48 ms·

Stop Using Discord

259 points by ColinWright 2y ago

gardenhedge 2y ago
Agreed. I also find it to be a terrible ux so I am bias
- RyJones 2y ago
  We (Hyperledger) got a ton of positive feedback from our blind users when we moved to Discord. Apparently the UX is extremely well laid out for screen readers.
  - gostsamo 2y ago
    I'm blind and I don't like Discord. They implement accessibility well, but they, Slack, Teams and the like have decided that I need to know the sender and time stamp of every message in the chat. Read to me for every message. Jumping between screen sections is annoying because lists and headings are too nineties and the hell with them. Captchas? Should I mention that for some reason they disliked one of my logins and put an inaccessible captcha? Maybe your unhappy blind users are still locked out and can't tell you for their issues. Good that I was registered with a gmail account and circumvented them by adding a dot in the email field. Those are personal experiences and I don't know your previous solution, but for me Discord manages to be annoying in a very specific and unnecessary way.
    - RyJones 2y ago
      I’m sorry to hear that. I know two of the blind users personally and they are active in discord. I agree on captchas. Rocket.Chat was the previous platform. I will file a bug against discord on the timestamp issue. When I worked for Washington State University, one of our tests pre website update, was the developers had to use a desktop with a screen reader and the display turned off. I think we made great websites for blind users. That was in 2003, so things may have changed.
      - gostsamo 2y ago
        Many products would benefit if there is such a friday game in the product team: Achieve story goals without the monitor in fewest possible steps. PS: Regarding the timestamp issue, maybe I've formulated it incorrectly. Just, when you arrow on a message, it reads sender and timestamp. Some people write bursts of messages so you have a name and timestamp for every few words of the conversation and for many stupid emois.
      - rightbyte 2y ago
        Oh... ye that is a great idea. I'll need to try that some time if I ever do a user facing app. But I guess I'll just put a blanket over the monitor. New OSes and GUI frameworks behave strangely with no target resolution.
koolala 2y ago
They forgot the Discord original amazing much better RFC pattern that lets anyone make channels about anything and connect any server, computer, or person together: Internet Relay Communication
xtiansimon 2y ago
This 78 word Mastadon post is more an Ask HN—discuss. Sure. Using Discord as a help community for technical issues seems like a bad idea on the surface. But that’s not why I use Discord for technical issues. I’m prolly a year and a half behind on what’s what (my last big project ). For me StackExchange was the place to find answers to specific questions. Discord (and Reddit because discussion is permitted) was the place to go to find guidance when you don’t know where to start. Sooo, Id rather say use Discord, use what works—but write and share back your knowledge to the searchable communities mentioned by the author. The easy way to do that is write the question that you should have asked to those technical communities and answer your own question.
rkuykendall-com 2y ago
I run a forum (for many, many years) and a Discord (for a few years). The Discord works perfectly and always has. It's completely free and easy to use. The forum is expensive, complicated, and usually broken. or hacked. or full of spam. It's going to cost even more money to fix. Nobody wants to work on forums, much less me. Good riddance.
beretguy 2y ago
The rest of the quote: > Stop using Discord for anything else than just chatting. Stop dumping knowledge into a black hole. Use forums. Use the open web. Future nerds will thank you.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- Rinzler89 2y ago
  Yeah I also hate technical discussions on (legal) hacking and tinkering happening in some obscure Telegram or Discord groups that you only find out if you know a guy who knows a guy who found the Discord link on some Reddit post. WTF?! I get the need for non-open communication channels if you want to stay away from Nintendo's lawyers or something but otherwise come on, just have the discussions in a more open place FFS. I also hate Reddit but at least it can be reached via search engines.
- CM30 2y ago
  This is the key part here. There's nothing wrong with using Discord to chat about random stuff. If you're talking to your friends about your latest night out or playing online games with a community, then Discord is fine. The issue is how some communities use it as a wiki, documentation and forum replacement for information that should be available on the public internet. This is a huge problem for speedrunning and modding communities, which seem to love using Discord and Google Sheets and other awkward 'must know the link to access' tools for information that should probably be in a wiki somewhere.
  - sneak 2y ago
    This is untrue. Talking to friends in DM on non-e2ee platforms normalizes ubiquitous surveillance of friendship interactions and makes all of society worse. Don’t be reachable on non-e2ee DM systems. Delete your account.
    - jmprspret 2y ago
      This also has the added benefit of weeding out people who can't be bothered to put in just a little effort to keep in touch with you. Shows who your true friends are. It's actually sad. But an eye opener ;)
dimitrisnl 2y ago
Valid. I migrated a Rails codebase from Webpacker to Vite. All the help I needed was hidden in an obscure Discord server. Nothing on GH.
Insalgo 2y ago
Any recommendations for a free engineering community forum?
- alanbernstein 2y ago
  phpBB
  - eviks 2y ago
    that's the one without per-post reactions and a weird markup language builtin?
    - alanbernstein 2y ago
      I think of it as the one that powered 10+ years of accessible forum posts.
      - eviks 2y ago
        And unfortunately hadn't evolved in those many years to be a good alternative for this year
- mikl 2y ago
  https://www.discourse.org https://www.discourse.org is great, best forum software I ever saw. You have probably used it already somewhere. They have a paid hosting offer, but you can also self-host it for free. And it’s open source.
  - Groxx 2y ago
    > Managed forum hosting from $50/month Yeowch. $50/mo is a huge cost for anything that's not making money.
  - 542458 2y ago
    I don’t get the love for discourse. I’m not one of those “every webpage should work without JS” purists, but Discourse seems intent to reinvent basic web features with JS and has some performance issues and as a consequence of both often (maybe when hitting something not in cache?) takes ages to load during which time you get nothing but a poorly-styled loading throbber, you can’t even read the content as it loads in. Even official instances are incredibly slow at times. One topic on https://meta.discourse.org/ https://meta.discourse.org/ just took over 30 seconds to load for me. Discourse just feels somewhat overengineered. Also anything that’s $50 a month doesn’t compete at the low end (which is where most OSS discussion hosting would exist) with Discord, which is free.
newsclues 2y ago
Discord and Reddit are terrible dark holes of knowledge
- sampullman 2y ago
  At least reddit is indexed by search engines, right? I find that for a significant portion of my searches, appending "reddit" cuts through SEO/blogspam results and I get an answer without having to wade through too much nonsense.
  - fireflash38 2y ago
    For now. How long until they put it behind a sign in barrier ala Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, etc?
    - tokai 2y ago
      They do that now.
- gl-prod 2y ago
  You can find info in Reddit, Discord is a black hole
- bmacho 2y ago
  Reddit you can save with archive.org if you want.
deafpolygon 2y ago
Meanwhile... the mastodon page takes over 3 minutes to load. I don't know of any pre-2010 forums that are still functional and searchable.
- BSDobelix 2y ago
  >I don't know of any pre-2010 forums https://www.vogons.org/ https://www.vogons.org/ ->Since 2002 https://bbs.archlinux.org https://bbs.archlinux.org -> Since 2003 And so on, just to name two important ones.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- yvdriess 2y ago
  somethingawful
- dotnet00 2y ago
  The OSDev forum (forum.osdev.org) has been around for a while
- Digit-Al 2y ago
  That's odd, it loads in a fraction of a second for me; and I'm on a mobile running android Firefox. Plus I'm on hotel WiFi at the moment.
- GrantMoyer 2y ago
  The game specific DarkMatters forums has been around for at least 10 years. I personally used it to resolve an issue I was having, when I found a thread[1] by web search. Some nice people helped the OP troubleshoot over almost 2 years until with their help the OP eventually found the issue and explained the fix. Then the thread went on for a couple more years helping people with similar issues for whom the orginal fix didn't work, until eventually another fix was posted. That other fix was copied over from another forum. [1]: https://darkmatters.org/forums/index.php?/topic/23158-help-sacred-2-gold-steam-dont-start-startup-error/ https://darkmatters.org/forums/index.php?/topic/23158-help-s...
Svip 2y ago
Where is the Wordpress.com (i.e. commercial hosting) for forums? I maintain a SMF forum that's lasted since 2000, but I get why most people aren't jumping into creating a new forum, because it's rather tedious compared to Discord. Hell, better ask instead; where is the Discord but for forums (real ones, not Discord)?
- CharlieDigital 2y ago
  Isn't that just Reddit?
  - beeboobaa3 2y ago
    No, on reddit you are subjected to the reddit administrators their policies. You have no real control. The user interface is also awful if you're interested in content older than a day.
    - boxed 2y ago
      And the voting system builds toxicity for smaller user numbers than should otherwise be needed.
    - CharlieDigital 2y ago
      It's not that different from Discord; unless you run the platform, there's always the risk of deplatforming.
  - Svip 2y ago
    Mostly, yes. Particularly in the terms of "Discord-difying forums". But you cannot have multiple subforums for your community on Reddit (unless you do something weird with subsubreddits, but those won't be clearly visible). Discord allows you to have several channels. Additionally, I'd like an alternative that isn't threaded like Reddit and HN. Threaded communities have their place, but classic chronological topics also do.
- hprotagonist 2y ago
  discourse has a few commercial hosting platforms. communiteq is one i’ve used.
segmondy 2y ago
folks have used such communication channels for a long time. there were folks using bbs chat instead of bbs forums, folks using talk instead of mail, there were folks using irc instead of web forums. there's always room for both.
poulpy123 2y ago
I totally agree, and also stop using FB groups it's even worse. But the issue is no replacement is proposed by the author. Discord has the advantage of: - being free - being maintained by someone else - being used by a lot of people, so no need to create a new account for many users - being very useful as a chat and growing organically as support from there I don't see many competitors available. For example discourse is paid 50€ per month for 100 users maximum, which small project can pay that ? Edit: I rarely see FB mentioned on these debates but it's probably by far the biggest place used for forum. I'm a member of several 10k+ groups. Even discords don't come close of it. The official bambulab group is 60k people, the hiking group of my area (1 million inhabitants max) is 30k people. The numbers are insane, as is the information invisible and lost
- hprotagonist 2y ago
  libera.chat is free. the network doesn’t compel registration, even! (though some channels do)
  - hu3 2y ago
    unfortunately, irc is not a replacement for discord.
    - hprotagonist 2y ago
      discord is just IRC in a trenchcoat. what’s to replace?
      - scientist4397 2y ago
        The missing feature of IRC is to be able to get all the messages even when you’re offline. V3 was as missed opportunity for that
        cykros 2y ago
        You mean like you get if you run a BNC, or just run your irssi or weechat inside a screen session, or headless X session that you reattach remotely? I've never understood people who log out of IRC.
Phiwise_ 2y ago
Side note: I really dislike how shortsighted many orgs are with the extreme level of "go to your customer" that led to using the persistent IRC client I used to banter during game nights with my friends a decade ago as an all-encompassing support and outreach forum. Forget forum admins. Forget the future. Forget the "open web". It's dysfunctional right now for me, the current target market of whatever product you're selling or program you're running. I'm alienated from whatever your thing or community is by how badly Discord works for over twenty people, so I don't engage with you, and I must imagine many others feel the same way. Surely someone's aware of this in your org? Was the single-digit man-hours saved by not spinning up a FOSS forum or starting a subreddit really worth this? Who made that calculation? /rant
lulzury 2y ago
I don't like Discord as much as the next person, but people use Discord because it's convenient. Why do people prefer Discord to IRC when the latter is free, open source, and indexable?
- morjom 2y ago
  You already answered yourself. Convenience and because your friends are already there or because that one thing hosts its forum there.
- dotnet00 2y ago
  Flashy UI, channel grouping, custom emoji, server side persistent logs and now the network effect of most likely not having to ask someone to install and learn the ins and outs of another program. Matrix comes the closest to fitting all the same requirements, but I've only ever managed to get one friend to regularly use it, and even then we only use it between ourselves and not to participate in federated matrix servers.
- benoliver999 2y ago
  If you are offline on IRC you don't get messages. I use a bouncer etc but that's more than the average person should have to worry about. There is https://www.irccloud.com/ https://www.irccloud.com/ but I fear it's too little too late Having to create an account on every IRC server is also not great. I use and love IRC, but I get why centralised services take off. It's just a shame it's a sucky one like discord where everything just goes into a black hole.
  - miah_ 2y ago
    Not getting messages when I'm offline is a feature.
    - gravescale 2y ago
      You also don't get messages from when you were offline which means if your group spans multiple timezones and you can only be online for a short time, you can completely miss someone. Yes, sure, bouncers, etc, but they were always a gigantic fiddly hassle compared to "log in, here's what you missed".
NemoNobody 2y ago
Ok... does Mastodon always take that long too load? That's not really viable considering the page I ended up on had essentially only textual content - like an old website from way back. Then I read a Geocities suggestion - something from my elementary days Discord is actually pretty cool - a walled garden but no different than the rest of the internet. Google won't send anyone to forums or blogs/personal sites anyways, so this isn't really advice at all
- chrisjj 2y ago
  > Google won't send anyone to forums or blogs/personal sites anyways Oh? It does here.
- jlpom 2y ago
  No, I think it's the instance
- r4indeer 2y ago
  Mastodon is decentralized / federated, so the page load time depends on the instance you're visiting.
- Andrex 2y ago
  Mastodon will continue to suck as long as their default client refuses to support noscript access. > Google won't send anyone to forums or blogs/personal sites anyways, so this isn't really advice at all They had that capability in the past, and may again in the future, to say nothing of possible competitors focusing on forum or blog search specifically. Discord is a black box and that data will be lost forever. That's different from publishing on the public web.
NeutralForest 2y ago
I feel like we have this discussion every month, one way or another. People use Discord because it's useful and they like the experience. Discourse is nice for purely written communication but if you want to setup a call, direct message and, more importantly, write bots (presentation, topic organization, news, modding, now even AI Q&A); people will fall back to Discord. Pointing at Discourse when it doesn't have the same value proposition and blaming users is just not useful at all.
- chrisjj 2y ago
  > People use Discord because it's useful and they like the experience. Let's fix that. Discord-using people use Discord because it's useful to them and they like the experience.
  - ramon156 2y ago
    If I'm honest, those say the exact same thing to me, and doesn't de-power the argument
  - NeutralForest 2y ago
    Ok? That's just being pedantic. The point I'm trying to make, is that we need to find why people use Discord and offer something better for our (devs+technical users) use case; that'll also need to go the existing network effect.
    - chrisjj 2y ago
      The point I'd make is you'd more need to find out why people who don't use Discourse (instead of fora) don't. The reason surely has little to do with the non-forum-like functions that appeal to those who do like it. Having said which, finding out is obstructed by the fact that very few organisers offer users both.
- kwanbix 2y ago
  I have been using computers for 40 years and I cannot see a single feature of discord that I cannot have on a forum or even reddit. In fact, the UX of Discord is abismal.
Kiro 2y ago
Stop Using Mastodon.
- thefz 2y ago
  Right. Page took 10 seconds to load.
- azangru 2y ago
  What would you rather see people use instead?
  - gaws 2y ago
    X, the everything app!
outime 2y ago
It will be as useful as other HN campaigns: stop using WhatsApp and use Signal, stop using Chrome and use Firefox, stop using Twitter and use this OSS alternative with 0.1% of the users, stop using Reddit, stop using Kubernetes, etc.
- skeeter2020 2y ago
  What's your alternative action? I tend to agree with you, but personally I've tried to stop pointing out problems without providing solutions; failing at something is better than preemptive surrender.
  - adamtaylor_13 2y ago
    Surrender implies there’s something inherently wrong with these alternatives. Something a lot of people just don’t agree with. I agree with you that it’s helpful to be proactive, but the incumbents are there for a reason: at one point a large consensus agreed they were the best for doing X, whatever X might’ve been in that situation. Maybe that’s changed. But a lot of folks don’t think so. Twitter is useful precisely due to its network effect. That’s why I’ll never move to mastodon. Doesn’t make sense for the reason that I use the tool.
  - outime 2y ago
    I'm not suggesting surrender, but I want to point out that a significant portion of the HN crowd seems to have a very specific perspective that doesn't align with reality. The average Discord user (hence, the largest percentage of the userbase) prioritize convenience, whether they're regular users or server creators. They don't care about being indexed by Google - they just want to connect quickly, chat, play games together, and so on. This convenience-driven mindset extends to technical communities on Discord. Creating a server there is as simple as clicking a couple of buttons, whereas setting up a new forum requires significant technical effort and ongoing maintenance, besides $$$. These practical aspects are often overlooked in discussions, hence the failure of all these campaigns lead by a bit too technical people i.e. those who are willing to spend time researching alternatives and enduring their particular pains, and don't care about networking effects. To challenge Discord effectively, create something equally convenient yet superior (like being indexable by Google). Wait for Discord's deep enshittification and seize the opportunity then. If it's not as convenient, don't expect users to switch. The average user won't invest time in learning new platforms when they can get everything faster and for free elsewhere.
Arch-TK 2y ago
Yes, please stop using discord. But also maybe stop using discourse. Nothing is more off-putting about an open source project than seeing that discord is the main support forum. I am in the fortunate position of being able to just solve my own problems by myself most of the time, but sometimes it genuinely is helpful to talk to someone about it. If you're an open source project, please use IRC, or matrix if you absolutely must. If you need a forum, well, discourse is not the worst option, but honestly no idea why forums need a tonne of javascript, a re-implementation of basic browser functionality like scrolling, and to override your keybindings. A mailing list is the ideal option. If you really must have something web based, I don't have any recommendations other than "please don't use discord, at least not unless you feel actually satisfied with its search functionality". You can self host a forum on a cheap VM and require some kind of user signup to try to mitigate the inevitable spam.
- nicoburns 2y ago
  Zulip is a good middle ground here. Open source, browsable without logging in (if configured to be), and much better UX than IRC (or god forbid Matrix which has to be about the worst chat software I've used).
- kunley 2y ago
  Valid points. By the way, maybe this is naive, but what's wrong with Github Discussions?
Springtime 2y ago
Ultimately someone has to pay for things. Many communities have apparently decided they don't want to use even modern forum software and become a webmaster, along with avoiding the costs and time associated, or use someone else's existing forum (which may or may not suit their needs). The quite liberal free file attachment limits (25MB each), ease of communication and ironically the fact Discord is closed off in nature means it's quite attractive for people to more easily share things that would require a separate file host normally (it's an almost universal experience that forums usually have meager attachment caps). I'd be quite interested in an article that understands Discord's benefits and use cases and then approaches a critique and alternative solutions to address it in a more open web friendly way.
- iforgotpassword 2y ago
  I tried discord only once, but to me it was a disorganized chaotic experience. People seem to really think that well organized faq sections on traditional websites and properly searchable and indexable forum threads should be replaced by "just search through two years of chat backlog on discord". Or something like that.
  - lamontcg 2y ago
    I'm actually a moderator on a discord. We have a lot of FAQ pages (generally wiki pages on various GitHub repos) that a discord bot will send you to in response to various different commands. Occasionally I use search to find a chat that I personally had with someone X months ago, and it usually works if I can find the right search terms. I don't think it is any worse than IRC with chatlogs (arguably might be better depending on how well indexed the chatlogs are). And the fundamental problem is that social chats are noisy, and you should never be using them for knowledge retention. And web forums aren't a replacement for social chat. And 99% of the questions and answers in there are from newbies and are covered in FAQs and are just noise anyway. You can't index your way out of a horrible noise problem. They also do serve a purpose because as one of the subject-matter experts (who is a single-point-of-failure/final-escalation level), I don't have to get involved in most of the discussion. There's usually dozens of people on the server who can answer the easy questions, and I can monitor for people hitting real bugs that actually need fixing.
barkerja 2y ago
I use Discord quite a bit in the Elixir community and find it quite useful. Messages are persisted. There's a wonderful forum feature now built into the platform; and it's all searchable with a pretty robust filtering mechanism. And with an active server, there's typically always someone around to help you chat through a problem almost immediately. I understand the sentiment, but it does seem misinformed. Slack, on the other hand. Absolutely! Stay away for anything related to knowledge-base.
- Nevolihs 2y ago
  A single example of it being done well doesn't have any bearing on all the issues stemming from the use of Discord as knowledge bases, wikis and documentation. Out of curiosity, is any of that useful information on the Elixir Discord available to be searched for with Google or any other search engine?
  - barkerja 2y ago
    > Out of curiosity, is any of that useful information on the Elixir Discord available to be searched for with Google or any other search engine? It is not, and that is the one major knock against Discord. But see my response above about that.
- moooo99 2y ago
  I don’t think the sentiment is misinformed. I understand your position and I’ve had pleasant experiences on discord in the past with people being very willing to help. However, the help I received for my problem is basically impossible to discovered for anybody else (in fact, I have a hard time finding this thread myself). Discord is really great for realtime interactions, wether that be chatting or talking. But it absolutely sucks at retrieving information generated in the past. It’s not search engine indexable and the discord search itself usually isn’t of any help either. On conventional forums on the other hand, I have learned so much from reading threads from the past. Recently I’ve been diving a bit deeper into construction and I’ve found a forum in my native language. There are so many treasures there: experts from the field sharing experiences and advising on issues, people linking relevant threads, people asking questions and whole threads evolving from that. Sure, there is quite a bit of „toxic“ forum interaction as well, but there are so many gems that would absolutely be undiscoverable if the same interactions would happen on discord
morjom 2y ago
Use a matrix bridge to discord instead. Jokes aside the discord ux is good enough for the average user, it already has chokehold on its users and there is no equivalent. I would also prefer things to be easily searchable, archivable etc but consumers consume.
- giancarlostoro 2y ago
  > there is no equivalent. Guilded has entered the chat
- lou1306 2y ago
  Point is, if you are using it as a tool to reach out to your community it's mostly okay, but if you are doing support or documentation up there you should really really think twice. In this instance: Amiga 600 Discord where we post pics of our cool Amigas good, Amiga maintenance and schematics hidden in God knows which channel on God knows which Amiga Discord server bad. Best of both worlds: if someone asks question on a Discord and you know the answer, write a blog post (or whatever, as long as it is on the open Web) and link it back! You are guaranteed to have at least 1 readerr which is wildly above the average blog post lol
- michaelt 2y ago
  > it already has chokehold on its users and there is no equivalent. There are plenty of equivalents - Slack, Microsoft Teams etc offer the same IRC + persistent messages + searchable + persistent user accounts & admin + multi-device + image sharing + file sharing + spam protection product. They're just even worse, by most of the metrics that make people hate discord.
  - ourmandave 2y ago
    I'll never use MS Teams for personal stuff because it's way to work adjacent. The fear of a mis-click or wrong login is to stressful to even start.
  - morjom 2y ago
    If they're worse are they equivalent?
consp 2y ago
Discord has succesfully claimed the word server out of it's meaning and giving people the idea it is "their server". It's not your server, it's not even a server at all.
- doommius 2y ago
  tbh on the backend they're called guilds: https://discord.com/developers/docs/resources/guild https://discord.com/developers/docs/resources/guild
sneak 2y ago
Stop using Discord for “just chatting”, too. It’s not end to end encrypted and Discord and whoever acquires them can read all of your chat logs, including DMs, for AI training or whatever else. Friends don’t talk to friends on surveillance platforms.
- stnmtn 2y ago
  Are forums not this way as well?
  - sneak 2y ago
    They are, but most people don’t expect privacy in forum DMs, and forum site DMs aren’t usually used that much. Lots of people mistakenly assume their DMs on Discord (and their iMessages) will be private.
anymouse123456 2y ago
This. "Join my Discord" is a 100% hard pass for me. Every time I've made an exception, the entire experience is a net-negative. Half the time, I can't even get authenticated and then once I'm in, everything is awful. The notifications, the constant chatter, the dozens of topics, the useless search, it shocks me that anyone over the age of 14 uses it at all. Add to all the broken basics, the fact that your data is now locked away in a vault that will absolutely disappear at some point in the not-too-distant future, and it just makes no sense at all.
- robertlagrant 2y ago
  I do find it very strange. It assumes I've been "invited" when I just clicked on a link to join from a website. I can't tell why I am or aren't logged in when I join. It's full of animations. Maybe it's the Gen Z take on IRC, but it seems a bit much. The client is very smooth in performance, though, which is nice.
- ziddoap 2y ago
  >it shocks me that anyone over the age of 14 uses it at all. Really? I'm in my mid 30s and am in a couple servers with a bunch of 30-50 year olds. I don't know of any better platform to organize and play DnD with voice chat and screen sharing. It's also great for when I play larger online games with a group (e.g. World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy) as we have a guild server to organize absences, socialize while not raiding, etc. If you have a suggestion for a better way to voice chat, screen share, drop in and out of conversations, etc. I'm all ears. For what its worth, all of your complaints (except for search, which really does suck) are easily addressed.
- viraptor 2y ago
  I don't get this: > The notifications, You can turn them off > the constant chatter, the dozens of topics Topics are there to limit the messages to just what you're interested in, cutting down the chatter. If you expect it to be anything different than discord, you'll be disappointed, but there are communities where discord/slack/mattermost model works fine.
- iteygib 2y ago
swayvil 2y ago
I dislike it. Clumsy and noisy. Just bad.
jimbobthrowawy 2y ago
Still moderately surprised there isn't an option built into discord to make certain channels public for reading/indexing. I have seen one site that seems to enable it by adding their bot to your "server", but it's only on a handful of programming-focused ones.
dools 2y ago
I remember a similar sentiment being expressed in IRC chats back in the day, ie. that it was way better to use mailing lists because they publicly recorded all the problems and solutions.
cl3misch 2y ago
I'm not the first to say this, but Discord is essentially IRC. It's great for ephemeral chatting and arguably the best platform for that currently. The content on it is not indexed and not discoverable with web search engines. I have been wondering: is it even possible for a platform to fulfill both needs? For searchable, "forum style" discussions, we already have a large accessible platform: Reddit! I genuinely ask myself: why is "Join our Discord" much more popular than "Join our Reddit"? I personally prefer "forum style" discussion over "IRC style" discussions, but the polularity of Discord even in technical circles proves to me that a lot of people like the IRC style of communication.
- ThrowawayTestr 2y ago
  You can have both. The forum I use also have a irc-like chat section.
  - cl3misch 2y ago
    Do you care to share what forum that is? And is its irc-like chat section searchable? Otherwise it is just forum and chat available under the same domain. But information in the IRC section is still ephemeral.
    - ThrowawayTestr 2y ago
      rdrama .net. We have a cute orange cat as our mascot.
      - jmprspret 2y ago
        This is quite an oddity in the internet space I feel (not in a bad way - but not necessarily a good way either - i just find it odd). Reading through the rules it's such an interesting mix of.. ideals?
  - foreverobama 2y ago
    [dead]
davikr 2y ago
Let's go back to Usenet.
ThrowawayTestr 2y ago
When you do find a community that you enjoy, make sure your support it. I donate $10 a month to the small forum I frequent. Hosting ain't cheap.
anonzzzies 2y ago
Let’s please get back to forums for knowledge. I am/was in discords where very deep tech talks are shared and then it’s closed suddenly; all is gone. It’s depressing. It’s very terrible. People said here before ‘but you can index it like irc’; lovely, but we don’t now, do we? At least not in any structured way. Chat fine, do deep discussions that could benefit people months, years and decades from now somewhere else.
bogwog 2y ago
I've been on Discord channels where the mods are constantly getting pissed off because people keep asking the same questions, so much so that they ban people when it happens. I'm starting to think that this is part of the appeal. Having an emotional outburst and power tripping is fun for some people, and Discord provides ample opportunity to do it (+ in real-time) However, I will admit that I much prefer seeing that a community has a Discord channel over being exclusively located on Github/Gitlab issues.
- cjbgkagh 2y ago
  It’s a change in culture, people are asking questions a lot more instead of doing their own searches for information. Then they get mad at me when I point out that google provides great results for that exact question and they should have started there. It seems to be an attempt to outsource their thinking to other people.
iteygib 2y ago
I don't understand the issue here. The author of the post is mad because people have the choice to not publicly discuss things? Why do they owe the author their conversations? Is this AI/data scraping related and the author is mad that they can't get a portion of data out there?
- pavel_lishin 2y ago
  The author is mad - rightfully, in my opinion - that many projects use Discord as a defacto knowledge base/documentation/support hub, instead of setting up something that's much better suited for it. Of course people can privately discuss things, but if you were asking for help with your car, would you prefer that someone tell you which manual and page to look at to solve your problem, or to invite you to their car club that meets on weekends because Timberly probably knows how to solve that problem, and will probably be there next weekend, unless he's not?
pavel_lishin 2y ago
Can we change the title to "Stop using Discord for anything else than just chatting", which more accurately reflects the author's point?
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
cl3misch 2y ago
> Stop dumping knowledge into a black hole. Use forums. Use the open web. I feel like there are two discussions to be had: (1) Discord as a commercial platform vs. open web; (2) Discord as an IRC-style platform vs. forums. For me, only (2) is about the point of OP of "dumping knowledge into a black hole". It's a black hole because it's IRC, not because it's commercial.
gbrindisi 2y ago
Current gen LLMs are trained on reddit, stackoverflow, etc. Discord is sitting on little data gold mine ready to be sold to train next gen LLMs.
alimoeeny 2y ago
I think this is a big problem we are going to face soon. And I wish I had a solution for it. For example, recently I've been using Haxe + Heaps.io for a game I am working on. And unlike their docs on the web, which is out of date, their discord community is vibrant and VERY VERY helpful and friendly. Which is both heartwarming and sad. Sad because all of this knowledge and advice is hidden from the public web.
bachmeier 2y ago
The D language forums[1] are a good example of an alternative approach. I don't know what their server/storage costs are, but all that information from the last couple decades is easy to find with a search. The forum is fast, it doesn't require registration, and it's open source.[2] [1] https://forum.dlang.org/ https://forum.dlang.org/ [2] https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed
- hu3 2y ago
  Snappy and simple! I like it. I wonder how they deal with spam if anyone can post without being logged in.
  - bachmeier 2y ago
    A few pieces get through the filter, but they zap it as needed.
    - hu3 2y ago
      Thank you! It's good to know. Specially since I plan to create a forum for a small web framework I might share in the future.
azangru 2y ago
Has anyone remarked on the irony that this appeal to stop using discord, because it isn't searchable from the outside, is published on mastodon, which is also not searchable from the outside? I tried to google for things I had earlier seen on Mastodon, but was never able to find the relevant post again. Even modern-day Twitter, which is impossible to just browse these days, is more googlable.
- viraptor 2y ago
  > on mastodon, which is also not searchable from the outside? By default. You can turn on indexing for your account if you want to.
  - azangru 2y ago
    Does this mean indexing within the database that drives this Mastodon instance, or indexing by web crawlers such as googlebot?
  - Springtime 2y ago
    My understanding when I looked into this a couple years ago is the optional wider scope search is only possible to enable for one's own posts/account and while logged in[1], but still limited. At a server level the only search possible (using the regular Mastodon) is for user-added tags on posts rather than full text and this was an intentional decision[2]. I'm not familiar with indexability outside Mastodon instances, though can't really recall coming across them naturally in search. [1] https://docs.joinmastodon.org/admin/elasticsearch/ https://docs.joinmastodon.org/admin/elasticsearch/ [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/Mastodon/comments/yv1cl4/global_search/iwcro0w/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Mastodon/comments/yv1cl4/global_sea... Edit: updated with links from my prior research.
- eviks 2y ago
  This post is searchable, so no irony
j16sdiz 2y ago
The main complain here is lack of archive/history of what was on the internet. Discord is a big offender, but it is not alone. Consider: Google Plus, Usenet, Facebook.
erremerre 2y ago
Everyone saying use forums. Like yeah, forums are great if you want to search something and find. But... Have you actually make an account and ask about your problem? Because I have, in reddit, specialised forums, and other forums, make an account and try to post. You have stupid limitations with your new account, most of them, do not impede you asking your question, but it does at linking image, video, or link that would help explaining your problem. You have to create an account for that specific forum. If you are on Reddit you need to deal with automod, who deletes your post the second you press send. Often without a warning, a real reason, other because you asked for help, please check the wiki. (Yes, my problem is not there) Then there is the second part, the community. Most of the time, if you overcome that situations, your post get no answers. Sitting there until it reaches the end of page 1 on the forum, and then it is forgotten forever. Discord is easy, you go, connect with your account, have some rules displayed, accept it, send a chat message, you might get an answer or not, most of the times you do, although is not helpful. So yes, Discord is a sinkhole of information. But the experience is way better, even if it is a shitty mess.
edwcross 2y ago
I once wanted to join the NixOS Discord. But of course people just call it "Nix", so I googled "Nix discord" and followed the first link ("NIX Official Discord"). Some of the channels seemed a bit weird, especially one full of memes, somewhat 4chan-like. It took me a few minutes of reading (and a few gross right-wing memes) before I realized that the Discord I joined had absolutely nothing to do with NixOS. The complete opaqueness of the process makes it impossible to know anything at all about the community you are about to join.
- edwcross 2y ago
  By the way, when I actually joined the "real" NixOS Discord, and asked a few questions but got no answers, I realized it was better to be on my own. I don't know if there was much useful information inside it, but I can see how it can help kill an open-source sofware community: you either arrived early and had the time to digest the information, or you end up having a very bad experience trying to search for the information, trying to understand how the community works, which channels are useful and which are not... so you choose between being the chatty noob who annoys everyone, or the silent lurker who spends hours looking for information or waiting for a reply.
ziml77 2y ago
I love Discord... for chat. I refuse to join servers for projects that are using it in place of a forum. I want to be able to browse the existing information without needing to announce that I'm looking (people joining a server may be announced in a specific channel and you are added to the user list) and without implicitly signing up for notifications (you get the chat notifications unless you make sure to mute the server and suppress @mentions). I want to be able to search for information without trudging through loads of BS chatter and interleaved conversations. Traditional forum software is great for this. Please use it!
TheRoque 2y ago
178 points, 145 comments in 2 hours, how did this disappear from the front page ? Anyways, my biggest concern for discord is their unclear business model. They have a ton of free features (unlimited video and voice streaming, unlimited messages, accessible forever, including uploaded files). But they are free. How do they intend to pay for all this ? AFAIK, their paid stuff (Nitro, goodies, and other features I couldn't care less about) don't give them much. So my concern is that someday, as we'll see an update to the EULA stating that all the data stored forever is now sold to OpenAI or something like this.
- yodon 2y ago
  It disappeared because people disagree on whether to upvote or downvote comments. When the HN algorithm sees signals like comments receiving large numbers of upvotes and downvotes simultaneously, it interprets that signal as "this post is controversial." HN explicitly and intentionally downranks algorithmically identified controversial topics in order to reduce the odds commenters behave badly (which is disproportionately more likely in controversial topics). The HN algorithm is intentional about a primary goal of driving well behaved discussions, even knowing that means important controversial topics getting downranked.
  - hu3 2y ago
    That doesn't explain Apple related flamewars staying in frontpage for up to more than a day.
  - TheRoque 2y ago
    Interesting, thanks for the insights
- swayvil 2y ago
  >178 points, 145 comments in 2 hours, how did this disappear from the front page ? Seriously. What's the probability that invisible masters gave the censor order?
Iuz 2y ago
They won't stop using it. It's simple as that. Should'nt we be doing something to scrape discord servers, push information to a acessible place instead of this? Is that doable?
alimoeeny 2y ago
I recently learned about https://www.linen.dev/ https://www.linen.dev/ which is claiming to fix this issue by "Make Slack and Discord communities Google-searchable" An example use by the Haxe community: https://www.linen.dev/s/haxe/c/haxe https://www.linen.dev/s/haxe/c/haxe
Ekaros 2y ago
Why isn't lot of information just inside the project repositories for open source projects? It is text thus space it takes is trivial. At least if images are not needed. It would be versioned so stay in relatively sync with versions of code at time. FAQ and basic configuration things for commonly asked questions could be easily be stored in documents. Why is this not being done? Wouldn't it be trivial amount of work?
astromd 2y ago
Discord isn’t the right tool for a knowledge base, but it’s great for communities. I run several servers but I wouldn’t recommend it for developer projects.
donkulous 2y ago
Please tell me where I can download the server binary to run my "Discord Server." Oh wait, I can't? So it's not really "my" "server"? I would have a very different take on Discord if I could host a server myself and ensure that what I and my community have built won't be deleted at the whim of the corporation or threat from a lawyer. There's no offline backup where you can just spin everything back up on a different host. And to those that think an obscure "invite" link will protect you from Nintendo's lawyers, you're living in a different reality than I am. Discord, a registered company with a lot to lose, will throw you under the bus in a heartbeat to lawyers or law enforcement. The current generation is way too comfortable with technical stuff being abstracted away behind pretty cloud based interfaces and Electron apps.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
jhanschoo 2y ago
I don't understand the need to move away from discord. It seems to me that you can have your cake and eat it too if you 1. Have your community accept a TOS that allows you to reproduce and distribute content that they contribute to the server, and 2. have a bridge or logging bot to mirror all conversation on the server.
ChrisArchitect 2y ago
Related from a few weeks back: Stop Using Discord https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40371595 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40371595
lacoolj 2y ago
Discord has features similar to these forums with their threads, etc. Might be worthwhile to pose a feature request that allows these threads to be public and searchable (or at least crawl-able). The chat logs, etc clearly would be a problem but these isolated areas could be prime candidates for a bridge of this gap.
tmaly 2y ago
It use to be join this Facebook group, now everyone is pushing private discord servers. I think the old phpBB was way better. But if there was some type of way to output the static html, it would benefit everyone in the long term.
crtasm 2y ago
Does anyone here run a Discord to IRC bridge? I'd be interested to hear what you're using and your experiences.

Stop Using Discord

259 points by ColinWright 2y ago

gardenhedge 2y ago

Agreed. I also find it to be a terrible ux so I am bias

RyJones 2y ago
We (Hyperledger) got a ton of positive feedback from our blind users when we moved to Discord. Apparently the UX is extremely well laid out for screen readers.
- gostsamo 2y ago
  I'm blind and I don't like Discord. They implement accessibility well, but they, Slack, Teams and the like have decided that I need to know the sender and time stamp of every message in the chat. Read to me for every message. Jumping between screen sections is annoying because lists and headings are too nineties and the hell with them. Captchas? Should I mention that for some reason they disliked one of my logins and put an inaccessible captcha? Maybe your unhappy blind users are still locked out and can't tell you for their issues. Good that I was registered with a gmail account and circumvented them by adding a dot in the email field. Those are personal experiences and I don't know your previous solution, but for me Discord manages to be annoying in a very specific and unnecessary way.
  - RyJones 2y ago
    I’m sorry to hear that. I know two of the blind users personally and they are active in discord. I agree on captchas. Rocket.Chat was the previous platform. I will file a bug against discord on the timestamp issue. When I worked for Washington State University, one of our tests pre website update, was the developers had to use a desktop with a screen reader and the display turned off. I think we made great websites for blind users. That was in 2003, so things may have changed.
    - gostsamo 2y ago
      Many products would benefit if there is such a friday game in the product team: Achieve story goals without the monitor in fewest possible steps. PS: Regarding the timestamp issue, maybe I've formulated it incorrectly. Just, when you arrow on a message, it reads sender and timestamp. Some people write bursts of messages so you have a name and timestamp for every few words of the conversation and for many stupid emois.
    - rightbyte 2y ago
      Oh... ye that is a great idea. I'll need to try that some time if I ever do a user facing app. But I guess I'll just put a blanket over the monitor. New OSes and GUI frameworks behave strangely with no target resolution.

koolala 2y ago

They forgot the Discord original amazing much better RFC pattern that lets anyone make channels about anything and connect any server, computer, or person together: Internet Relay Communication

xtiansimon 2y ago

This 78 word Mastadon post is more an Ask HN—discuss. Sure. Using Discord as a help community for technical issues seems like a bad idea on the surface. But that’s not why I use Discord for technical issues. I’m prolly a year and a half behind on what’s what (my last big project ). For me StackExchange was the place to find answers to specific questions. Discord (and Reddit because discussion is permitted) was the place to go to find guidance when you don’t know where to start. Sooo, Id rather say use Discord, use what works—but write and share back your knowledge to the searchable communities mentioned by the author. The easy way to do that is write the question that you should have asked to those technical communities and answer your own question.

rkuykendall-com 2y ago

I run a forum (for many, many years) and a Discord (for a few years). The Discord works perfectly and always has. It's completely free and easy to use. The forum is expensive, complicated, and usually broken. or hacked. or full of spam. It's going to cost even more money to fix. Nobody wants to work on forums, much less me. Good riddance.

beretguy 2y ago

The rest of the quote: > Stop using Discord for anything else than just chatting. Stop dumping knowledge into a black hole. Use forums. Use the open web. Future nerds will thank you.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
Rinzler89 2y ago
Yeah I also hate technical discussions on (legal) hacking and tinkering happening in some obscure Telegram or Discord groups that you only find out if you know a guy who knows a guy who found the Discord link on some Reddit post. WTF?! I get the need for non-open communication channels if you want to stay away from Nintendo's lawyers or something but otherwise come on, just have the discussions in a more open place FFS. I also hate Reddit but at least it can be reached via search engines.
CM30 2y ago
This is the key part here. There's nothing wrong with using Discord to chat about random stuff. If you're talking to your friends about your latest night out or playing online games with a community, then Discord is fine. The issue is how some communities use it as a wiki, documentation and forum replacement for information that should be available on the public internet. This is a huge problem for speedrunning and modding communities, which seem to love using Discord and Google Sheets and other awkward 'must know the link to access' tools for information that should probably be in a wiki somewhere.
- sneak 2y ago
  This is untrue. Talking to friends in DM on non-e2ee platforms normalizes ubiquitous surveillance of friendship interactions and makes all of society worse. Don’t be reachable on non-e2ee DM systems. Delete your account.
  - jmprspret 2y ago
    This also has the added benefit of weeding out people who can't be bothered to put in just a little effort to keep in touch with you. Shows who your true friends are. It's actually sad. But an eye opener ;)

dimitrisnl 2y ago

Valid. I migrated a Rails codebase from Webpacker to Vite. All the help I needed was hidden in an obscure Discord server. Nothing on GH.

Insalgo 2y ago

Any recommendations for a free engineering community forum?

alanbernstein 2y ago
phpBB
- eviks 2y ago
  that's the one without per-post reactions and a weird markup language builtin?
  - alanbernstein 2y ago
    I think of it as the one that powered 10+ years of accessible forum posts.
    - eviks 2y ago
      And unfortunately hadn't evolved in those many years to be a good alternative for this year
mikl 2y ago
https://www.discourse.org https://www.discourse.org is great, best forum software I ever saw. You have probably used it already somewhere. They have a paid hosting offer, but you can also self-host it for free. And it’s open source.
- Groxx 2y ago
  > Managed forum hosting from $50/month Yeowch. $50/mo is a huge cost for anything that's not making money.
- 542458 2y ago
  I don’t get the love for discourse. I’m not one of those “every webpage should work without JS” purists, but Discourse seems intent to reinvent basic web features with JS and has some performance issues and as a consequence of both often (maybe when hitting something not in cache?) takes ages to load during which time you get nothing but a poorly-styled loading throbber, you can’t even read the content as it loads in. Even official instances are incredibly slow at times. One topic on https://meta.discourse.org/ https://meta.discourse.org/ just took over 30 seconds to load for me. Discourse just feels somewhat overengineered. Also anything that’s $50 a month doesn’t compete at the low end (which is where most OSS discussion hosting would exist) with Discord, which is free.

newsclues 2y ago

Discord and Reddit are terrible dark holes of knowledge

sampullman 2y ago
At least reddit is indexed by search engines, right? I find that for a significant portion of my searches, appending "reddit" cuts through SEO/blogspam results and I get an answer without having to wade through too much nonsense.
- fireflash38 2y ago
  For now. How long until they put it behind a sign in barrier ala Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, etc?
  - tokai 2y ago
    They do that now.
gl-prod 2y ago
You can find info in Reddit, Discord is a black hole
bmacho 2y ago
Reddit you can save with archive.org if you want.

deafpolygon 2y ago

Meanwhile... the mastodon page takes over 3 minutes to load. I don't know of any pre-2010 forums that are still functional and searchable.

BSDobelix 2y ago
>I don't know of any pre-2010 forums https://www.vogons.org/ https://www.vogons.org/ ->Since 2002 https://bbs.archlinux.org https://bbs.archlinux.org -> Since 2003 And so on, just to name two important ones.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
yvdriess 2y ago
somethingawful
dotnet00 2y ago
The OSDev forum (forum.osdev.org) has been around for a while
Digit-Al 2y ago
That's odd, it loads in a fraction of a second for me; and I'm on a mobile running android Firefox. Plus I'm on hotel WiFi at the moment.
GrantMoyer 2y ago
The game specific DarkMatters forums has been around for at least 10 years. I personally used it to resolve an issue I was having, when I found a thread[1] by web search. Some nice people helped the OP troubleshoot over almost 2 years until with their help the OP eventually found the issue and explained the fix. Then the thread went on for a couple more years helping people with similar issues for whom the orginal fix didn't work, until eventually another fix was posted. That other fix was copied over from another forum. [1]: https://darkmatters.org/forums/index.php?/topic/23158-help-sacred-2-gold-steam-dont-start-startup-error/ https://darkmatters.org/forums/index.php?/topic/23158-help-s...

Svip 2y ago

Where is the Wordpress.com (i.e. commercial hosting) for forums? I maintain a SMF forum that's lasted since 2000, but I get why most people aren't jumping into creating a new forum, because it's rather tedious compared to Discord. Hell, better ask instead; where is the Discord but for forums (real ones, not Discord)?

CharlieDigital 2y ago
Isn't that just Reddit?
- beeboobaa3 2y ago
  No, on reddit you are subjected to the reddit administrators their policies. You have no real control. The user interface is also awful if you're interested in content older than a day.
  - boxed 2y ago
    And the voting system builds toxicity for smaller user numbers than should otherwise be needed.
  - CharlieDigital 2y ago
    It's not that different from Discord; unless you run the platform, there's always the risk of deplatforming.
- Svip 2y ago
  Mostly, yes. Particularly in the terms of "Discord-difying forums". But you cannot have multiple subforums for your community on Reddit (unless you do something weird with subsubreddits, but those won't be clearly visible). Discord allows you to have several channels. Additionally, I'd like an alternative that isn't threaded like Reddit and HN. Threaded communities have their place, but classic chronological topics also do.
hprotagonist 2y ago
discourse has a few commercial hosting platforms. communiteq is one i’ve used.

segmondy 2y ago

folks have used such communication channels for a long time. there were folks using bbs chat instead of bbs forums, folks using talk instead of mail, there were folks using irc instead of web forums. there's always room for both.

poulpy123 2y ago

I totally agree, and also stop using FB groups it's even worse. But the issue is no replacement is proposed by the author. Discord has the advantage of: - being free - being maintained by someone else - being used by a lot of people, so no need to create a new account for many users - being very useful as a chat and growing organically as support from there I don't see many competitors available. For example discourse is paid 50€ per month for 100 users maximum, which small project can pay that ? Edit: I rarely see FB mentioned on these debates but it's probably by far the biggest place used for forum. I'm a member of several 10k+ groups. Even discords don't come close of it. The official bambulab group is 60k people, the hiking group of my area (1 million inhabitants max) is 30k people. The numbers are insane, as is the information invisible and lost

hprotagonist 2y ago
libera.chat is free. the network doesn’t compel registration, even! (though some channels do)
- hu3 2y ago
  unfortunately, irc is not a replacement for discord.
  - hprotagonist 2y ago
    discord is just IRC in a trenchcoat. what’s to replace?
    - scientist4397 2y ago
      The missing feature of IRC is to be able to get all the messages even when you’re offline. V3 was as missed opportunity for that
      - cykros 2y ago
        You mean like you get if you run a BNC, or just run your irssi or weechat inside a screen session, or headless X session that you reattach remotely? I've never understood people who log out of IRC.

Phiwise_ 2y ago

Side note: I really dislike how shortsighted many orgs are with the extreme level of "go to your customer" that led to using the persistent IRC client I used to banter during game nights with my friends a decade ago as an all-encompassing support and outreach forum. Forget forum admins. Forget the future. Forget the "open web". It's dysfunctional right now for me, the current target market of whatever product you're selling or program you're running. I'm alienated from whatever your thing or community is by how badly Discord works for over twenty people, so I don't engage with you, and I must imagine many others feel the same way. Surely someone's aware of this in your org? Was the single-digit man-hours saved by not spinning up a FOSS forum or starting a subreddit really worth this? Who made that calculation? /rant

lulzury 2y ago

I don't like Discord as much as the next person, but people use Discord because it's convenient. Why do people prefer Discord to IRC when the latter is free, open source, and indexable?

morjom 2y ago
You already answered yourself. Convenience and because your friends are already there or because that one thing hosts its forum there.
dotnet00 2y ago
Flashy UI, channel grouping, custom emoji, server side persistent logs and now the network effect of most likely not having to ask someone to install and learn the ins and outs of another program. Matrix comes the closest to fitting all the same requirements, but I've only ever managed to get one friend to regularly use it, and even then we only use it between ourselves and not to participate in federated matrix servers.
benoliver999 2y ago
If you are offline on IRC you don't get messages. I use a bouncer etc but that's more than the average person should have to worry about. There is https://www.irccloud.com/ https://www.irccloud.com/ but I fear it's too little too late Having to create an account on every IRC server is also not great. I use and love IRC, but I get why centralised services take off. It's just a shame it's a sucky one like discord where everything just goes into a black hole.
- miah_ 2y ago
  Not getting messages when I'm offline is a feature.
  - gravescale 2y ago
    You also don't get messages from when you were offline which means if your group spans multiple timezones and you can only be online for a short time, you can completely miss someone. Yes, sure, bouncers, etc, but they were always a gigantic fiddly hassle compared to "log in, here's what you missed".

NemoNobody 2y ago

Ok... does Mastodon always take that long too load? That's not really viable considering the page I ended up on had essentially only textual content - like an old website from way back. Then I read a Geocities suggestion - something from my elementary days Discord is actually pretty cool - a walled garden but no different than the rest of the internet. Google won't send anyone to forums or blogs/personal sites anyways, so this isn't really advice at all

chrisjj 2y ago
> Google won't send anyone to forums or blogs/personal sites anyways Oh? It does here.
jlpom 2y ago
No, I think it's the instance
r4indeer 2y ago
Mastodon is decentralized / federated, so the page load time depends on the instance you're visiting.
Andrex 2y ago
Mastodon will continue to suck as long as their default client refuses to support noscript access. > Google won't send anyone to forums or blogs/personal sites anyways, so this isn't really advice at all They had that capability in the past, and may again in the future, to say nothing of possible competitors focusing on forum or blog search specifically. Discord is a black box and that data will be lost forever. That's different from publishing on the public web.

NeutralForest 2y ago

I feel like we have this discussion every month, one way or another. People use Discord because it's useful and they like the experience. Discourse is nice for purely written communication but if you want to setup a call, direct message and, more importantly, write bots (presentation, topic organization, news, modding, now even AI Q&A); people will fall back to Discord. Pointing at Discourse when it doesn't have the same value proposition and blaming users is just not useful at all.

chrisjj 2y ago
> People use Discord because it's useful and they like the experience. Let's fix that. Discord-using people use Discord because it's useful to them and they like the experience.
- ramon156 2y ago
  If I'm honest, those say the exact same thing to me, and doesn't de-power the argument
- NeutralForest 2y ago
  Ok? That's just being pedantic. The point I'm trying to make, is that we need to find why people use Discord and offer something better for our (devs+technical users) use case; that'll also need to go the existing network effect.
  - chrisjj 2y ago
    The point I'd make is you'd more need to find out why people who don't use Discourse (instead of fora) don't. The reason surely has little to do with the non-forum-like functions that appeal to those who do like it. Having said which, finding out is obstructed by the fact that very few organisers offer users both.
kwanbix 2y ago
I have been using computers for 40 years and I cannot see a single feature of discord that I cannot have on a forum or even reddit. In fact, the UX of Discord is abismal.

Kiro 2y ago

Stop Using Mastodon.

thefz 2y ago
Right. Page took 10 seconds to load.
azangru 2y ago
What would you rather see people use instead?
- gaws 2y ago
  X, the everything app!

outime 2y ago

It will be as useful as other HN campaigns: stop using WhatsApp and use Signal, stop using Chrome and use Firefox, stop using Twitter and use this OSS alternative with 0.1% of the users, stop using Reddit, stop using Kubernetes, etc.

skeeter2020 2y ago
What's your alternative action? I tend to agree with you, but personally I've tried to stop pointing out problems without providing solutions; failing at something is better than preemptive surrender.
- adamtaylor_13 2y ago
  Surrender implies there’s something inherently wrong with these alternatives. Something a lot of people just don’t agree with. I agree with you that it’s helpful to be proactive, but the incumbents are there for a reason: at one point a large consensus agreed they were the best for doing X, whatever X might’ve been in that situation. Maybe that’s changed. But a lot of folks don’t think so. Twitter is useful precisely due to its network effect. That’s why I’ll never move to mastodon. Doesn’t make sense for the reason that I use the tool.
- outime 2y ago
  I'm not suggesting surrender, but I want to point out that a significant portion of the HN crowd seems to have a very specific perspective that doesn't align with reality. The average Discord user (hence, the largest percentage of the userbase) prioritize convenience, whether they're regular users or server creators. They don't care about being indexed by Google - they just want to connect quickly, chat, play games together, and so on. This convenience-driven mindset extends to technical communities on Discord. Creating a server there is as simple as clicking a couple of buttons, whereas setting up a new forum requires significant technical effort and ongoing maintenance, besides $$$. These practical aspects are often overlooked in discussions, hence the failure of all these campaigns lead by a bit too technical people i.e. those who are willing to spend time researching alternatives and enduring their particular pains, and don't care about networking effects. To challenge Discord effectively, create something equally convenient yet superior (like being indexable by Google). Wait for Discord's deep enshittification and seize the opportunity then. If it's not as convenient, don't expect users to switch. The average user won't invest time in learning new platforms when they can get everything faster and for free elsewhere.

Arch-TK 2y ago

Yes, please stop using discord. But also maybe stop using discourse. Nothing is more off-putting about an open source project than seeing that discord is the main support forum. I am in the fortunate position of being able to just solve my own problems by myself most of the time, but sometimes it genuinely is helpful to talk to someone about it. If you're an open source project, please use IRC, or matrix if you absolutely must. If you need a forum, well, discourse is not the worst option, but honestly no idea why forums need a tonne of javascript, a re-implementation of basic browser functionality like scrolling, and to override your keybindings. A mailing list is the ideal option. If you really must have something web based, I don't have any recommendations other than "please don't use discord, at least not unless you feel actually satisfied with its search functionality". You can self host a forum on a cheap VM and require some kind of user signup to try to mitigate the inevitable spam.

nicoburns 2y ago
Zulip is a good middle ground here. Open source, browsable without logging in (if configured to be), and much better UX than IRC (or god forbid Matrix which has to be about the worst chat software I've used).
kunley 2y ago
Valid points. By the way, maybe this is naive, but what's wrong with Github Discussions?

Springtime 2y ago

Ultimately someone has to pay for things. Many communities have apparently decided they don't want to use even modern forum software and become a webmaster, along with avoiding the costs and time associated, or use someone else's existing forum (which may or may not suit their needs). The quite liberal free file attachment limits (25MB each), ease of communication and ironically the fact Discord is closed off in nature means it's quite attractive for people to more easily share things that would require a separate file host normally (it's an almost universal experience that forums usually have meager attachment caps). I'd be quite interested in an article that understands Discord's benefits and use cases and then approaches a critique and alternative solutions to address it in a more open web friendly way.

iforgotpassword 2y ago
I tried discord only once, but to me it was a disorganized chaotic experience. People seem to really think that well organized faq sections on traditional websites and properly searchable and indexable forum threads should be replaced by "just search through two years of chat backlog on discord". Or something like that.
- lamontcg 2y ago
  I'm actually a moderator on a discord. We have a lot of FAQ pages (generally wiki pages on various GitHub repos) that a discord bot will send you to in response to various different commands. Occasionally I use search to find a chat that I personally had with someone X months ago, and it usually works if I can find the right search terms. I don't think it is any worse than IRC with chatlogs (arguably might be better depending on how well indexed the chatlogs are). And the fundamental problem is that social chats are noisy, and you should never be using them for knowledge retention. And web forums aren't a replacement for social chat. And 99% of the questions and answers in there are from newbies and are covered in FAQs and are just noise anyway. You can't index your way out of a horrible noise problem. They also do serve a purpose because as one of the subject-matter experts (who is a single-point-of-failure/final-escalation level), I don't have to get involved in most of the discussion. There's usually dozens of people on the server who can answer the easy questions, and I can monitor for people hitting real bugs that actually need fixing.

barkerja 2y ago

I use Discord quite a bit in the Elixir community and find it quite useful. Messages are persisted. There's a wonderful forum feature now built into the platform; and it's all searchable with a pretty robust filtering mechanism. And with an active server, there's typically always someone around to help you chat through a problem almost immediately. I understand the sentiment, but it does seem misinformed. Slack, on the other hand. Absolutely! Stay away for anything related to knowledge-base.

Nevolihs 2y ago
A single example of it being done well doesn't have any bearing on all the issues stemming from the use of Discord as knowledge bases, wikis and documentation. Out of curiosity, is any of that useful information on the Elixir Discord available to be searched for with Google or any other search engine?
- barkerja 2y ago
  > Out of curiosity, is any of that useful information on the Elixir Discord available to be searched for with Google or any other search engine? It is not, and that is the one major knock against Discord. But see my response above about that.
moooo99 2y ago
I don’t think the sentiment is misinformed. I understand your position and I’ve had pleasant experiences on discord in the past with people being very willing to help. However, the help I received for my problem is basically impossible to discovered for anybody else (in fact, I have a hard time finding this thread myself). Discord is really great for realtime interactions, wether that be chatting or talking. But it absolutely sucks at retrieving information generated in the past. It’s not search engine indexable and the discord search itself usually isn’t of any help either. On conventional forums on the other hand, I have learned so much from reading threads from the past. Recently I’ve been diving a bit deeper into construction and I’ve found a forum in my native language. There are so many treasures there: experts from the field sharing experiences and advising on issues, people linking relevant threads, people asking questions and whole threads evolving from that. Sure, there is quite a bit of „toxic“ forum interaction as well, but there are so many gems that would absolutely be undiscoverable if the same interactions would happen on discord

morjom 2y ago

Use a matrix bridge to discord instead. Jokes aside the discord ux is good enough for the average user, it already has chokehold on its users and there is no equivalent. I would also prefer things to be easily searchable, archivable etc but consumers consume.

giancarlostoro 2y ago
> there is no equivalent. Guilded has entered the chat
lou1306 2y ago
Point is, if you are using it as a tool to reach out to your community it's mostly okay, but if you are doing support or documentation up there you should really really think twice. In this instance: Amiga 600 Discord where we post pics of our cool Amigas good, Amiga maintenance and schematics hidden in God knows which channel on God knows which Amiga Discord server bad. Best of both worlds: if someone asks question on a Discord and you know the answer, write a blog post (or whatever, as long as it is on the open Web) and link it back! You are guaranteed to have at least 1 readerr which is wildly above the average blog post lol
michaelt 2y ago
> it already has chokehold on its users and there is no equivalent. There are plenty of equivalents - Slack, Microsoft Teams etc offer the same IRC + persistent messages + searchable + persistent user accounts & admin + multi-device + image sharing + file sharing + spam protection product. They're just even worse, by most of the metrics that make people hate discord.
- ourmandave 2y ago
  I'll never use MS Teams for personal stuff because it's way to work adjacent. The fear of a mis-click or wrong login is to stressful to even start.
- morjom 2y ago
  If they're worse are they equivalent?

consp 2y ago

Discord has succesfully claimed the word server out of it's meaning and giving people the idea it is "their server". It's not your server, it's not even a server at all.

doommius 2y ago
tbh on the backend they're called guilds: https://discord.com/developers/docs/resources/guild https://discord.com/developers/docs/resources/guild

sneak 2y ago

Stop using Discord for “just chatting”, too. It’s not end to end encrypted and Discord and whoever acquires them can read all of your chat logs, including DMs, for AI training or whatever else. Friends don’t talk to friends on surveillance platforms.

stnmtn 2y ago
Are forums not this way as well?
- sneak 2y ago
  They are, but most people don’t expect privacy in forum DMs, and forum site DMs aren’t usually used that much. Lots of people mistakenly assume their DMs on Discord (and their iMessages) will be private.

anymouse123456 2y ago

This. "Join my Discord" is a 100% hard pass for me. Every time I've made an exception, the entire experience is a net-negative. Half the time, I can't even get authenticated and then once I'm in, everything is awful. The notifications, the constant chatter, the dozens of topics, the useless search, it shocks me that anyone over the age of 14 uses it at all. Add to all the broken basics, the fact that your data is now locked away in a vault that will absolutely disappear at some point in the not-too-distant future, and it just makes no sense at all.

robertlagrant 2y ago
I do find it very strange. It assumes I've been "invited" when I just clicked on a link to join from a website. I can't tell why I am or aren't logged in when I join. It's full of animations. Maybe it's the Gen Z take on IRC, but it seems a bit much. The client is very smooth in performance, though, which is nice.
ziddoap 2y ago
>it shocks me that anyone over the age of 14 uses it at all. Really? I'm in my mid 30s and am in a couple servers with a bunch of 30-50 year olds. I don't know of any better platform to organize and play DnD with voice chat and screen sharing. It's also great for when I play larger online games with a group (e.g. World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy) as we have a guild server to organize absences, socialize while not raiding, etc. If you have a suggestion for a better way to voice chat, screen share, drop in and out of conversations, etc. I'm all ears. For what its worth, all of your complaints (except for search, which really does suck) are easily addressed.
viraptor 2y ago
I don't get this: > The notifications, You can turn them off > the constant chatter, the dozens of topics Topics are there to limit the messages to just what you're interested in, cutting down the chatter. If you expect it to be anything different than discord, you'll be disappointed, but there are communities where discord/slack/mattermost model works fine.
iteygib 2y ago

swayvil 2y ago

I dislike it. Clumsy and noisy. Just bad.

jimbobthrowawy 2y ago

Still moderately surprised there isn't an option built into discord to make certain channels public for reading/indexing. I have seen one site that seems to enable it by adding their bot to your "server", but it's only on a handful of programming-focused ones.

dools 2y ago

I remember a similar sentiment being expressed in IRC chats back in the day, ie. that it was way better to use mailing lists because they publicly recorded all the problems and solutions.

cl3misch 2y ago

I'm not the first to say this, but Discord is essentially IRC. It's great for ephemeral chatting and arguably the best platform for that currently. The content on it is not indexed and not discoverable with web search engines. I have been wondering: is it even possible for a platform to fulfill both needs? For searchable, "forum style" discussions, we already have a large accessible platform: Reddit! I genuinely ask myself: why is "Join our Discord" much more popular than "Join our Reddit"? I personally prefer "forum style" discussion over "IRC style" discussions, but the polularity of Discord even in technical circles proves to me that a lot of people like the IRC style of communication.

ThrowawayTestr 2y ago
You can have both. The forum I use also have a irc-like chat section.
- cl3misch 2y ago
  Do you care to share what forum that is? And is its irc-like chat section searchable? Otherwise it is just forum and chat available under the same domain. But information in the IRC section is still ephemeral.
  - ThrowawayTestr 2y ago
    rdrama .net. We have a cute orange cat as our mascot.
    - jmprspret 2y ago
      This is quite an oddity in the internet space I feel (not in a bad way - but not necessarily a good way either - i just find it odd). Reading through the rules it's such an interesting mix of.. ideals?
- foreverobama 2y ago
  [dead]

davikr 2y ago

Let's go back to Usenet.

ThrowawayTestr 2y ago

When you do find a community that you enjoy, make sure your support it. I donate $10 a month to the small forum I frequent. Hosting ain't cheap.

anonzzzies 2y ago

Let’s please get back to forums for knowledge. I am/was in discords where very deep tech talks are shared and then it’s closed suddenly; all is gone. It’s depressing. It’s very terrible. People said here before ‘but you can index it like irc’; lovely, but we don’t now, do we? At least not in any structured way. Chat fine, do deep discussions that could benefit people months, years and decades from now somewhere else.

bogwog 2y ago

I've been on Discord channels where the mods are constantly getting pissed off because people keep asking the same questions, so much so that they ban people when it happens. I'm starting to think that this is part of the appeal. Having an emotional outburst and power tripping is fun for some people, and Discord provides ample opportunity to do it (+ in real-time) However, I will admit that I much prefer seeing that a community has a Discord channel over being exclusively located on Github/Gitlab issues.

cjbgkagh 2y ago
It’s a change in culture, people are asking questions a lot more instead of doing their own searches for information. Then they get mad at me when I point out that google provides great results for that exact question and they should have started there. It seems to be an attempt to outsource their thinking to other people.

iteygib 2y ago

I don't understand the issue here. The author of the post is mad because people have the choice to not publicly discuss things? Why do they owe the author their conversations? Is this AI/data scraping related and the author is mad that they can't get a portion of data out there?

pavel_lishin 2y ago
The author is mad - rightfully, in my opinion - that many projects use Discord as a defacto knowledge base/documentation/support hub, instead of setting up something that's much better suited for it. Of course people can privately discuss things, but if you were asking for help with your car, would you prefer that someone tell you which manual and page to look at to solve your problem, or to invite you to their car club that meets on weekends because Timberly probably knows how to solve that problem, and will probably be there next weekend, unless he's not?

pavel_lishin 2y ago

Can we change the title to "Stop using Discord for anything else than just chatting", which more accurately reflects the author's point?

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

cl3misch 2y ago

> Stop dumping knowledge into a black hole. Use forums. Use the open web. I feel like there are two discussions to be had: (1) Discord as a commercial platform vs. open web; (2) Discord as an IRC-style platform vs. forums. For me, only (2) is about the point of OP of "dumping knowledge into a black hole". It's a black hole because it's IRC, not because it's commercial.

gbrindisi 2y ago

Current gen LLMs are trained on reddit, stackoverflow, etc. Discord is sitting on little data gold mine ready to be sold to train next gen LLMs.

alimoeeny 2y ago

I think this is a big problem we are going to face soon. And I wish I had a solution for it. For example, recently I've been using Haxe + Heaps.io for a game I am working on. And unlike their docs on the web, which is out of date, their discord community is vibrant and VERY VERY helpful and friendly. Which is both heartwarming and sad. Sad because all of this knowledge and advice is hidden from the public web.

bachmeier 2y ago

The D language forums[1] are a good example of an alternative approach. I don't know what their server/storage costs are, but all that information from the last couple decades is easy to find with a search. The forum is fast, it doesn't require registration, and it's open source.[2] [1] https://forum.dlang.org/ https://forum.dlang.org/ [2] https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed

hu3 2y ago
Snappy and simple! I like it. I wonder how they deal with spam if anyone can post without being logged in.
- bachmeier 2y ago
  A few pieces get through the filter, but they zap it as needed.
  - hu3 2y ago
    Thank you! It's good to know. Specially since I plan to create a forum for a small web framework I might share in the future.

azangru 2y ago

Has anyone remarked on the irony that this appeal to stop using discord, because it isn't searchable from the outside, is published on mastodon, which is also not searchable from the outside? I tried to google for things I had earlier seen on Mastodon, but was never able to find the relevant post again. Even modern-day Twitter, which is impossible to just browse these days, is more googlable.

viraptor 2y ago
> on mastodon, which is also not searchable from the outside? By default. You can turn on indexing for your account if you want to.
- azangru 2y ago
  Does this mean indexing within the database that drives this Mastodon instance, or indexing by web crawlers such as googlebot?
- Springtime 2y ago
  My understanding when I looked into this a couple years ago is the optional wider scope search is only possible to enable for one's own posts/account and while logged in[1], but still limited. At a server level the only search possible (using the regular Mastodon) is for user-added tags on posts rather than full text and this was an intentional decision[2]. I'm not familiar with indexability outside Mastodon instances, though can't really recall coming across them naturally in search. [1] https://docs.joinmastodon.org/admin/elasticsearch/ https://docs.joinmastodon.org/admin/elasticsearch/ [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/Mastodon/comments/yv1cl4/global_search/iwcro0w/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Mastodon/comments/yv1cl4/global_sea... Edit: updated with links from my prior research.
eviks 2y ago
This post is searchable, so no irony

j16sdiz 2y ago

The main complain here is lack of archive/history of what was on the internet. Discord is a big offender, but it is not alone. Consider: Google Plus, Usenet, Facebook.

erremerre 2y ago

Everyone saying use forums. Like yeah, forums are great if you want to search something and find. But... Have you actually make an account and ask about your problem? Because I have, in reddit, specialised forums, and other forums, make an account and try to post. You have stupid limitations with your new account, most of them, do not impede you asking your question, but it does at linking image, video, or link that would help explaining your problem. You have to create an account for that specific forum. If you are on Reddit you need to deal with automod, who deletes your post the second you press send. Often without a warning, a real reason, other because you asked for help, please check the wiki. (Yes, my problem is not there) Then there is the second part, the community. Most of the time, if you overcome that situations, your post get no answers. Sitting there until it reaches the end of page 1 on the forum, and then it is forgotten forever. Discord is easy, you go, connect with your account, have some rules displayed, accept it, send a chat message, you might get an answer or not, most of the times you do, although is not helpful. So yes, Discord is a sinkhole of information. But the experience is way better, even if it is a shitty mess.

edwcross 2y ago

I once wanted to join the NixOS Discord. But of course people just call it "Nix", so I googled "Nix discord" and followed the first link ("NIX Official Discord"). Some of the channels seemed a bit weird, especially one full of memes, somewhat 4chan-like. It took me a few minutes of reading (and a few gross right-wing memes) before I realized that the Discord I joined had absolutely nothing to do with NixOS. The complete opaqueness of the process makes it impossible to know anything at all about the community you are about to join.

edwcross 2y ago
By the way, when I actually joined the "real" NixOS Discord, and asked a few questions but got no answers, I realized it was better to be on my own. I don't know if there was much useful information inside it, but I can see how it can help kill an open-source sofware community: you either arrived early and had the time to digest the information, or you end up having a very bad experience trying to search for the information, trying to understand how the community works, which channels are useful and which are not... so you choose between being the chatty noob who annoys everyone, or the silent lurker who spends hours looking for information or waiting for a reply.

ziml77 2y ago

I love Discord... for chat. I refuse to join servers for projects that are using it in place of a forum. I want to be able to browse the existing information without needing to announce that I'm looking (people joining a server may be announced in a specific channel and you are added to the user list) and without implicitly signing up for notifications (you get the chat notifications unless you make sure to mute the server and suppress @mentions). I want to be able to search for information without trudging through loads of BS chatter and interleaved conversations. Traditional forum software is great for this. Please use it!

TheRoque 2y ago

178 points, 145 comments in 2 hours, how did this disappear from the front page ? Anyways, my biggest concern for discord is their unclear business model. They have a ton of free features (unlimited video and voice streaming, unlimited messages, accessible forever, including uploaded files). But they are free. How do they intend to pay for all this ? AFAIK, their paid stuff (Nitro, goodies, and other features I couldn't care less about) don't give them much. So my concern is that someday, as we'll see an update to the EULA stating that all the data stored forever is now sold to OpenAI or something like this.

yodon 2y ago
It disappeared because people disagree on whether to upvote or downvote comments. When the HN algorithm sees signals like comments receiving large numbers of upvotes and downvotes simultaneously, it interprets that signal as "this post is controversial." HN explicitly and intentionally downranks algorithmically identified controversial topics in order to reduce the odds commenters behave badly (which is disproportionately more likely in controversial topics). The HN algorithm is intentional about a primary goal of driving well behaved discussions, even knowing that means important controversial topics getting downranked.
- hu3 2y ago
  That doesn't explain Apple related flamewars staying in frontpage for up to more than a day.
- TheRoque 2y ago
  Interesting, thanks for the insights
swayvil 2y ago
>178 points, 145 comments in 2 hours, how did this disappear from the front page ? Seriously. What's the probability that invisible masters gave the censor order?

Iuz 2y ago

They won't stop using it. It's simple as that. Should'nt we be doing something to scrape discord servers, push information to a acessible place instead of this? Is that doable?

alimoeeny 2y ago

I recently learned about https://www.linen.dev/ https://www.linen.dev/ which is claiming to fix this issue by "Make Slack and Discord communities Google-searchable" An example use by the Haxe community: https://www.linen.dev/s/haxe/c/haxe https://www.linen.dev/s/haxe/c/haxe

Ekaros 2y ago

Why isn't lot of information just inside the project repositories for open source projects? It is text thus space it takes is trivial. At least if images are not needed. It would be versioned so stay in relatively sync with versions of code at time. FAQ and basic configuration things for commonly asked questions could be easily be stored in documents. Why is this not being done? Wouldn't it be trivial amount of work?

astromd 2y ago

Discord isn’t the right tool for a knowledge base, but it’s great for communities. I run several servers but I wouldn’t recommend it for developer projects.

donkulous 2y ago

Please tell me where I can download the server binary to run my "Discord Server." Oh wait, I can't? So it's not really "my" "server"? I would have a very different take on Discord if I could host a server myself and ensure that what I and my community have built won't be deleted at the whim of the corporation or threat from a lawyer. There's no offline backup where you can just spin everything back up on a different host. And to those that think an obscure "invite" link will protect you from Nintendo's lawyers, you're living in a different reality than I am. Discord, a registered company with a lot to lose, will throw you under the bus in a heartbeat to lawyers or law enforcement. The current generation is way too comfortable with technical stuff being abstracted away behind pretty cloud based interfaces and Electron apps.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

jhanschoo 2y ago

I don't understand the need to move away from discord. It seems to me that you can have your cake and eat it too if you 1. Have your community accept a TOS that allows you to reproduce and distribute content that they contribute to the server, and 2. have a bridge or logging bot to mirror all conversation on the server.

ChrisArchitect 2y ago

Related from a few weeks back: Stop Using Discord https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40371595 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40371595

lacoolj 2y ago

Discord has features similar to these forums with their threads, etc. Might be worthwhile to pose a feature request that allows these threads to be public and searchable (or at least crawl-able). The chat logs, etc clearly would be a problem but these isolated areas could be prime candidates for a bridge of this gap.

tmaly 2y ago

It use to be join this Facebook group, now everyone is pushing private discord servers. I think the old phpBB was way better. But if there was some type of way to output the static html, it would benefit everyone in the long term.

crtasm 2y ago

Does anyone here run a Discord to IRC bridge? I'd be interested to hear what you're using and your experiences.