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Stop Using Discord for Your Open source Communities | mattcen's mumblings (blog.mattcen.com)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by noodlejetski to c/foss

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Recently I accidentally made a Fediverse post which went viral:

stop using discord for your open source communities

That post is short, punchy, opinionated, and prescriptive, which I suspect is the cause for its virality.

Unfortunately, like many micro-blog posts, it lacks nuance, which many replies highlighted. I made the post to vent my frustration at needing to join a Discord server to interact with a community, so it is far from a measured critique of the subject.

This blog post is an attempt to address those nuances in greater detail. This is not an exhaustive analysis, and I’ve resolved to not let “perfect” be the enemy of “done”.

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[–] VoxAdActa 119 points 1 year ago (14 children)

I wish people would stop trying to use Discord as an information repository/hub. It's a chat program. It's designed for people to engage in transient, real-time back-and-forth communication, not to store discussions or information for long-term use. I get so cranky at people who insist that Discord can be used like a web forum when it so obviously sucks nuts at it.

A forum has content that can stay up indefinitely, where the message history on narrowly defined subjects is packaged into a convenient container and is visible as far back in time as one cares to go. It's easily searchable, and old discussions for which a user has new questions can be brought back up to the top of the list, in full. Trying to recreate that kind of functionality on Discord is not only stupid, but also generally futile. It's the exact opposite of what Discord is intended to be.

[–] BitOneZero 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I almost never see someone link to a Discord past conversation on fixing an issue/problem solving. It's a one-way black hole.

[–] CinnamonTheCat 3 points 1 year ago

Discord is a black hole for your messages to go into.

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