I was devastated when I learned X-Moto dumped their forums in favor of dicksword. You have the infrastructure already set up, why replace it with garbage, especially as an open source project?
I see this point a lot and I don't get it at all. You can do something awesome, free and open-source but use tools that aren't, especially when we're talking about community building. Sure, you can do your outreach exclusively on Mastodon or Farcaster, but the most eyes just happen to be on closed platforms, so it'd just be self-sabotage. Doing the only thing that makes sense doesn't make you a hypocrite.
Matrix and matter most are my top two. Matrix is preferred because of the federation support and a pretty good bridge (to services such as discord) ecosystem.
To be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand cropped memes. The humour is extremely subtle, and without a solid grasp of memetics and linguistics most of the jokes will go over a typical reader's head. There's also the high contrast color pallette, which is deftly woven into the message. Lemmy users understand this stuff; they have the intellectual capacity to truly appreciate the depths of these jokes, to realise that they're not just funny- they say something deep about LIFE. As a consequence people who dislike cropped memes truly ARE idiots- of course they wouldn't appreciate, for instance, the humour in longing for the bottom half of the text, "Join our Discord". I'm smirking right now just imagining one of those addlepated simpletons scratching their heads in confusion as the meme's genius wit unfolds itself on their smartphone screens. What fools..
I did find a wikipedia article to that, and it still seems legitimately more sensible than using Discord for any reason other than gaming-related peer pressure
That’s just not true. I’m no discord fan but less accessible? They have an app for the mobile platforms as well as pc/mac, and browser-based support as well.
But oh no, they have a captcha!!! So much less accessible!!! The fuck you talking about
Nonsense! All you have to do is individually search each channel on the discord server and you just might find a brief thread discussing your issue 6 months ago, and then you just have to scroll for three minutes to find the comment with the resolution
I'm sorry but where is this random assumption that the documentation is on discord coming from?? It is extremely common for projects/organisations to have some kind of community discord, but I have never seen one that used it as their main documentation host. The discord are almost always just community hubs to chat with other community members.
I think the term documentation can and should include bug reports, community questions and answers, and project examples and guides that are often only shared in Discord servers in recent years.
Most of these servers would be better off as discussion forums, but spam and ancient software have really hurt them. Young web devs need to start giving a shit about open web again. Time to make something better than phpbb, wordpress, and discord.
Then I must be missing a lot of projects, because I don't know of any which use discord for any of these things, besides questions and answers. And even then, only for informal stuff. Anything more serious goes on GitHub (or alternatives) or forums.
I run into this most often for video game mods' and fan ROM hacks' support communities; they might host their projects on GitHub, but any and all technical support happens exclusively on their Discord server.
If I can't read or even search it without creating an account then it's pretty useless as an information source. Same issue with Twitter and Instagram.
Opinion: Not if that community advertises itself to know/care about open source. Using a proprietary, privacy unfriendly service which uses predatory marketing to get people to spend money on bs stuff and arbitrarily paywall functionalities is both anti open source and anti people. Its enabling those companies. One could maybe argue for a strict bridge which only server to connect those who resist foss platforms.
Counterpoint: If said community is about a certain type of software, decisions over the type of platform matter more than popularity within teenagers. Coherence is important.
Putting everything on discord makes information unsearchable via search engines, which is objectivily not great. This recent habit is contributing to killing the web.
On a more subjective note, I just don't like it. On the top of my head : Confusing interface, wont' shut up about nitro, requires a phone number.
I honestly think that's the big part there. You can build a great app but it doesn't matter if no one is using it and you don't get feed back or it's not shared around.
So, here we are trying to use the newest virtual 3rd space to create a community so that there is people will feel engaged in the product and share it around to add more.
But that's also an issue with discord. It wants to be a social space more than a useful space and it usually gets entirely dominated by a few users with others less inclined to add in. It's also accessible but not easy necessarily to stumble into if you are outside of the community trying to look into it more.
It just does the wrong job, slower and less efficient than old school forums or wikis, but it's the tools we have to use in this less efficient connected Internet of the now.
if you're trying to build a chatroom then any chat software goes but if you're trying to build a community you should probably use something searchable and indexed, like real community software
also i find it laughable that users must already be on such platform, by your logic all communities should be mailing lists
You may find it laughable but it is what it is. Most people does not enjoy signing up for specific product forums. It's much easier to just add yet another discord server to the list.
Virtually all of new projects created after certain years. Younger devs prefer setting up a discord server first than setting up a documentation site/wiki. I feel old.
They usually have a read only channel where the devs post how-to's and tutorials. You know, something that could've been put into a wiki or documentation site instead.
