5 ms·
I know that this isn't the point of this post exactly, since this is more of the "free as in speech" argument, but I just want to say that I dislike Discord for
by schacon 3y ago
I know that this isn't the point of this post exactly, since this is more of the "free as in speech" argument, but I just want to say that I dislike Discord for lots of reasons but it's _amazing_ as a community engagement tool.
When GitHub was young and we were just starting out, we didn't really have anything like this. We had Campfire for internal chat, but not an external IRC like tool for engaging with our early users. The problem with IRC is mostly that nobody used it, it's just not an easy to use platform. We would mostly just use Twitter or something for user conversations.
I remember Leah Culver launching Convore (based on IRC tech) to try to make this easier, but for whatever reason it didn't take off. But somehow, Discord took off and there are _so many_ people there. We opened a server for GitButler and it's been so fantastic for connecting with and supporting our users.
But more importantly, it's amazing to have when you want to engage in a community as a _user_. We started using Planetscale and I had an issue and was able to join their server, ask my question and get a real answer from real PS employees and users almost immediately. Rather than dumping an issue into GitHub and watching it linger. Real time chat is so much more powerful.
Discord has done _so much_ for the open source community. Just look at great projects that embrace it. Go into the ohmyzsh channel and get _anything_ answered, there are like 1000 active users in there all the time.
I just can't imagine the concept of throwing that away because "it's not FOSS".
- TulliusCicero 3y agoDiscord is both powerful and easy to use. A lot of FOSS software is the former but not the latter, and the community often come across as, well, not really giving a shit about that (or sometimes being completely unable to perceive any usability differences). Yeah there are some downsides compared to IRC, but the average user will likely have a MUCH better nicer experience using Discord...which is a big part of why it's exploded in popularity.
- pistoriusp 3y agoTo be fair this was always the prevailing attitude on IRC. Try to fix it yourself, RTFM, and ask good questions. Maybe IRC was a litmus test of sorts.
- TulliusCicero 3y agoRight, and that's not wrong. It's fine to have software like that. But it'll probably never be as popular as software that gives a shit about decent UX design.
- esdf 3y agoBeing DDoS'd because you joined IRC and didn't read a manual on how to use it so you didn't know all the cool kids have bouncers or that the server may or may not have "cloaks" that you had to opt-in to. Discord is/was definitely a much better nicer experience than this.
- pistoriusp 3y agoWe even stopped using Slack for our internal conversations, and instead use private Discord rooms, to me it means that everyone who cares about our product is focused on the same space.
- tomnipotent 3y agoI recently took a dive into the world of Wayland compositors, and ended up trying out both Sway and Hyprland. Sway just happens to be a Drew DeVault project, and unsurprisingly relies on LibreChat/IRC while Hyprland is Discord. The Hyprland Discord was both more active and easier to get my questions answered, in no small part thanks to chat history and decent search. It felt like a world of a difference, and played a huge role in my going with Hyprland despite finding Sway source code better written and a slimmer running process.
- _dmn7 3y agoA lot of people use FOSS because they value control and self-ownership. Discord is the antithesis to that, being controlled by an external entity which places itself in a privileged position to both be the speech police and shut you down at will. Unlike Github, a community is much harder to move than a code repository + CI system because it is more than a technical problem.