this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2024
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Programmer Humor

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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?

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[–] [email protected] 309 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (15 children)
  • 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.

[–] [email protected] 72 points 9 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 9 months ago

It's the "see no evil" approach. If you didn't report the issue while the admin was online, then they aren't compelled to do anything about it. Convenient for the project maintainer who doesn't actually like maintaining things. Awful for the rest of us.

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