4 pane comic of dolan on the left and spooderman on the right

pane 1 (dolan): cum join opensurce cummunity!
pane 2 (spooderman): shure! how joyn?
pane 3 (dolan): Here discord! (with discord logo)
pane 4 (spooderman with tears in eyes): y u do dis?

  • ono@lemmy.caEnglish
    2·
    3 years ago
    • Terrible format for archiving knowledge
    • Terrible tool for retrieving knowledge
    • Locks community access behind a corporate license agreement
    • Hands control of community-created content to a corporation
    • Prevents indexing by web search engines
    • Antithetical to interoperability
    • Privacy-hostile

    A web forum is far better in most cases. If you can’t manage to run your own, there are plenty of lemmy servers that will do it for you. Even an email list (with searchable archives) would be better than Discord.

    If you have collaborative documents that outgrow the forum format, use a wiki.

    If real-time chat is needed, irc or matrix.

    A project hosting its community on Discord is a project that won’t get my contributions.

    • corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca
      1·
      3 years ago

      A web forum is far better in most cases

      It’s sad when a web forum is better than the tool you’re considering. Bumps, aggressive garbage collection, no Resurrection, it’s weird.

      I’m old, I guess. I miss NNTP, mainly for the archived posts I could discuss with the authors for an updated take or revised solution or some clarification. And yes, I know there’s a good webUI front-end for an NNTP server as a back-end. ;-)

    • elrik@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      3 years ago

      I recently went through these exact pains trying to contribute to a project that exclusively ran through Discord and eventually had to give up when it was clear they would never enable issues in their GitHub repos for “reasons.”

      It was impossible to discover the history behind anything. Even current information was lost within days, having to rehash aspects that were already investigated and decided upon.

      • corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca
        1·
        3 years ago

        would never enable issues in their Git…

        That’s a worrying sign for a project.

        Did you clone their Git and start tracking issues there? ;-)

    • JustEnoughDucks@feddit.nl
      0·
      3 years ago

      Lemmy also doesn’t get indexed by web search engines. I have yet to find a single post from lemmy on google or DDG even when specifically searching

  • janAkali@lemmy.oneEnglish
    0·
    3 years ago

    I would accept discord/irc over mailing list. But nothing beats a proper forum website.
    And no, subreddit is not a proper forum.

    • ipkpjersi@lemmy.ml
      0·
      3 years ago

      For the main project I’m a maintainer on we do have forums too but they’re pretty dead, we mostly just use Discord because that’s what everyone else seems to be using.

      • TechNom (nobody)@programming.devEnglish
        0·
        3 years ago

        Discord is absolute trash if you’re a user searching for solutions. It simply doesn’t turn up in web searches. Why would you want your users to ask the same questions again and again?

        • ipkpjersi@lemmy.ml
          0·
          3 years ago

          It just so happens to be where all our users end up anyway so for us it’s been okay for the most part. Having moderator commands for frequently asked questions, and automating frequently asked questions tends to help even more. Discord also seems to work well for projects far larger than ours, ones like RPCS3 etc.