4 ms·

How do you feel about the fact that all your institutional knowledge is now not visible outside of Discord, not indexed and barely searchable? How do you feel

How do you feel about the fact that all your institutional knowledge is now not visible outside of Discord, not indexed and barely searchable? How do you feel about the fact that the long-term survival of this knowledge is at the whim of a company that is mostly focused on the gaming community and has no vested interest in preservation over longer time periods? When was the last time you found an answer to a question from an ancient newsgroup or mailing list that's archived on the open web? It happens to me fairly regularly. (for context, I help maintain a Discord for an open source project and I feel like I'm betraying the web as an ideal - and constanty wish we had chosen differently) EDIT - I didn't look to see who I was replying to. Simon -not you of all people! I'm less concerned about your specific community than I am about the example you're setting and the the fact you're lending your voice to support a worrying trend that affects the long-term health of open source.

SecretDreams 3y ago
> How do you feel about the fact that all your institutional knowledge is now not visible outside of Discord, not indexed and barely searchable? No different than an office workspace no?
- andybak 3y ago
  Discord is a replacement for IRC, forums and mailing lists - not for hanging out in meat-space.
  - hardware2win 3y ago
    Is IRC google searchable?
    - harrisi 3y ago
      In my experience, there is usually some percentage of people that archive whatever channels they use. Sometimes they will put them up on a website. There's also nothing stopping anyone from doing that, and it's quite easy. I've always just had irssi running on some server that archives everything and I ssh into the server when I want to chat.
      - mcpackieh 3y ago
        While it is true that many public IRC channels publish logs on the web, I cannot remember the last time such a log ever showed up in my google results. It virtually never happens. If somebody's primary concern with discord is search engine indexing (rather than discord being a for-profit company, not a federated service? rather than the discord desktop app spying on the other programs you run? rather than discord requiring most people to hand over their phone number to use the service?) then surely they have the precise same beef with IRC if they stop to think about it. Honestly, not being indexed by google is the least offensive aspect of discord. For most people these days I think it is actually a benefit. Tides are changing, common people are becoming apprehensive about their words being immortalized in some ledger easily accessible to the public which future employers will be able to trawl through for disqualifying out-of-context remarks. The objective in such chat rooms like discord and IRC is to make ephemeral connections to other people and discuss things in the moment, not to build up a semi-permanent corpus of information for the benefit of people googling things in the future.
    - calvinmorrison 3y ago
      if you hung out in channels there would often be a log bot If it was a channel with a lot of users, also a general bot would often exist. For example you could call up faqs easily on say systemd in Debian by just hitting !systemd You could add to the faqs on the fly All faqs were synced back to the website. So we're just reinventing the wheel here
  - SecretDreams 3y ago
    The Internet is moving towards a meat place replacement.
    - tharne 3y ago
      Pretty sure that COVID showed the exact opposite. Our brains evolved in the meatspace and won't be happy anywhere else. Even the success of remote work shows this. People want to avoid the office (and the commute) to get more time with friends, family, and their hobbies. The internet is most successful when it helps people live the life they want in the meatspace, not when it tries to replace it.
yrro 3y ago
Have you considered logging what's said in each channel and publishing it to your project's web site?
- toastercat 3y ago
  That makes me think, has anyone created a Discord bot that automatically archives chats? Preferably as HTML files similar to Pidgin? That would be great.
  - andybak 3y ago
    I suspect it's against the Discord TOS - but even if it's not there's a bunch of community expectations to manage. For recent forums we've added a disclaimer to the channel discription notifying people that we might make the contents web public at some point. Discord also encourages certain usage patterns that are unhealthy. Threads are rarely used and have poor discoverability, search is incredibly limited etc.
    - Frotag 3y ago
      Someone stirred up a bit of drama doing something similar a few years ago. The biggest difference is that they were selling it and harvesting it without any consent from users or server admins. https://web.archive.org/web/20221205181242/https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/fbhv5t/help_us_fight_discool_and_stop_the_scraping/ https://web.archive.org/web/20221205181242/https://www.reddi...
  - pocketarc 3y ago
    I've thought about this in the past, it's not difficult to do. I've used the Discord API in the past, you can listen to literally all messages that happen in the server. Streaming those into a DB and displaying them in a web-based UI (with Pidgin-like HTML export) would be straightforward. Maybe that'll be my next weekend's project. Edit: My sibling mentions the appropriateness of such a thing, and I do think letting users know that their messages will be posted on the web is important, but either way, if it's a public channel of a FOSS project's Discord server, surely people understand that those messages aren't private to begin with, right?
marcinzm 3y ago
My experience with semi-private chats in modern times is that it encourages more conversation that are visible to more people since everything people say is not going to be trivially searchable for all time by anyone. In the age where the media and those with an axe to grind (and frankly the person interviewing you for a job in 10 years) have figured out how to dig up anything you ever said in under 10 minutes the web ideal is less than ideal. Part of learning is saying stupid things and semi-private forums makes that easier I feel.
- andybak 3y ago
  I'm more concerned about the people that need help with something, but don't ask on Discord for any number of reasons. I suspect 1000 people use Google to solve a problem for every 1 that joins a Discord and asks.
  - skinnymuch 3y ago
    Discord servers aren’t fully private. Messages can be extracted. Neither Google nor Discord need to officially do anything. The people of Discord servers can decide how info can be publicly shared. There are nuances to care about like people’s privacy and comfort.
    - andybak 3y ago
      It's worth repeating the maxim "Defaults Matter". It's a fair bit of effort to mirror Discord to the web, and it's unclear whether it's officially frowned upon. Add to that the nuances you refer to and the end result is lots of valuable knowledge that will never be preserved, will rarely be found and will one day disappear.
      - skinnymuch 3y ago
        Those all seem like good things to me. Not the loss of knowledge being mainstreamed but the trade offs. An ultimate goal for knowledge doesn’t usually go well from my limited experience.
mid-kid 3y ago
Running a discord server for an open source project, I very much echo this feeling. I came after the discord server's creation, and the best I can do is help keep the IRC open and advocate that we keep the server on the lowest security level so people without accounts can join (in the odd case that feature actually works - it's very strictly behind captchas and IP rangebans, and desktop-only). Getting people off the platform and moving elsewhere is not an option, even if I had full decision-making power. But it's a question that constantly weighs on my mind. There's a lot of knowledge and information archived in the server, and it's really not easily findable without knowing to look in the discord server. Opening a second Q&A site would mean nobody would ask there, as the barrier to entry and use would be too high (even if it had a discord login). Using github discussions binds us even closer to github (they can't be exported), and I'm not comfortable with that either. I would love to see a service appear that allows us to publish discord forums on the net. I feel this is the closest thing we can do to something that would actually spark change. Discord's forum system is absolutely rancid compared to everything else, but my biggest priority is getting the information out there and at least slightly ordered. I feel this would encourage the most people to actually use it.
- jacobobryant 3y ago
  > I would love to see a service appear that allows us to publish discord forums on the net. Check out https://linen.dev https://linen.dev. See https://www.linen.dev/d/tfos https://www.linen.dev/d/tfos for an example (that's my own Discord community). Before discovering Linen I also made a proof-of-concept for something similar (https://discord.tfos.co); https://discord.tfos.co); I might try to make some updates to that at some point so I can change the design.
simonw 3y ago
I certainly worry about that - it's one of the reasons I held out for so long. My solution to this is a cultural one. Any time a question comes up on Discord that should be in the documentation, I add it to the docs. If it's a bug report, I open a GitHub issue. I often copy and paste messages out of Discord and into the relevant issues to keep them searchable and available in the most useful context. It's a bit of extra admin work for me, but the stronger community I get from having a social space for people to hang out with each other is more than worth it.

SecretDreams 3y ago

> How do you feel about the fact that all your institutional knowledge is now not visible outside of Discord, not indexed and barely searchable? No different than an office workspace no?

andybak 3y ago
Discord is a replacement for IRC, forums and mailing lists - not for hanging out in meat-space.
- hardware2win 3y ago
  Is IRC google searchable?
  - harrisi 3y ago
    In my experience, there is usually some percentage of people that archive whatever channels they use. Sometimes they will put them up on a website. There's also nothing stopping anyone from doing that, and it's quite easy. I've always just had irssi running on some server that archives everything and I ssh into the server when I want to chat.
    - mcpackieh 3y ago
      While it is true that many public IRC channels publish logs on the web, I cannot remember the last time such a log ever showed up in my google results. It virtually never happens. If somebody's primary concern with discord is search engine indexing (rather than discord being a for-profit company, not a federated service? rather than the discord desktop app spying on the other programs you run? rather than discord requiring most people to hand over their phone number to use the service?) then surely they have the precise same beef with IRC if they stop to think about it. Honestly, not being indexed by google is the least offensive aspect of discord. For most people these days I think it is actually a benefit. Tides are changing, common people are becoming apprehensive about their words being immortalized in some ledger easily accessible to the public which future employers will be able to trawl through for disqualifying out-of-context remarks. The objective in such chat rooms like discord and IRC is to make ephemeral connections to other people and discuss things in the moment, not to build up a semi-permanent corpus of information for the benefit of people googling things in the future.
  - calvinmorrison 3y ago
    if you hung out in channels there would often be a log bot If it was a channel with a lot of users, also a general bot would often exist. For example you could call up faqs easily on say systemd in Debian by just hitting !systemd You could add to the faqs on the fly All faqs were synced back to the website. So we're just reinventing the wheel here
- SecretDreams 3y ago
  The Internet is moving towards a meat place replacement.
  - tharne 3y ago
    Pretty sure that COVID showed the exact opposite. Our brains evolved in the meatspace and won't be happy anywhere else. Even the success of remote work shows this. People want to avoid the office (and the commute) to get more time with friends, family, and their hobbies. The internet is most successful when it helps people live the life they want in the meatspace, not when it tries to replace it.

yrro 3y ago

Have you considered logging what's said in each channel and publishing it to your project's web site?

toastercat 3y ago
That makes me think, has anyone created a Discord bot that automatically archives chats? Preferably as HTML files similar to Pidgin? That would be great.
- andybak 3y ago
  I suspect it's against the Discord TOS - but even if it's not there's a bunch of community expectations to manage. For recent forums we've added a disclaimer to the channel discription notifying people that we might make the contents web public at some point. Discord also encourages certain usage patterns that are unhealthy. Threads are rarely used and have poor discoverability, search is incredibly limited etc.
  - Frotag 3y ago
    Someone stirred up a bit of drama doing something similar a few years ago. The biggest difference is that they were selling it and harvesting it without any consent from users or server admins. https://web.archive.org/web/20221205181242/https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/fbhv5t/help_us_fight_discool_and_stop_the_scraping/ https://web.archive.org/web/20221205181242/https://www.reddi...
- pocketarc 3y ago
  I've thought about this in the past, it's not difficult to do. I've used the Discord API in the past, you can listen to literally all messages that happen in the server. Streaming those into a DB and displaying them in a web-based UI (with Pidgin-like HTML export) would be straightforward. Maybe that'll be my next weekend's project. Edit: My sibling mentions the appropriateness of such a thing, and I do think letting users know that their messages will be posted on the web is important, but either way, if it's a public channel of a FOSS project's Discord server, surely people understand that those messages aren't private to begin with, right?

marcinzm 3y ago

My experience with semi-private chats in modern times is that it encourages more conversation that are visible to more people since everything people say is not going to be trivially searchable for all time by anyone. In the age where the media and those with an axe to grind (and frankly the person interviewing you for a job in 10 years) have figured out how to dig up anything you ever said in under 10 minutes the web ideal is less than ideal. Part of learning is saying stupid things and semi-private forums makes that easier I feel.

andybak 3y ago
I'm more concerned about the people that need help with something, but don't ask on Discord for any number of reasons. I suspect 1000 people use Google to solve a problem for every 1 that joins a Discord and asks.
- skinnymuch 3y ago
  Discord servers aren’t fully private. Messages can be extracted. Neither Google nor Discord need to officially do anything. The people of Discord servers can decide how info can be publicly shared. There are nuances to care about like people’s privacy and comfort.
  - andybak 3y ago
    It's worth repeating the maxim "Defaults Matter". It's a fair bit of effort to mirror Discord to the web, and it's unclear whether it's officially frowned upon. Add to that the nuances you refer to and the end result is lots of valuable knowledge that will never be preserved, will rarely be found and will one day disappear.
    - skinnymuch 3y ago
      Those all seem like good things to me. Not the loss of knowledge being mainstreamed but the trade offs. An ultimate goal for knowledge doesn’t usually go well from my limited experience.

mid-kid 3y ago

Running a discord server for an open source project, I very much echo this feeling. I came after the discord server's creation, and the best I can do is help keep the IRC open and advocate that we keep the server on the lowest security level so people without accounts can join (in the odd case that feature actually works - it's very strictly behind captchas and IP rangebans, and desktop-only). Getting people off the platform and moving elsewhere is not an option, even if I had full decision-making power. But it's a question that constantly weighs on my mind. There's a lot of knowledge and information archived in the server, and it's really not easily findable without knowing to look in the discord server. Opening a second Q&A site would mean nobody would ask there, as the barrier to entry and use would be too high (even if it had a discord login). Using github discussions binds us even closer to github (they can't be exported), and I'm not comfortable with that either. I would love to see a service appear that allows us to publish discord forums on the net. I feel this is the closest thing we can do to something that would actually spark change. Discord's forum system is absolutely rancid compared to everything else, but my biggest priority is getting the information out there and at least slightly ordered. I feel this would encourage the most people to actually use it.

jacobobryant 3y ago
> I would love to see a service appear that allows us to publish discord forums on the net. Check out https://linen.dev https://linen.dev. See https://www.linen.dev/d/tfos https://www.linen.dev/d/tfos for an example (that's my own Discord community). Before discovering Linen I also made a proof-of-concept for something similar (https://discord.tfos.co); https://discord.tfos.co); I might try to make some updates to that at some point so I can change the design.

simonw 3y ago

I certainly worry about that - it's one of the reasons I held out for so long. My solution to this is a cultural one. Any time a question comes up on Discord that should be in the documentation, I add it to the docs. If it's a bug report, I open a GitHub issue. I often copy and paste messages out of Discord and into the relevant issues to keep them searchable and available in the most useful context. It's a bit of extra admin work for me, but the stronger community I get from having a social space for people to hang out with each other is more than worth it.