4 ms·

I hate the "everything interesting happens on Discord" thing some of these "hip" projects are doing. Why are we putting everything in a data silo controlled by

I hate the "everything interesting happens on Discord" thing some of these "hip" projects are doing. Why are we putting everything in a data silo controlled by a company with pretty draconian policies? There's so many open discussion platforms available - why use the worst one?

p1necone 3y ago
> why use the worst one? Because functionality wise, it's the best one. And the most popular one. Even among programmers people who will sacrifice that for idealogical purity are a minority.
- prmoustache 3y ago
  I don't know if there are alternative clients, but default ui is messy as f. I don't care about functionnality if just searching for stuff is so terrible.
  - malermeister 3y ago
    Alternative clients are explicitly prohibited by the ToS and will get you banned.
    - toastal 3y ago
      And every person that tried to make a FOSS one got a cease & desist. This sort of accessibility & developer hostility should clue in projects as to why they should choose a better option.
      - malermeister 3y ago
        Yup, people are really setting themselves up for losing a ton of important data and context in a knowledge silo they don't control.
- dgb23 3y ago
  I disagree. To me, Discord is a huge barrier. I use it when I have to. But it‘s bloated, slow and complicated. I don’t want to run it constantly because of that, and it takes very long to start up. The machine I use is fairly recent btw. I get distracted and frustrated by slow programs. If you run enough of them, you get compounding issues. It’s not fun! Aside from that, I do agree with GP 50%. However I absolutely use and promote proprietary software when it’s good quality.
  - voidfunc 3y ago
    > I disagree. To me, Discord is a huge barrier. I use it when I have to. But it‘s bloated, slow and complicated. I don’t want to run it constantly because of that, and it takes very long to start up. Yea man, that's a you problem. Discords popularity speaks to how little of a problem any of that is for other people. Anecdotal I've never thought of Discord as slow or "complicated".
    - beepbooptheory 3y ago
      "If its popular, it just simply must be good," is such a poignant conceit these days. Like a portal to twenty years ago.
      - sfn42 3y ago
        It is good. I use discord all the time. We can make our own servers for free, easily invite people, talk in text or voice or even stream video. I also enjoy using discord for programming, it has awesome support for code blocks and all kinds of stuff. At work we use slack, I'd take discord over slack any time. That's not to say I think it makes sense for a programming language or library to use discord servers instead of documentation. Documentation is a minimum requirement in my book. But if they also have a discord server, I might consider visiting it.
- ta8645 3y ago
  Unity is the best game engine. People who will sacrifice that for ideological purity are a minority. I'm sure that will work out great for them.
  - p1necone 3y ago
    This is an awful analogy. People aren't dropping unity for ideological purity, they're dropping it because unity is making real changes that actively screw over their customers.
    - ta8645 3y ago
      Wrong. The point is that you could have seen it coming. And you sow the seeds of it happening again when you think of opposition to Discord as an ideological stance, rather than one that promotes a practical structure which guards against a company deciding to screw you over.
    - malermeister 3y ago
      That's exactly what parent is pointing out, it just flew over your head. People saying Unity was not a good choice because it's closed source and controlled by one private company were laughed off as ideologues. Then what they warned about happened. Now the same kind of people are getting the same kind of response. Maybe that "ideology" is based on practical considerations after all?
      - kelipso 3y ago
        Anything I don't like is ideology and contrarianism, sorry.
      - p1necone 3y ago
        > People saying Unity was not a good choice because it's closed source and controlled by one private company were laughed off as ideologues. I kinda feel like including what Unity pulled recently in your "private company threat model" is a bit overkill - I'm generally comfortable assuming that private companies aren't going to do something quite that self destructive and braindead. Based on prior behaviour I wouldn't trust anything google develops to not get canned within a year or two, I'm very weary of anyone trying to monetize open source projects, and building a business on top of someone else's saas product seems pretty risky. But commercially licensed development tooling that I'm using to produce my own binaries is pretty low on my list of concerns - most companies aren't as bugfuck insane as Unity's current management seems to be. And just using some closed source product for which the switching cost is effectively zero (for me - see other comment in this thread about chat being ephemeral) seems like a no brainer.
- cultureswitch 3y ago
  Everyone knows the enshittification of Discord is only a matter of time and that it is inevitable. Arguably, it has already started. I guess most people don´t care that much about participating in forums that are, for all practical purposes, essentially ephemeral. Not only is the search abysmally bad, we all know the data will vanish eventually. I genuinely think this is how people roll. The willingness to do something that can remain useful 20 years from now is relatively rare. Sometimes speaking about this topic to others, it's like they don't even acknowledge there's a problem to begin with.
  - p1necone 3y ago
    > I guess most people don´t care that much about participating in forums that are, for all practical purposes, essentially ephemeral For me at least, chat in general is ephemeral - I don't care about history past the last couple hours - the same way as I don't record regular conversations with people and listen to them later. For this reason I'm much less concerned about vendor lockin with a chat solution than I would be with email or more forum type stuff - if Discord starts sucking I don't lose anything by moving to something new (assuming it sucks enough for the communities I'm in to move too).
panic 3y ago
Discord is where the creative energy is right now, for better or for worse.
- nextos 3y ago
  I disagree. Lots of communities, e.g. Julia or Stan, use https://www.discourse.org https://www.discourse.org. Discourse is GPL2 and emulates old Internet forums.
  - lproven 3y ago
    > emulates old Internet forums. Extremely poorly. I am on 2 or 3 instances, and I cordially loathe it. Compared to mailing lists, it's a grotesquely over-complicated mess. To make a comparison with text editors: Discourse for a mailing list user is like telling a skilled expert in Vim or Emacs... "Now, to join our community, all you have to do is install a Windows 11 VM and use MS Word 365 for all your editing! Some new users prefer the toolbar. It does all the stuff you're used to and like, but it has a cool new UI! It's great! We all love it and we are sure you will too! We looked at your old system and we have made sure we've included all the old functionality! You can move the cursor left, right, up and down, but now, you can also use an animated GIF or PNG as your cursor and have a choice of colours!"
    - r-w 3y ago
      To quote a sibling comment to yours: > Try it and you'll get a bunch of people complaining that inline images are bloat and who needed an auth system anyway and why can't I use my IRC client from 1996 and your client wasn't supposed to use my RAM, I'm saving that for guests.
      - lmm 3y ago
        Nah, I wrote that and Discourse is the worst of both worlds, it's somehow even less usable than old-style forums. I don't exactly love e.g. XenForo but it's better than Discourse in every way.
    - 3y ago
lmm 3y ago
Because the open community is apparently incapable of making a system with good UX. Try it and you'll get a bunch of people complaining that inline images are bloat and who needed an auth system anyway and why can't I use my IRC client from 1996 and your client wasn't supposed to use my RAM, I'm saving that for guests. If and when those open discussion platforms manage to match the UX of Discord, I'm sure people will be happy to switch. But I'm not sure it'll ever happen.
- malermeister 3y ago
  https://github.com/revoltchat https://github.com/revoltchat looks pretty promising!
- r-w 3y ago
  Matrix. It has an IRC bridge.
  - lmm 3y ago
    Yeah, I have high hopes for Matrix, but I don't think they're quite there yet (although I haven't used the release from a week or two back that is allegedly a major step forward).
- TerrifiedMouse 3y ago
  I think the only way to get an “open discord” is for some hero programmer to write it then release it as open source more or less fully formed, have it go viral, then play BDFL - i.e. the Python/Linux model.

p1necone 3y ago

> why use the worst one? Because functionality wise, it's the best one. And the most popular one. Even among programmers people who will sacrifice that for idealogical purity are a minority.

prmoustache 3y ago
I don't know if there are alternative clients, but default ui is messy as f. I don't care about functionnality if just searching for stuff is so terrible.
- malermeister 3y ago
  Alternative clients are explicitly prohibited by the ToS and will get you banned.
  - toastal 3y ago
    And every person that tried to make a FOSS one got a cease & desist. This sort of accessibility & developer hostility should clue in projects as to why they should choose a better option.
    - malermeister 3y ago
      Yup, people are really setting themselves up for losing a ton of important data and context in a knowledge silo they don't control.
dgb23 3y ago
I disagree. To me, Discord is a huge barrier. I use it when I have to. But it‘s bloated, slow and complicated. I don’t want to run it constantly because of that, and it takes very long to start up. The machine I use is fairly recent btw. I get distracted and frustrated by slow programs. If you run enough of them, you get compounding issues. It’s not fun! Aside from that, I do agree with GP 50%. However I absolutely use and promote proprietary software when it’s good quality.
- voidfunc 3y ago
  > I disagree. To me, Discord is a huge barrier. I use it when I have to. But it‘s bloated, slow and complicated. I don’t want to run it constantly because of that, and it takes very long to start up. Yea man, that's a you problem. Discords popularity speaks to how little of a problem any of that is for other people. Anecdotal I've never thought of Discord as slow or "complicated".
  - beepbooptheory 3y ago
    "If its popular, it just simply must be good," is such a poignant conceit these days. Like a portal to twenty years ago.
    - sfn42 3y ago
      It is good. I use discord all the time. We can make our own servers for free, easily invite people, talk in text or voice or even stream video. I also enjoy using discord for programming, it has awesome support for code blocks and all kinds of stuff. At work we use slack, I'd take discord over slack any time. That's not to say I think it makes sense for a programming language or library to use discord servers instead of documentation. Documentation is a minimum requirement in my book. But if they also have a discord server, I might consider visiting it.
ta8645 3y ago
Unity is the best game engine. People who will sacrifice that for ideological purity are a minority. I'm sure that will work out great for them.
- p1necone 3y ago
  This is an awful analogy. People aren't dropping unity for ideological purity, they're dropping it because unity is making real changes that actively screw over their customers.
  - ta8645 3y ago
    Wrong. The point is that you could have seen it coming. And you sow the seeds of it happening again when you think of opposition to Discord as an ideological stance, rather than one that promotes a practical structure which guards against a company deciding to screw you over.
  - malermeister 3y ago
    That's exactly what parent is pointing out, it just flew over your head. People saying Unity was not a good choice because it's closed source and controlled by one private company were laughed off as ideologues. Then what they warned about happened. Now the same kind of people are getting the same kind of response. Maybe that "ideology" is based on practical considerations after all?
    - kelipso 3y ago
      Anything I don't like is ideology and contrarianism, sorry.
    - p1necone 3y ago
      > People saying Unity was not a good choice because it's closed source and controlled by one private company were laughed off as ideologues. I kinda feel like including what Unity pulled recently in your "private company threat model" is a bit overkill - I'm generally comfortable assuming that private companies aren't going to do something quite that self destructive and braindead. Based on prior behaviour I wouldn't trust anything google develops to not get canned within a year or two, I'm very weary of anyone trying to monetize open source projects, and building a business on top of someone else's saas product seems pretty risky. But commercially licensed development tooling that I'm using to produce my own binaries is pretty low on my list of concerns - most companies aren't as bugfuck insane as Unity's current management seems to be. And just using some closed source product for which the switching cost is effectively zero (for me - see other comment in this thread about chat being ephemeral) seems like a no brainer.
cultureswitch 3y ago
Everyone knows the enshittification of Discord is only a matter of time and that it is inevitable. Arguably, it has already started. I guess most people don´t care that much about participating in forums that are, for all practical purposes, essentially ephemeral. Not only is the search abysmally bad, we all know the data will vanish eventually. I genuinely think this is how people roll. The willingness to do something that can remain useful 20 years from now is relatively rare. Sometimes speaking about this topic to others, it's like they don't even acknowledge there's a problem to begin with.
- p1necone 3y ago
  > I guess most people don´t care that much about participating in forums that are, for all practical purposes, essentially ephemeral For me at least, chat in general is ephemeral - I don't care about history past the last couple hours - the same way as I don't record regular conversations with people and listen to them later. For this reason I'm much less concerned about vendor lockin with a chat solution than I would be with email or more forum type stuff - if Discord starts sucking I don't lose anything by moving to something new (assuming it sucks enough for the communities I'm in to move too).

panic 3y ago

Discord is where the creative energy is right now, for better or for worse.

nextos 3y ago
I disagree. Lots of communities, e.g. Julia or Stan, use https://www.discourse.org https://www.discourse.org. Discourse is GPL2 and emulates old Internet forums.
- lproven 3y ago
  > emulates old Internet forums. Extremely poorly. I am on 2 or 3 instances, and I cordially loathe it. Compared to mailing lists, it's a grotesquely over-complicated mess. To make a comparison with text editors: Discourse for a mailing list user is like telling a skilled expert in Vim or Emacs... "Now, to join our community, all you have to do is install a Windows 11 VM and use MS Word 365 for all your editing! Some new users prefer the toolbar. It does all the stuff you're used to and like, but it has a cool new UI! It's great! We all love it and we are sure you will too! We looked at your old system and we have made sure we've included all the old functionality! You can move the cursor left, right, up and down, but now, you can also use an animated GIF or PNG as your cursor and have a choice of colours!"
  - r-w 3y ago
    To quote a sibling comment to yours: > Try it and you'll get a bunch of people complaining that inline images are bloat and who needed an auth system anyway and why can't I use my IRC client from 1996 and your client wasn't supposed to use my RAM, I'm saving that for guests.
    - lmm 3y ago
      Nah, I wrote that and Discourse is the worst of both worlds, it's somehow even less usable than old-style forums. I don't exactly love e.g. XenForo but it's better than Discourse in every way.
  - 3y ago

lmm 3y ago

Because the open community is apparently incapable of making a system with good UX. Try it and you'll get a bunch of people complaining that inline images are bloat and who needed an auth system anyway and why can't I use my IRC client from 1996 and your client wasn't supposed to use my RAM, I'm saving that for guests. If and when those open discussion platforms manage to match the UX of Discord, I'm sure people will be happy to switch. But I'm not sure it'll ever happen.

malermeister 3y ago
https://github.com/revoltchat https://github.com/revoltchat looks pretty promising!
r-w 3y ago
Matrix. It has an IRC bridge.
- lmm 3y ago
  Yeah, I have high hopes for Matrix, but I don't think they're quite there yet (although I haven't used the release from a week or two back that is allegedly a major step forward).
TerrifiedMouse 3y ago
I think the only way to get an “open discord” is for some hero programmer to write it then release it as open source more or less fully formed, have it go viral, then play BDFL - i.e. the Python/Linux model.