking ahead. the text below him says, "wow a cool software. let’s check out the community"
  2. 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.

  3. hand on gear shift zoomed in, switching to reverse
  4. person looking behind with the text “nevermind”.
Feathercrown,

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!

corytheboyd,
corytheboyd avatar

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.

ElectroVagrant,

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.

Tbh you can find similar hostility to newcomers in Discord servers, simply swap some words about for a, “Did you read the pins you fucking noob?” mentality. It’s very much the old forum kneejerk response of, “Did you read the rules/stickied posts?” simply in a different context. As you note though, you’ll find assholes in any communication medium.

Also, to your point about a place for real-time questions & discussion, that’s also to its detriment for anyone out of sync with a server’s more active hours, which I think is kind of an understated argument against it among the usual criticism found in these threads. Sure search is one thing, but the asynchronous nature of a forum is imo one of its greatest strengths, especially considering how flaky and/or inundated Discord’s inbox/mentions can be.

LainTrain,

Most of discord is toxic AF and is so prone to astroturfing it’s unreal. Literally just use reddit at that point I beg you.

Real time conversation is only useful for children with too much free time on their hands and that’s why WhatsApp group chats exist.

JackbyDev,

Who is saying this is using it as a forum?

laurelraven,

This, exactly.

Discord sucks at what it wasn’t designed to do… Shocker. That doesn’t make it bad.

platypus_plumba,

Why do people do this when there are already Github discussions and issues?

Warl0k3,

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…

platypus_plumba,

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.

someacnt_,

Yeah, wait, do people archive some info in discord? Why, there are approaches like github, readthedocs, blogs, wiki, and so on. I only use discord for socializing, works for well-managed servers.

TrickDacy,

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.

uis,
@uis@lemmy.world avatar

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.

thedirtyknapkin,

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.

Takumidesh,

Can you share some of the bugs you encounter? I actually find discord to be quite stable.

jjjalljs,

My favorite, though more of a UI blunder than a bug, and I think fixed now: If you right clicked on a user name and hit “Add Note”, a box would pop up for you to type in. Like for writing your note in. But that box was in fact the “send them a direct message” box.

So if you hypothetically wanted to write “Asshole” as a note, and didn’t pay attention to what text box had focus, well, that was a bad time.

chocosoldier,

my screen freaks out and flashes white and pink when I open/type in the gif thingy, in a way that makes me thankful i’m not photosensitive. it’s been this way for over a year.

TrickDacy,

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.

Poik,
@Poik@pawb.social avatar

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.

Omniraptor,

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

TrickDacy, (edited )

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?

Omniraptor,

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.

TrickDacy,

“I paid for nothing, I don’t I get everything? This janky shitty free app gives it to me!”

They give it for free to nonprofits. Anything else for the confidently incorrect movement today?

berg,

Slack got sacked in my circles when they removed the ability to view messages older than 30 days…

The UI in discord isn’t great, but it works, and it’s free.

bl4ckblooc,

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.

Mango,

It makes for a bad forum sure, but why should it have to be a forum?

HowManyNimons,

Time zones.

TomAwsm,

To be able to search through and find information in previous discussions.

Mango,

You can do that.

TomAwsm,

Sorry, I forgot to add “easily”.

Mango,

If you don’t understand it, that’s ok. Maybe they could work on making it easier.

DragonOracleIX,

Making it easier is not the problem. The problem is having the search function actually find the messages you are looking for. The biggest problem I have with it is that word order matters too much. “Keyword1 keyword2” will find different messages than “keyword2 keyword1”. Not only that, but it will also search for different variations of the word with no way of preventing it from doing it. If there is a solution for these problems, then no one is taking about it.

DrQuint,

If only there was something called an Issues page attached to every code repository. Oh well, that is an idea that is probably impossible or whatever.

helenslunch,

They added forum-style posts a while ago, which greatly improves usability. But I won’t use it regardless, due to privacy issues.

lemann,

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

helenslunch,

True. That’s why I recommend Discourse if you can’t use a proper development forum like Codeberg or something.

DrQuint,

Greatly improved usability, while still greatly hurting searchability, in that common bugs are still hidden away from indexable sight.

helenslunch,

Discord has a robust search system

DrQuint,

That is absolutely not true unless if you have exact word matches, and anyone with half a brain knows it’s not about searching within discord, but about searching outside of it.

Discord is a black hole of information. What happens inside is unknown from the outside. This is why every single FOSS project using discord loses the right to call themselves FOSS - an issues page is equally free, has way, way better features to relate an issue to patches and releases, and is actually indexable.

helenslunch,

That is absolutely not true

It absolutely is.

it’s not about searching within discord, but about searching outside of it.

I’m gonna ignore your uncalled-for personal insult and instead point out that you might want to search a specific group for information rather than the entirety of the internet.

What happens inside is unknown from the outside.

Then just…go inside? These aren’t password-protected communities.

This is why every single FOSS project using discord loses the right to call themselves FOSS

Uhhhh no that’s not how that works.

an issues page is equally free, has way, way better features to relate an issue to patches and releases, and is actually indexable.

I agree.

DrQuint,

then just go inside?

Ladies and gentlemen of the Linux community: A guy telling you to step inside the walled garden. Unironically.

I rest my case.

I don’t have the time for this.

helenslunch,

A guy telling you to step inside the walled garden.

What “walled garden”? I don’t think you know what that phrase means.

I don’t have the time for this.

Good, go away.

LainTrain,

No I will not sign up for ze discord chinese data harvesting op

If your project isn’t something I can index through a search engine - you don’t have a project. Want a forum? Make a subreddit or better yet a Lemmy community.

helenslunch, (edited )

If your project isn’t something I can index through a search engine - you don’t have a project.

LOL are we just making up arbitrary rules now?

If your project doesn’t have a photo of a clown at the bottom of the page, yOu DoNt HaVe A pRoJekT! 🤡

LainTrain,

Are you slow

zeppo,
@zeppo@lemmy.world avatar

That’s the problem. I know of a couple video games where the publisher closed their forums and opened a discord channel. I have no idea why people view them as equivalent things.

CeeBee,

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.

LainTrain,

See I always wondered what the rationale was, hiding from indexers to not get canceled or smth? Bruh 💀

AlexWIWA,

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.

assassin_aragorn,

You just gave me a fear I didn’t know I had.

boredsquirrel,

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…

boredsquirrel,

Btw they have Github Discussions now

tou,
@tou@lemmy.world avatar

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.

obinice,
@obinice@lemmy.world avatar

Discord isn’t a forum and shouldn’t be used as one, but it’s a fantastic community chat room/hangout space. It’s my main hangout these days :-)

lud,

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.

tron, (edited )
@tron@midwest.social avatar

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.

  1. USA government has access to unencrypted push notifications on Android and iOS. Discord does not offer any encryption. Wired Article
  2. Discord is moderating private chats PC Gamer,
  3. Discord moderating policy is becoming more ideological and political. TechCrunch
  4. Tencent Ownership
  5. 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.

LightDelaBlue,
@LightDelaBlue@lemmy.world avatar

Oh damn that concerning .I use allucord but that don’t ditch many of those problème .

Icaria,

Discord is moderating private chats PC Gamer

This annoys me, not because discord is doing anything wrong, there needs to be a way to report spam and abuse, but because users can potentially abuse the feature. My hope is that reported DMs past a certain age are automatically ignored.

Discord moderating policy is becoming more ideological and political. TechCrunch

This one is just inevitable due to all the kids on it. Discord doesn’t want media and govts breathing down its neck after kids are bullied into killing themselves via the platform.

Where it gets annoying is one of the bigger public servers in Oz is straight-up a neo-nazi recruitment vector, and no amount of reporting seems to get anything done about it.

TravisKelce,
@TravisKelce@lemmy.world avatar

Hilarious

FontMasterFlex,

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.

femboy_bird,

You ditch discord because it’s bad for organizing projects

I ditched discord because it’s proprietary

We are not the same

Dragon_Titan,

I ditch it because it doesn’t have End to end encryption in chats.

source: their T&C, and from the horses mouth the CEO

abraxas,

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.

lemmesay,
@lemmesay@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

zod?

abraxas,

No. Zod’s fine, if slow as molassas.

The library I was referring to is typebox (I wasn’t going to name&shame, but I guess it doesn’t hurt). By some metrics, it’s the second-most-popular validation library, despite the fact most devs have never heard of it. And according to a lot of benchmarks, it’s incredibly fast. But that sinclairzx81 guy was really immature on reddit, starting a bunch of arguments and then up and ragequitting the threads. And as far as I can tell, he’s the only owner/merger. It sorta scares me about using it until at least enough other active users embrace it that it would be reasonably forked if he pulls a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_the_lucky_stiff

lemmesay,
@lemmesay@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

oh, I’ve seen it being used before.

Tattorack,
@Tattorack@lemmy.world avatar

I mean, good riddance, then?

MystikIncarnate,

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.

Faresh,

Not defending it, but discord has an inbox menu, where you can see a list of messages that pinged you and jump to any of those messages. It is a button on the top right corner to the left of the question mark and to the right of the search field (desktop).

MystikIncarnate,

I’ve been using that, and bluntly, that’s great, but why, when I click on a notification, does it not do the same thing?

Riven,
@Riven@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

Maybe it’s your devise or I’m misunderstanding? When I click a notification it takes me to where it’s at. Gilded on the other hand sucks balls at notification.

MystikIncarnate,

It doesn’t really matter if I select the notification from the windows notification system, or the one on my android. At most it only takes me to the correct server and channel at most. Unless the message was one of the things said that’s still on the screen when discord opens that server and channel, then I won’t see the message.

So if I’m fast at clicking the notification as it happens, then it works fine. If there’s a delay, fuck me, I guess. Which is especially bad when it comes to busy servers with a lot of chatter.

aidan,

Discord sometimes pings you for sales of their products!!

dangblingus,

Another day, another 10 posts of people complaining about discord. This is getting tiring guys.

Octopus1348,
@Octopus1348@lemy.lol avatar

Ditchcord!

smileyhead,

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.

Digestive_Biscuit,
@Digestive_Biscuit@feddit.uk avatar

I used it for a short time when it first came out. I went back for another look recently. I haven’t a clue what is what. So much going on. I thought I don’t wish to spend the time learning something I probably will use a couple of times a week.

Is this what getting old feels like?

smileyhead,

I can name myself a technical person, using stuff like these everyday and always trying new software. And I too have problems doing something above basic on Discord sometimes, especially on mobile.

dangblingus,

My brother in Christ, this is a Linux community. High barriers to entry is literally what you signed up for.

Icaria,

If an OSS project is designed to connect people with each other, and it doesn’t do that well, it’s kind of a failure.

Looking at you, Matrix.

smileyhead,

Won’t consider all those people inviting to join and wanting to give help, with community written wikis that only this OS has actually useful a high barrier.

UnderpantsWeevil,
@UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world avatar

You could say this about virtually any modern social media platform. Hell, half the reason I’m on Lemmy is because Reddit hates me if I try to look at something without signing in first and then hates me even more for signing in and participating in a community.

Discord isn’t any more difficult to enter than Reddit (or Lemmy, for that matter). At the worst, I’d consider it a modernization on IRC with Microsoft Characteristics. I wouldn’t call that high at all. At its best, its a great live chat space for niche interest groups to organize.

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