Programmer Humor

19512 readers

418 users here now

Welcome to Programmer Humor!

This is a place where you can post jokes, memes, humor, etc. related to programming!

For sharing awful code theres also Programming Horror.

Rules

Keep content in english
No advertisements
Posts must be related to programming or programmer topics

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

1531

FLOSS communities right now (i.imgflip.com)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

432 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 21 points 9 months ago (21 children)

While I understand why FOSS community hates Discord, I don't know an alternative that is better at everything.

Discord's main problems:

Not FOSS / Privacy respectful
Hard/Impossible to index/search for data and organize tech support

However alternatives we have are not ideal either:

Old-school web forums
- Great for info archival / organized tech support
- Separate accounts for every one of them, different sets of newsletters / email notifications. Basically, to efficiently be active on several forums you have to manually log in to each on regular basis and check what's new
- Due to slower pace of communication, it's harder to just log in and "hang out" with community, everybody is more of a pen pal.

FOSS messaging applications (e.g. Matrix since that's what most use)
- Info archival is even worse then on Discord. Every time I tried to search for anything useful on Matrix I would give up due to poor results and HUGE delays for every search
- Because most communities use a single Matrix chat, it's a huge disorganized mess for any communication and tech support. There's often 2-3 concurrent conversations in a single room and some just stop abruptly due to it getting confusing to keep up
- it's FOSS and Private, though

Feel free to downvote me for this, but I think that Github for support & issue tracking and Discord for community hang out spot is currently the lesser evil approach until better Foss tools arrive

[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

The most important downside for me is: I'm looking for some information about an issue I'm having or how to install or configure something and I find none. Because all the people talk behind closed doors and googling etc doesn't help any more. Only solution is to join every Discord and platform before you start using your software and scrolling trough pages of chat messages.

I'd rather google for an error message and then be directed directly to an issue tracker where people discussed that specific problem.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Yep, that's exactly why in the end of my comment I say that I currently believe a combination of Github+Discord to be best. Github for bug reporting, Discord if you want to socialize with the community, that's what it does best

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

I'm somewhat fine with that. But you absolutely have to tell people to keep the discussions to random chatter and the absolute minimum then. (And internal talk maybe, if that's of no interest to the public. Once it gets important or someone asks for advice that could be beneficial to others, the discussion on Discord needs to be interrupted and switch platforms. Or be copied to a Wiki after the fact.

load more comments (18 replies)