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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 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I can’t grasp the whole concept of Discord servers even though I was moderating one. They’re bad as a knowledge base, they’re bad as a discussion platform, so why do people keep creating them?

I mean, as a chat room, it's fantastic. It's a massively upgraded IRC (except in terms of the ease of discovering new servers), with QOL features I didn't even know how badly I wanted back in the old Yahoo! Chat days (such as the ability to spin up a temporary thread to take an in-depth conversation out of the main channel without going to DMs). It's for discussions that happen right now and are not meant to be conserved forever because, generally speaking, they're not expected to be that important. I love discord for that, because I miss chat rooms.

But it's absolutely garbage for being a repository of static knowledge. Releasing patch notes only in discord is ridiculous.

[–] averyminya 5 points 1 year ago

What's interesting is that it seems to be a cultural difference? I mean, back in the days of IRC we had Bash which essentially was IRC memes. They were pretty good, but discord has much fewer posts of this kind. Advent of photo memes mostly I'm sure, but it's still interesting.

Discord is at least easier to get some of what your looking for with searches. IRC was known that it was gone for good once you logged off, or you would find out the hard way. Mind you, I'm not advocating for it, just agreeing with you in that it's more robust and people are somewhat using it wrong.

Because it's absolutely people using it wrong. Time and time again, you create #help or #information and people post in #specific-channel asking for the speil. Like dude, it's literally already all in #information and you can ask there.

Like with most things I think good things can be used poorly and even some bad things can be used well. People use discord poorly, but despite it being pretty bad it still does pretty well compared to its predecessor.