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I get GitHub - it's proprietary, but also just git, so moving somewhere else is just a pull and push away. The same can't be said for issues/discussions/wiki, b

I get GitHub - it's proprietary, but also just git, so moving somewhere else is just a pull and push away. The same can't be said for issues/discussions/wiki, but at least it's still the web, so it is googleable, archivable, curlable, you name it. It has happened more than a dozen times that I googled a weird error from eg libssl, ended up in a random issue of a random tool I never heard of, but someone still explained the underlying issue well enough while debugging that I was able to solve my problem. This requires a browser and nothing else. None of this is true for discord. It isn't indexed by anything, even "servers" are walled gardens to each other mostly. Anything shared on discord will be lost to time in a decade or two. Nothing discovered or solved within $project's discord will possibly benefit anyone outside that project. And sure, we already had that problem with IRC, but I think the text-only nature of it helped that anything a bit more involved moved to forums or mailing lists which again both were web accessible and searchable. And even then some projects did have logbots which just dumped text files into a web server.

ljm 3y ago
What’s worse is that the stuff that does get indexed will usually describe your exact issue, but then you’ll see it’s closed with a message like “this issue is stale because no one answered in 20 minutes,” or “this isn’t a bug, ask it on discord”. There’s no guarantee you get an answer there or if someone snaps at you for asking the same question yet again and not knowing the exact ceremony to perform to find the previous answers. I don’t have the time or energy to arse about with real time chat and micro-communities for every single thing. The claim is that they are inclusive but I find them rather cliquey and exclusive.
- zarathustreal 3y ago
  “Inclusive” is a modern day euphemism much like “diversity.” It just means the target audience is present.
joshspankit 3y ago
> Anything shared on discord will be lost to time in a decade or two Personally, as someone who has watched the evolution of IRC and other types of communication channels, I would argue that unless a thread is archived to the open web, anything shared in a realtime chat channel is lost in hours if not days.
ambigious7777 3y ago
Discord does have a forums feature, which is somewhat searchable, so that's not entirely true. I think the best thing for this stuff is still a forum, like GitHub Discussions (or Issues), or just run your own message board.

ljm 3y ago

What’s worse is that the stuff that does get indexed will usually describe your exact issue, but then you’ll see it’s closed with a message like “this issue is stale because no one answered in 20 minutes,” or “this isn’t a bug, ask it on discord”. There’s no guarantee you get an answer there or if someone snaps at you for asking the same question yet again and not knowing the exact ceremony to perform to find the previous answers. I don’t have the time or energy to arse about with real time chat and micro-communities for every single thing. The claim is that they are inclusive but I find them rather cliquey and exclusive.

zarathustreal 3y ago
“Inclusive” is a modern day euphemism much like “diversity.” It just means the target audience is present.

joshspankit 3y ago

> Anything shared on discord will be lost to time in a decade or two Personally, as someone who has watched the evolution of IRC and other types of communication channels, I would argue that unless a thread is archived to the open web, anything shared in a realtime chat channel is lost in hours if not days.

ambigious7777 3y ago

Discord does have a forums feature, which is somewhat searchable, so that's not entirely true. I think the best thing for this stuff is still a forum, like GitHub Discussions (or Issues), or just run your own message board.