Can we reverse this trend? I've recently started to see an FAQ, on GitHub, hide the answer with a deeplink into Discord channels where you needed to find the guild to join first. I've never gotten disinterested in a project that fast. This needs to stop.
Especially Discord "forums", the black hole of the internet. Neither real-time so I can get my question answered when I'm there, nor open enough to find old questions through Google, nor popular enough that people browse through them to answer.
People go "oh, Discord has forums, we don't need a web forum", and the world is now a little bit worse.
Maybe there's value in (semi-)automated discord exfiltration. Like A browser plugin that grabs all the data from any discord pages I look at and mirrors it somewhere on the open web.
There probably is, but instead of making something that breaks Discord's TOS while simultaneously increasing their popularity (because of this useful tool), I'd rather let projects realize that a web forum is better.
Discord's terms of service can suck my ass. There's no legal or moral obligation there. And I would hope they taking the valuable information out of Duscord would drain the moat and make it less popular, hard to predict though.
I agree but which alternative exists which is free which also provides voice chat option? On the other hand, many Discord servers never even use the voice chat option. I think Discord is more of an alternative to IRC than to forums. Maybe it does both good enough?
Matrix supports voice and video integration out of the box, as does Zulip.
I think voice chat is very popular with gaming discord users, not so much with software projects anyway.
In any case, it is so simple to just send a link to an open jitsi instance on any platform that it isn't that big of a deal if you do that once every full moon.
Unable to decrypt: The sender's device has not sent us the keys for this message.
It's very unfortunate that the entire Matrix ecosystem seems to be funded by people who want to build private branded messaging systems for enterprise and government and other users aren't the target audience anymore.
The Matrix Foundation tries to fund itself philanthropically by selling sponsorship and memberships at matrix.org/support, but it doesn’t remotely cover the full dev costs.
So there is absolutely no alternative but a) ensure the wider independent FOSS ecosystem can build general purpose apps (which they can and do - eg Cinny and FluffyChat), and b) have Element go off and build apps which people actually pay for (empirically that means govtech & enterprise).
The hope is that if/when Element is profitable doing the latter, then Element can get back to investing in the broader Matrix ecosystem again. (Separately, it’s fascinating to see how little much of the Matrix ecosystem seems to appreciate the $$M that Element has put in over the years. Funny old world.)
edit: oh, and the unable to decrypt errors should be pretty much gone now; we just spent the last 6 months on crypto doing nothing but killing them.
Uh... I can replicate them right now as I speak, I use fluffy chat on my one phone, fluffy on another android, schildichat and cinny on Linux.
I am logged out of my schildichat every few days, cinny breaks a bit, and sometimes messages just show "could not decrypt message".
They "eventually" show on all sessions but I am facing them now.
My old sessions are broken, only new messages are visible across new sessions.
I use matrix as my daily driver so i it doesn't bother me much but I can say an average user might not.
Also,
Fluffychat android doesn't work with audio calls. Notifications are broken, I get "some" notifications, some days, sometimes after a few weeks, sometimes none.
It definitely doesn't do forums well enough, and I've never been on a forum and thought "I wish there were a voice chat option here". Discord is OK for real-time chat (though I'd still like something more open), but asynchronous forum chats should be left to web forum software.
My rule is if I need to join the Discord and I can’t figure it out with the given docs, I don’t use that project. It’s helped me save a lot of headaches with dealing with their “community” who are more likely to spam NSFW than actually commit to a discussion of the project.
I think discord serves a functional quite like email mailing lists, but with a twist. Email mailing lists, by their nature, gatekeep and filter out younger or less technical people, while discord by its nature is doing the same but inverted. It filters the sort of people that would be far more comfortable with mailing lists.
That sounds awful. You want a venue where younger and less technical people can get help and guidance from the more experienced people, not an echo chamber full of the least experienced users.
Well, I think discord appeals more to the young or less technical, in other words young and technical people, like the developers of many new projects, seem to like it. It's a model of software collaboration for their generation which their parents neither get nor appreciate, and I think that is part of the appeal to them.
I dislike Discord for the same reason I disliked some IRC networks. There's a lot young people on a powertrip and generally very clique-y behavior. But at least IRC wasn't also run by a huge uncaring tech company known to completely ignore the GDPR (or interpret it in asinine ways) that will eventually run out of VC money and disappear.
It's okay-ish for when you need to ask questions. But we're trending towards gating binaries and general documentation there too.
Discord must be aware that their secret ingredient is that people are "admins" over others, and that people actually quite like being in power and having a different colored name. And all that without the technical barrier of having to setup forums or Teamspeak (not that such gatekeeping kept terrible people from being admins)
This is it exactly. Discord is, inherently, where quick gratification prospers. Immediate memetic responses followed by swapping to the next server for the next high.
Reddit attracts a lot of trolls. Managing the reddit takes work (moderation, keeping up with stupid reddit drama).
With a project discord, you're filtering out people immediately -- typically only people who want to be there wind up there. It makes things easier for a lot of people this way.
> With a project discord, you're filtering out people immediately -- typically only people who want to be there wind up there. It makes things easier for a lot of people this way.
Well. Yes. You filter out a lot of people, including legitimate users who would be interested but aren't going to deal with Discord. I'm not convinced that's actually a win.
To pile on, from what I've seen, Reddit is shit for a community of people getting to know each other.
Posts aging out mean that discussions fade from view. That means that they die off, as other people don't join in. Combine that with karma, and you get people tending to just contribute content that is counter to community building.
I've seen some similar stuff happen on Discord servers (I'm looking at you, Discord servers with 50 topic channels), but I've also seen people slowly get to know each other better there.
Or, to summarize: I generally see Reddit as better for discoverability and Discord as better for community. But they're both inadequate as a whole.
Because they are a discord user. And don't have a forum account.
In todays world forums can also be a pain as looking at picture attachments most of the time require accounts.
Can we reverse this trend? I've recently started to see an FAQ, on GitHub, hide the answer with a deeplink into Discord channels where you needed to find the guild to join first. I've never gotten disinterested in a project that fast. This needs to stop.