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What I miss the most from forums is the indexing power. Sure: there are plenty of great Discord communities for let's say game dev, but searching a particular q

What I miss the most from forums is the indexing power. Sure: there are plenty of great Discord communities for let's say game dev, but searching a particular question on a Discord server is very complicated, and it can be even harder to keep track of the solution. It's usually easier to just ask the question again, and hope for an insightful answer, it's also harder to gauge the quality of an answer: forums users have a reputation (for better or worse), I'd not treat an answer from a veteran with 5+ years of activity the same as one from someone who joined 2 days before. I believe these issues are much more impactful than the fragmentation of communities itself.

tomduncalf 6y ago
Discord etc. also requires a lot more regular attention to keep up with I find. The threaded nature of forums makes it easy to come back once a day or once a week or whatever and catch up with it, whereas in a Discord most of the valuable content will be lost in noise. I do like that these chat groups are popping up for communities though, would just be nice to have the forum option too.... but I guess you have to go with what the majority actually use! And I'd much rather Discord than Facebook.
sneak 6y ago
Discord goes to great lengths to make it feel like they are just hosting “your server”. There is only one Discord community, and it is Discord, and it’s a giant silo where your community members cannot participate anonymously without time and money and significant effort. https://sneak.berlin/20200220/discord-is-not-an-acceptable-choice-for-free-software-projects/ https://sneak.berlin/20200220/discord-is-not-an-acceptable-c...
- cblconfederate 6y ago
  Which is why we left discord for self hosted mattermost with auto-login for our community. Its just so predictable that discord will become a silo the day they decide to make money
  - sneak 6y ago
    That's awesome! I also run a self-hosted mattermost. Do you use the EE or CE? Because you seem to care about this kind of stuff, note that at least the CE (and presumably also the EE) versions of Mattermost have phone-home to segment.io embedded in the server, which can be disabled with the undocumented and exceedingly misleadingly-named 'MM_LOGSETTINGS_ENABLEDIAGNOSTICS=false' var in the env. It's part of the growing trend of free software spyware being developed by small groups of isolated people in for-profit enterprises. The other phone home it does is to check for a version's security alerts, which you may want, but is still assume-consent-and-dont-bother-to-ask phone-home and can be disabled with the similarly undocumented 'MM_SERVICESETTINGS_ENABLESECURITYFIXALERT=false'. I made a Dockerfile that actually patches out the spying in the binary using sed, rather than figure out how to rebuild it without it or trust that the env vars work. See: https://github.com/caprover/one-click-apps/blob/master/public/v4/apps/mattermost.yml https://github.com/caprover/one-click-apps/blob/master/publi...
    - cblconfederate 6y ago
      CE. Thanks for the tip
betwixthewires 6y ago
I think you're on to something very important here. Bad indexing hurts UX. Many reddit users complain of seeing the same question asked daily. Usually this is attributed to laziness on the part of the asker, but more often than not I feel it is a failure of UX design, specifically indexing.

tomduncalf 6y ago

Discord etc. also requires a lot more regular attention to keep up with I find. The threaded nature of forums makes it easy to come back once a day or once a week or whatever and catch up with it, whereas in a Discord most of the valuable content will be lost in noise. I do like that these chat groups are popping up for communities though, would just be nice to have the forum option too.... but I guess you have to go with what the majority actually use! And I'd much rather Discord than Facebook.

sneak 6y ago

Discord goes to great lengths to make it feel like they are just hosting “your server”. There is only one Discord community, and it is Discord, and it’s a giant silo where your community members cannot participate anonymously without time and money and significant effort. https://sneak.berlin/20200220/discord-is-not-an-acceptable-choice-for-free-software-projects/ https://sneak.berlin/20200220/discord-is-not-an-acceptable-c...

cblconfederate 6y ago
Which is why we left discord for self hosted mattermost with auto-login for our community. Its just so predictable that discord will become a silo the day they decide to make money
- sneak 6y ago
  That's awesome! I also run a self-hosted mattermost. Do you use the EE or CE? Because you seem to care about this kind of stuff, note that at least the CE (and presumably also the EE) versions of Mattermost have phone-home to segment.io embedded in the server, which can be disabled with the undocumented and exceedingly misleadingly-named 'MM_LOGSETTINGS_ENABLEDIAGNOSTICS=false' var in the env. It's part of the growing trend of free software spyware being developed by small groups of isolated people in for-profit enterprises. The other phone home it does is to check for a version's security alerts, which you may want, but is still assume-consent-and-dont-bother-to-ask phone-home and can be disabled with the similarly undocumented 'MM_SERVICESETTINGS_ENABLESECURITYFIXALERT=false'. I made a Dockerfile that actually patches out the spying in the binary using sed, rather than figure out how to rebuild it without it or trust that the env vars work. See: https://github.com/caprover/one-click-apps/blob/master/public/v4/apps/mattermost.yml https://github.com/caprover/one-click-apps/blob/master/publi...
  - cblconfederate 6y ago
    CE. Thanks for the tip

betwixthewires 6y ago

I think you're on to something very important here. Bad indexing hurts UX. Many reddit users complain of seeing the same question asked daily. Usually this is attributed to laziness on the part of the asker, but more often than not I feel it is a failure of UX design, specifically indexing.