The biggest problem with Discord is that its an information black hole. Its not properly searchable and not indexed by search engines.
Discord is fine for casual chat, but horrible when used for forum-type discussions and even worse when used for documentation.
You see the same problems being discussed and solved again and again, but you cant just “link” someone the solution like you could with a forum thread cause its spread out over 3-10 chat messages that are interleaved in-between other topics being discussed in the same room
Anything of long-term value for the project (forum-type discussions, documentation etc) should not recide in Discord
There’s going to be a lot of shocked Pikachus when the inevitable enshittification hits, and suddenly they charge to host all the documentation and wiki pages. All that barely maintained stuff will just vanish overnight.
I have all the issues with Discord that you mention, but struggle to find a better alternative. Do you have any recommendations?
Forums. Phpbb, Mybb, hell even discourse is better than discord. If you’re specifically dealing with a coding project, most git repositories offer an issues page and wiki you can use.
And if you want something realtime, IRC & XMPP are low-resource chat options—with the latter being federated & can offer encryption for private rooms.
I think a happy medium for this is to rely on GitHub issues for support, and then people can discuss each issue on GitHub or Discord
A solution would be to save the chat log as a text file. An LLM might be able to turn it into FAQ format with little oversight. Of course, someone would still have to volunteer the work.
Obviously, Discord doesn’t want that sort of thing since it lessens their hold on a community and the people in it. They could decide to cause trouble.
my main problem is issue cannot be searched on search engine
Chat and forum are different things and serve different purposes. Even matrix doesn’t solve the search problem. Use a forum for this.
yeah that is why discord should not be used for problem-solving or archival purpose. Hell, even mastodon,reddit and lemmy can be indexed properly on search engine.
The biggest problem with traditional forums is the fact that participation requires yet another account. This is the most significant thing that discord has going for it, nearly everybody already has a discord account. Federated forums mostly solve this issue tho
The issue is that we used to have both irc and forums. Discord has taken on the role of both in 1. Unfortunately, that means that it also needs the remote search capabilities of a forum to not screw over the community, long term.
It’s amazing the number of times a 3+ year old discussion on either a forum, or Reddit has bailed me out of a hole. Everything like that on discord is cut off, unless you know it exists.
i don’t understand discord’s popularity at all. it’s so annoying to use
It started getting popular years ago and that’s when me an my friends switched to it too (back when I didn’t know shit about privacy). You gotta keep in mind the alternatives back then were Skype, which was meant for 1 to 1 calls, had shit audio quality and issues all the time and TeamSpeak, which was complicated because you needed a server (we were kids, we only knew what a server was from Minecraft) and had a text chat that was only a small part of the bottom of the window that was full of connected and disconnected messages, so I actually didn’t even know you could write in that. TeamSpeak’s interface also isn’t exactly good-looking or very intuitive. Then came Discord, you could create a server for you and your friends for free, you saw who of your friends was online and playing what, you could see when someone was in a voice channel and could just join, you had multiple text chats where you could easily send a link or memes while playing and you could easily share your screen with the others. It was a major improvement over the other two. I know that it sucks from a privacy standpoint but there’s good reasons why people started using it.
It was my replacement of Skype, which was leaning hard into its enshittification around that time.
How familiar are you with IRC?
I was told by someone that IRC is kind of what discord is built on. Maybe the answer is someone in that relation, if what i was told is accurate or not
Discord copies a lot of concepts from IRC, like servers and threads are almost identical. But it isn’t technically based on IRC. Maybe your friend mixed it up with Twitch chat which is actual IRC only slightly modified.
I second this!
It’s especially disappointing to see FOSS people on Fediverse promoting it.
People love discord. When Microsoft tried to buy it, people freaked out. They turned down the multi billion dollar offer. IMO, I don’t believe the paid portion of the app is worth the money because it’s mostly cosmetic bullshit. They don’t give me a good reason to give them money
I also think discord nitro is kind of B.S . The only reason I still use discord is because my friends use it.
I wish there were similar features in Matrix clients like Element. Just the voice channels feature will be enough for me.
Revolt chat is a good alternative. It lacks in features but its pretty good for an FOSS project. I tried to convince my friends to use it but they crawled back to discord after 2 days.
They don’t give me a good reason to give them money
The constant harassment was enough to get me to pay for it. But guess what? After I paid for it, the harassment continued, trying to get me to give them even more money for products I don’t even understand. And that’s just not something I tolerate.
That + the inevitable data-mining + refusal to provide any sort of deletion tools = no more Discord for me. I use Revolt now when I need that sort of thing.
Can’t wait for the day Discord backstabs everyone and people decide to get the fuck away from it. I seriously can’t stand having to search past troubleshooting messages, it’s a fucking mess, almost unusable. Whoever uses Discord as a Forum seriously needs a full force punch in the mouth.
Discord can and sometimes does monitor your chats.
Source: CEO himself said that, in a hearing
Also a large portion is owned by Tencent with whom Discord is allowed to share all the data they want according to their ToS.
https://github.com/privy-cafe/discordspyware/blob/master/README.md
Discord can
Well that’s pretty obvious.
and sometimes does monitor your chats.
Probably, although why would they? More likely they’ll just data mine everything an sell it on for AI learning program to nom nom on.
why would they?
People use it for things like planning terrorism, child enticement, and sharing CSAM. Discord probably wants to ban those people, and maybe aid in their prosecution.
Of course if you’re sharing something that’s actually private, Discord is a poor choice. So is email or DMs on Lemmy where the server admin could read the content.
Well that’s no better than searching IRC logs, which are something folks have absolutely done in the past. I still haven’t figured out why folks like discord so much though.
People like it cause when it first came out, it was considerably better than other popular voice chat software available for PC games at the time, like TeamSpeak and Ventrillo. But most importantly: it was free, unlike those other two. So people flocked to it and it blew up big, leading us to where we are today.
Can’t wait for the day Discord backstabs everyone and people decide to get the fuck away from it.
I can’t wait either, then maybe all the communities that disappeared into discord that I feel unable to actually feel like I am a genuine member of and connect with anymore because I am not part of the conversations on discord will go somewhere where I can be a part of them again.
sigh
FUCK DISCORD
