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?
Half this thread is mad discord saves messages and the other half is mad that discord doesn’t save messages. You can’t make this shit up lmao.
I’ll eat all the downvotes but objectively discord is the best chatting service available to the public for discussion. Blows irc out of the water easily. The only point I’ll concede on is the phone number bullshit but otherwise I’d take it over anything else.
Never had issues using their search feature for dev discords. It’s keyword based; truly stupid simple and easy to follow.
And yes I’ve used irc actively. It’s delusional to think that is somehow easier to follow.
Telegram would be much better if you want some chat based discusstions. Search indexable forums are the best to find help
I don’t think it is better at all. Unlike Discord, which might allow you to exist without a phone number, Telegram requires it right upfront. And it removed the ability to register from desktop, at least without spinning up an Android VM.
I’m not sure you understand what “objectively” actually means… Care to provide your data in support of your objective conclusion?
Sure.
- FREE with zero maintenance or resources required on my end since day 1
- All messages and uploads are saved and searchable to anyone who joins a discord server. Some of my servers are from 2016 and all 100k messages up to this day are still there with each and every file untouched whenever I search for something. Same thing if I join a new server.
No other app has these two points along with the incredible amount of features and QoL Discord has. This is objectively true.
Good for you, you have a short list of requirements out of a chat service and discord perfectly fills your niche. But different people have different requirements for chat, and they don’t align. And network effects force people who have differing requirements to use the service with the most users which sucks.
For instance here are things that I require from any chat service that I use that discord completely falls flat at:
- Ability to run it on my linux machine without using an electron client (npm is a huge mess of supply chain attacks and I refuse to run any software that is likely to contain dependencies from it)
- Ability to run it on my AOSP phone which does not have any google play services installed
- Ability to write software to back up messages without fear of a company changing their API and breaking my backup system
this is not explicitly true, moderation is still a labor requirement.
Messages get deleted from bans, channels wipes cause problems, sometimes discord just decides people shouldnt exist anymore.
Do you want to alienate users who are banned from Discord or don’t want to use proprietary software?
the irony here is that discord quite literally has quantum state messages/posts, unless you NAIL the search perfectly, you’re gonna get everything but the exact message you wanted. I mean sure the keywords make sense, but try searching for two or three keywords in a server with tens of thousands of message, or better yet, not knowing what specific keywords to use.
i can’t tell you the amount of times i’ve tried searching for an embed with words only to realize that apparently, discord is completely incapable of searching through embed names.
Discord is alright as a chat platform, would actually be better if it were a universal platform base, like matrix, or get this, IRC. Not being stuck on a shitty broken electron app would nice from time to time.
The search has issues but I don’t fuck with irc channels because there is literally NEVER anyone there. I don’t understand IRC, either. I’m young, sorry
IRC would have been the best tool if it did session logging instead of requiring the use of bouncers. IRC is text-only, nonproprietary and completely distraction-free.
But you don’t have to use IRC. There are more modern federated protocols like Matrix and XMPP that do session logging. There are quite a lot of FOSS communities on them that are very active.
However, the main complaint here isn’t about Discord vs other chat protocols. It’s about the use of Discord as a community support forum. Unlike forums like Discourse, Discord messages aren’t searchable on the web. If a person asks a question on it and gets a solution, it’s then lost forever. Another person with the same question has to ask again. It completely defeats the utility of FOSS - of reusing someone else’s solutions.
