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I never understood this obsession of open source projects with Discord. Why is Discord treated as if it was somehow different from all the other commercial offe

I never understood this obsession of open source projects with Discord. Why is Discord treated as if it was somehow different from all the other commercial offerings?

skidd0 3y ago
It's more than open source. A political party I tried to join organized via Discord. A hardware project offered support only through Discord. Seems most "communities" have one now. But I hate Discord and it's a poor tool for those jobs! A subreddit might have been better as I wouldn't need an account to view proir posts for troubleshooting, or organizing meetings. Or an email address. Or a contact form. But no, only the aptly named Discord.
- ddejohn 3y ago
  Discord has been detrimental to many aspects of the internet. We really need a "next-gen" forum software, and for people to move back to using forums. Discord is fine for gaming, sharing memes, and chatting with friends. We really need to stop using it for everything else.
- rescbr 3y ago
  > A subreddit might have been better as I wouldn't need an account to view proir posts for troubleshooting Subreddits are not suitable as forums - you just have two sticky posts, and the Reddit format punishes long discussions in a single thread. If you need to search older posts or want to keep context of some specific subject in a thread, a phpBB-style forum is better.
bluecalm 3y ago
It has a better interface than everything else by a long mile. People like using it. I like using it even though voice call quality is way worse than competition, the app is bloated and slow but the interface is just so nice: readable, clear, intuitive.
- _boffin_ 3y ago
  Hard disagree that it has a better ui than everything else. Every time I’ve used it, it feels like I’m at a carnival with everything trying to compete for my attention. Utterly distracting and feels childish, at least for me. I’m glad that you like the ui though.
  - YetAnotherNick 3y ago
    Just curious, which alternative do you like more with free message retention. I think free message retention is absolutely needed for open source projects.
    - rescbr 3y ago
      We used to connect a logging bot to our IRC channels back in the day :)
      - _boffin_ 3y ago
        ...i do that with slack. :D
        neom 3y ago
        you irc to slack, or you use a bouncer with slack, or both?
        _boffin_ 3y ago
        I just wrote a script that i captures the network requests as i scroll through, cleans it, outputs to a nice file that i can then insert into a database.
        neom 3y ago
        cool, that's a clever idea. :)
_heimdall 3y ago
I watched a few open source projects I was a part of move from Slack to Discord. Slack wasn't a great fit IMO, but Discord has always felt much worse to me. I'm not a gamer so I only used Discord for those open source projects, maybe it'd be different otherwise. It always seemed that most of Discord's efforts went into new features rather than keeping things stable. The constant churn and restructuring of the UI is a huge pain in the butt, and with a larger server we spent way too much time moving around channels and managing automations and rules.
- OkayPhysicist 3y ago
  I am utterly baffled by the complaints about UI changes. Discord looks nigh-identical to when I first installed it in 2017. Literally the only significant changes I remember was the smoothing of the logo, and relatively recent bottom left icon changes. I guess they added the activities button at some point in there, too. In fact, the stability of their UI is something that I've greatly appreciated. What about the UI is changing?
  - _heimdall 3y ago
    The overall UI design has been consistent, what has rubbed me the wrong way is all the unnecessary UI features like soundboards, custom animated gifts/stamps, etc. As far as UI hierarchy goes, its mostly been a challenge of the use cases for open source not fitting well with Discord. Too many channels, permission levels, and an unmanageable sidebar structure. That may just be an issue with scale of a larger OSS project, that's my only experience with it.
hombre_fatal 3y ago
Discord is treated differently because people already use it and they like using it.
neom 3y ago
Young people love it. Slack isn't right for "communities" as it's very specifically marketed as a work tool (and it's unless for community organizing building with how it's structured money wise now). IRC is probably too difficult an idea for young people to get behind + they like streaming their video games and movies. I guess it's like if teamspeak meets irc. Either way, if you wanna get old people and young people together for some community and want the tech to be low friction, discord seems to bridge that gap very well.
- dangus 3y ago
  More specifically, Slack’s payment model makes it impossible to use for communities. With Discord if you want premium stuff you pay for it at an individual level, and having the free tier doesn’t limit important functionality like message history. With Slack your workspace’s cost is based on how many people are members in the workspace. You can’t have one member decide to buy a premium subscription and another one decide not to. You’re either all in on paying money for every user or you’re stuck on a gimped free version that hides message history and has other limitations.
  - eatonphil 3y ago
    Yep, Slack's pricing is terrible for communities. I have a community Discord with 2.8k people with full history. If that were on Slack it would be $25,000/month?
    - avgDev 3y ago
      That's crazy, it seems like a such a simple thing? It is mostly text with emojis and memes. As someone who experienced online chat rooms, forums and IRC....it is crazy to me that something like Slack is even successful.
- TillE 3y ago
  Several years ago we crossed the point where everyone is on Discord because everyone is on Discord. Also it's free, of course. And there's a bunch of neat features that are somewhat unique, like using roles to sign up for specific types of announcements. It can be a chat room, or a forum, or voice/video chat, or a substitute for email notifications, or all of the above. I think that versatility is important too.
Inf0s3c 3y ago
Because it just works. Really not that hard to understand. IRC sucks, federated systems suck (not that they have to, they just do right now) Be the change you want to see in the world and make something that works better than Discord and fits with your philosophy. Why better? Because no one else cares about your philosophy they will only go through the motions to jump ship if it’s a better fit for their routine
wintermutestwin 3y ago
Isn’t the real issue here that ephemeral chat is a poor substitute for forums?
- dangus 3y ago
  I think that reducing the functionality of Discord to “ephemeral chat” is vastly selling short the functionality on offer.
  - dleary 3y ago
    What does Discord offer that is more than ‘ephemeral chat’? Do you disagree with the ‘real’ statement that GP was trying to say, that whatever “functionality on offer” that Discord provides is a poor substitute for forums?
    - ambichook 3y ago
      discord has forum channels too so ephemeral chat isnt just what it is anyway
      - luqtas 3y ago
        they introduced that last year? if you are looking for something older and you have to use the search function, things get pretty noisy... also most of big commuties despite having a forum, they still have a chat channel for help where people use; a lot
    - dangus 3y ago
      - Has forum channels now - The chat literally isn’t ephemeral. It is saved forever and you can search it. - Bots and webhooks. Communities can have very advanced functionality there. Applications can interact with the Discord API and do a huge variety of things. For example, I have a bot installed that sends alerts for free game sales on PC game platforms. - Multiple Voice/video/streaming channels in the same server. You can manage huge real time social events. - Cross-server socialization. You can make friends in one community and interact with the same people in other communities with no friction. - No registration friction. You can join other servers (forums) without making another account. I’d make the argument that you’re backwards on this. Forums are a poor substitute for Discord or any similar product. If you started with Discord and decided to migrate your community to a forum solution you’d be looking at lost functionality. People seem to cite lack of Google-searchability as the main downside with Discord but the people who use it don’t actually need that. In fact you could easily get around it: for example, you could make a Discord channel for support that automatically creates GitHub issues out of Discord messages.
Levitating 3y ago
Discord is free and is an incredibly strong tool with few limitations. Discord aimed to replace TeamSpeak and Skype but it is such a stable platform with so much customization it can be used for almost anything. People even use it as a customer support system or as a command and control center. My university uses Discord, my skydiving club uses Discord, many FOSS communities use Discord. Discord has also open sourced quite a few of their tools. And Discord has always supported the creation of bots via their stable REST api.

I never understood this obsession of open source projects with Discord. Why is Discord treated as if it was somehow different from all the other commercial offerings?

skidd0 3y ago

It's more than open source. A political party I tried to join organized via Discord. A hardware project offered support only through Discord. Seems most "communities" have one now. But I hate Discord and it's a poor tool for those jobs! A subreddit might have been better as I wouldn't need an account to view proir posts for troubleshooting, or organizing meetings. Or an email address. Or a contact form. But no, only the aptly named Discord.

ddejohn 3y ago
Discord has been detrimental to many aspects of the internet. We really need a "next-gen" forum software, and for people to move back to using forums. Discord is fine for gaming, sharing memes, and chatting with friends. We really need to stop using it for everything else.
rescbr 3y ago
> A subreddit might have been better as I wouldn't need an account to view proir posts for troubleshooting Subreddits are not suitable as forums - you just have two sticky posts, and the Reddit format punishes long discussions in a single thread. If you need to search older posts or want to keep context of some specific subject in a thread, a phpBB-style forum is better.

bluecalm 3y ago

It has a better interface than everything else by a long mile. People like using it. I like using it even though voice call quality is way worse than competition, the app is bloated and slow but the interface is just so nice: readable, clear, intuitive.

_boffin_ 3y ago
Hard disagree that it has a better ui than everything else. Every time I’ve used it, it feels like I’m at a carnival with everything trying to compete for my attention. Utterly distracting and feels childish, at least for me. I’m glad that you like the ui though.
- YetAnotherNick 3y ago
  Just curious, which alternative do you like more with free message retention. I think free message retention is absolutely needed for open source projects.
  - rescbr 3y ago
    We used to connect a logging bot to our IRC channels back in the day :)
    - _boffin_ 3y ago
      ...i do that with slack. :D
      - neom 3y ago
        you irc to slack, or you use a bouncer with slack, or both?
        _boffin_ 3y ago
        I just wrote a script that i captures the network requests as i scroll through, cleans it, outputs to a nice file that i can then insert into a database.
        neom 3y ago
        cool, that's a clever idea. :)

_heimdall 3y ago

I watched a few open source projects I was a part of move from Slack to Discord. Slack wasn't a great fit IMO, but Discord has always felt much worse to me. I'm not a gamer so I only used Discord for those open source projects, maybe it'd be different otherwise. It always seemed that most of Discord's efforts went into new features rather than keeping things stable. The constant churn and restructuring of the UI is a huge pain in the butt, and with a larger server we spent way too much time moving around channels and managing automations and rules.

OkayPhysicist 3y ago
I am utterly baffled by the complaints about UI changes. Discord looks nigh-identical to when I first installed it in 2017. Literally the only significant changes I remember was the smoothing of the logo, and relatively recent bottom left icon changes. I guess they added the activities button at some point in there, too. In fact, the stability of their UI is something that I've greatly appreciated. What about the UI is changing?
- _heimdall 3y ago
  The overall UI design has been consistent, what has rubbed me the wrong way is all the unnecessary UI features like soundboards, custom animated gifts/stamps, etc. As far as UI hierarchy goes, its mostly been a challenge of the use cases for open source not fitting well with Discord. Too many channels, permission levels, and an unmanageable sidebar structure. That may just be an issue with scale of a larger OSS project, that's my only experience with it.

hombre_fatal 3y ago

Discord is treated differently because people already use it and they like using it.

neom 3y ago

Young people love it. Slack isn't right for "communities" as it's very specifically marketed as a work tool (and it's unless for community organizing building with how it's structured money wise now). IRC is probably too difficult an idea for young people to get behind + they like streaming their video games and movies. I guess it's like if teamspeak meets irc. Either way, if you wanna get old people and young people together for some community and want the tech to be low friction, discord seems to bridge that gap very well.

dangus 3y ago
More specifically, Slack’s payment model makes it impossible to use for communities. With Discord if you want premium stuff you pay for it at an individual level, and having the free tier doesn’t limit important functionality like message history. With Slack your workspace’s cost is based on how many people are members in the workspace. You can’t have one member decide to buy a premium subscription and another one decide not to. You’re either all in on paying money for every user or you’re stuck on a gimped free version that hides message history and has other limitations.
- eatonphil 3y ago
  Yep, Slack's pricing is terrible for communities. I have a community Discord with 2.8k people with full history. If that were on Slack it would be $25,000/month?
  - avgDev 3y ago
    That's crazy, it seems like a such a simple thing? It is mostly text with emojis and memes. As someone who experienced online chat rooms, forums and IRC....it is crazy to me that something like Slack is even successful.
TillE 3y ago
Several years ago we crossed the point where everyone is on Discord because everyone is on Discord. Also it's free, of course. And there's a bunch of neat features that are somewhat unique, like using roles to sign up for specific types of announcements. It can be a chat room, or a forum, or voice/video chat, or a substitute for email notifications, or all of the above. I think that versatility is important too.

Inf0s3c 3y ago

Because it just works. Really not that hard to understand. IRC sucks, federated systems suck (not that they have to, they just do right now) Be the change you want to see in the world and make something that works better than Discord and fits with your philosophy. Why better? Because no one else cares about your philosophy they will only go through the motions to jump ship if it’s a better fit for their routine

wintermutestwin 3y ago

Isn’t the real issue here that ephemeral chat is a poor substitute for forums?

dangus 3y ago
I think that reducing the functionality of Discord to “ephemeral chat” is vastly selling short the functionality on offer.
- dleary 3y ago
  What does Discord offer that is more than ‘ephemeral chat’? Do you disagree with the ‘real’ statement that GP was trying to say, that whatever “functionality on offer” that Discord provides is a poor substitute for forums?
  - ambichook 3y ago
    discord has forum channels too so ephemeral chat isnt just what it is anyway
    - luqtas 3y ago
      they introduced that last year? if you are looking for something older and you have to use the search function, things get pretty noisy... also most of big commuties despite having a forum, they still have a chat channel for help where people use; a lot
  - dangus 3y ago
    - Has forum channels now - The chat literally isn’t ephemeral. It is saved forever and you can search it. - Bots and webhooks. Communities can have very advanced functionality there. Applications can interact with the Discord API and do a huge variety of things. For example, I have a bot installed that sends alerts for free game sales on PC game platforms. - Multiple Voice/video/streaming channels in the same server. You can manage huge real time social events. - Cross-server socialization. You can make friends in one community and interact with the same people in other communities with no friction. - No registration friction. You can join other servers (forums) without making another account. I’d make the argument that you’re backwards on this. Forums are a poor substitute for Discord or any similar product. If you started with Discord and decided to migrate your community to a forum solution you’d be looking at lost functionality. People seem to cite lack of Google-searchability as the main downside with Discord but the people who use it don’t actually need that. In fact you could easily get around it: for example, you could make a Discord channel for support that automatically creates GitHub issues out of Discord messages.

Levitating 3y ago

Discord is free and is an incredibly strong tool with few limitations. Discord aimed to replace TeamSpeak and Skype but it is such a stable platform with so much customization it can be used for almost anything. People even use it as a customer support system or as a command and control center. My university uses Discord, my skydiving club uses Discord, many FOSS communities use Discord. Discord has also open sourced quite a few of their tools. And Discord has always supported the creation of bots via their stable REST api.