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.
Openstreetmap 👀 👀 👀 👀
Yes I know of and use the bridged Matrix Room. But bridges can’t mimic or replicate every function which has effect on dialogue between users on both sides.
This article has a few primary arguments for not using Discord—
- because it is proprietary software
- because it has poor accessibility
- because control over moderation and other administrative tools is ultimately in the hands of Discord rather than the community.
I know this opinion is going to be unpopular but here I go anyway.
Other than the accessibility argument, I find these arguments quite weak. Yes, Discord is proprietary software, but the reason it’s used is because a lot of people are familiar with it and many people already have Discord accounts.
Although I’m a firm supporter of free software, I also believe that it’s more important to use the right software for the job than to idealistically use inferior software just because it happens to be open-source. And yes, I regard most of the alternatives to Discord listed in the article to be inferior solely because they are unfamiliar to users. Sometimes, the superior choice happens to be proprietary and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. That’s the way it is sometimes; you can’t win every fight, as much as you’d like to.
If your goal is to foster a community of regular users and make it easy for normal users to interact with contributors, there is no choice that will hamper that goal more than using an obscure alternative software that nobody’s heard of.
With respect to chat logs and administration tools… for the most part, nobody cares. Discord’s tools are sufficient for most groups and few people consider the drawbacks to outweigh the other benefits.
The strongest argument for me is that discord is commercial, borne of venture capital spent on operating at a loss for years to gain users. It is therefore bound for a turn towards profit and enshittification, sooner, rather than later.
The flip-side of that argument is that “librefosschat” alternative might also be dead next year when it runs out of money :/
At least commercial vc enshitiffied stuff tends to get ridden into the ground, so there is a long offramp.
Not really. Something you can self-host, like irc, xmpp or matrix, has an infinite offramp.
True, but managing expectations is needed tho, mainly about exit strategy:
If a community needs to leave, the content on Discord must be considered “not important”, “not transferable” and “not archive worthy”.
If Discord changes freemium, limits users or otherwise applies enshittification just leave your stuff and start over.
It would be easier to leave if you started by using a platform that made that seamless. Freenode gets bought & communities say to point your bouncers/clients to Libera.chat or OFTC. If you were on XMPP on a decentralized account, your account stays, but now there’s a new MUC to join. With Discord, if Discord goes down, so does the client & the whole server… folks need to relearn a bunch of stuff & it’s not a clean break.
This is also inevitable as we are talking about a US-based, VC-funded service & we have the entire track record of these types of services declining. Why not start with something that’s more likely to not suck in 5 or 10 years even if it doesn’t have all the same features so long as you can still chat in realtime.
Although I’m a firm supporter of free software
Unless I’m misreading this, your argument seems to be that software freedom is irrelevant in the face of technical superiority or popularity. That’s exactly the opposite of “firm support” in my view.
I’ll offer a counterpoint to the “best tool for the job” thing: before git existed, Linux development relied on a proprietary VCS called Bitkeeper. Licenses for Bitkeeper were “graciously” donated for gratis by the Bitkeeper developer. Andrew Tridgell, who was not party to the Bitkeeper EULA, telneted to a Bitkeeper server and typed “help”. The Bitkeeper developer, in retaliation, revoked the Linux developers’ gratis license to use the proprietary “best tool for the job.” This was what forced Linus to develop git, which became the most widely used VCS in the free software world. (read: Thank You, Larry McVoy by Richard Stallman)
Proprietary tools can seem to be useful in the moment but developing a dependency on them, and encouraging their use, is dangerous. Discord might seem like “the best tool for the job” until it enshittifies, just like its predecessors did, and just like its successors inevitably will. We’ve seen it happen often enough.
Although I’m a firm supporter of free software,
Lies, according to the rest of your very own post.
it’s more important to use the right software for the job than to
Discord literally doesn’t allow me to google (or DDG, or searx, or…) for solutions related to your software. How is that the right tool to use?
And yes, I regard most of the alternatives to Discord listed in the article to be inferior solely because they are unfamiliar to users.
Fallacy of popularity. If something is “”“inferior”“” simply because people have not been trained on them already, then by your definition Windows is superior to everything else. Remember: big corpo trains you to depend on them since childhood in schools, which all use Office.
That’s the way it is sometimes; you can’t win every fight,
Not with that attitude. That is, the one of a loser.
If your goal is to foster a community of regular users and make it easy for normal users to interact with contributors, there is no choice that will hamper that goal more than using an obscure alternative software that nobody’s heard of.
That would be true f people were literally doing that. But no, the stack of software that includes stuff like IRC, goode olde web forums, Stack Overflow-like webpages or friggin’ email has existed since the '80s and can be not by any reasonable metric be called “obscure” or “alternative” or “nobody’s heard of”.
With due respect, you do not have the authority to dictate what it means for me to support free software. Nor anyone else.
When it comes to community-building and social networking, the popularity metric is absolutely an important consideration. If you are choosing where to start the official community for your software project, and you choose an obscure service, people will make unofficial communities in the more popular services, and you end up with all the supposed drawbacks anyway. Normal non-technical users who are looking to join a community won’t prefer an official community on a service they’ve never used before to an unofficial community on a popular service. That’s why people make unofficial user subreddits and community Discord servers. Those unofficial communities could and in many cases will outgrow the official community. This has happened many times before and will happen many times again. Then, new users, even if they see both, will see an unofficial community on, say, Reddit with many more users than the official one, and when this happens, developers either start participating in the unofficial community posting announcements and whatnot there, and if that happens, there becomes little reason to join the official community.
Remember: big corpo trains you to depend on them since childhood in schools, which all use Office.
lmao I remember getting schooled by a math teacher when I tried to use libreoffice calc instead of excel on an assignment back in highschool
detail: all the school computers ran linux. fuck whoever didn’t have a pc with windows at home
she brought her windows laptop and attached it to the projector and expected everyone to have the assignment files in a format excel could read
problem is, at least going 12 years back, not all calc functions and/or param names translate directly to excel ones
so when she opened the file, which I made sure was one excel could read, there was a bunch of gibberish on some cells
when I told her it worked as intended on libreoffice, she said something along the lines of: you don’t go to church using the same clothes that you use when going to a nightclub
anyway, at least the school was trying not to depend on windows
But I also don’t want to make zillions accounts, one for each project, just for a quick question.
You mean pretty much a single GitHub account?
Also your quick question may have already been asked and answered but difficult to find on Discord. Or if it hasn’t been asked yet, now a future person can’t discover the same question easily. So either way you’re just wasting other people’s time.
That “Discord” can be replaced with any IM platforms. Slack, Martix, Gitter, you name it. They are still hard to search. By no means I like the idea of using IM platforms as a support portal/community. I still think forums-like platforms are the best, yet I don’t want to create another account to engage with a project that I use.
Github, Lemmy and Stack Exchange enables one account for multiple projects/topics, which I quite like. Or mailing lists. That can do as well.
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.
