person looking ahead. the text below him says, "wow a cool software. let's check out the community"
screenshot with the text
Community
The main place where the community gathers is our Discord server. Feel free to join there to ask questions, help out others, share cool things you created with Typst, or just to chat.
hand on gear shift zoomed in, switching to reverse
Discord makes for a bad forum because it's not a forum! Stop using it as one! It's good for small groups that need realtime communication-- friend groups, project groups, even classes of students. If you're using it as a public forum you're using the wrong tool!
i mean, it's far from perfect, but as someone that's been using video/voice clients since before there was a commercial solution, what is better? i haven't found it.
Depends on what exact type of app you want, but as one example of something that can mostly replace discord and do a far better job-- Slack. There was an app in the early 2000's for gaming voice chat which I thought worked far better too. It was called something like "Roger Wilco" I think. The only similar apps I've used which are obviously worse than discord? Teams, and once MS bought it, Skype.
ah yes slack the app that won't let you voice chat in groups or store chat history unless you pay $7 per user per month. I'm honestly amazed how they've been getting away with it this long when discord exists
Weird, I guess I have been imagining doing that at work for the past couple of years. I do understand though, when you're used to apps like discord, you forget it's possible to not only gain new useful features, but have them actually work.
Slack's pricing logic makes perfect sense to me there. It's free and works for a large number of users, but the ones who actually need chat history probably can/should pay for it.
I'm honestly amazed how they've been getting away with it this long when discord exists
Yeah it's totally crazy that an app can be considered good enough that many thousands of businesses find it worth paying for. I mean why isn't every business using free Gmail accounts? Or for similar shittiness in the UI department, why isn't everyone using Hotmail?
I was pretty clearly only complaining about the features offered by their free tier, which I just checked does still not let you voice chat with three or more people or search chat history. (The chat history issue is more significant by far).
And yes $7 per user per month is not reasonable for an open source project with a few hundred members that doesn't have a budget, especially compared to discord that gives you unlimited chat history for free. All the open source projects I know that use chat use either matrix or discord.
my screen freaks out and flashes white and pink when I open/type in the gif thingy, in a way that makes me thankful i'm not photosensitive. it's been this way for over a year.
My favorite, though more of a UI blunder than a bug, and I think fixed now: If you right clicked on a user name and hit "Add Note", a box would pop up for you to type in. Like for writing your note in. But that box was in fact the "send them a direct message" box.
So if you hypothetically wanted to write "Asshole" as a note, and didn't pay attention to what text box had focus, well, that was a bad time.
Because having an active community on github or a forum is a very different feeling to having one on IRC or discord. They're entirely different tools. IRC-style communities have always been more active than github, discord is just the latest iteration of that concept.
Hosting documentation or issue tracking on discord, though, I hate that. For tech support its... fine, for getting informal feedback or engaging with users its great. Anything archival its a goddamn crime.
The worst is when people try to use discords forum features, which are the worst of all possible worlds....
I still think that support stuff should be opened FIRST in the forum tool because it gives visibility for search engines. Just label it as "Support".
That should automatically open a thread in the discord server where people can discuss. The discord server thread should be tagged in the forum. If any bug/features come from that chat, then they can be linked to the support ticket.
If anyone has a similar support related issue, they'll find full traceability using a search engine instead of having to find the discord server to search stuff.
Yeah, wait, do people archive some info in discord? Why, there are approaches like github, readthedocs, blogs, wiki, and so on.
I only use discord for socializing, works for well-managed servers.
That is absolutely not true unless if you have exact word matches, and anyone with half a brain knows it's not about searching within discord, but about searching outside of it.
Discord is a black hole of information. What happens inside is unknown from the outside. This is why every single FOSS project using discord loses the right to call themselves FOSS - an issues page is equally free, has way, way better features to relate an issue to patches and releases, and is actually indexable.
it's not about searching within discord, but about searching outside of it.
I'm gonna ignore your uncalled-for personal insult and instead point out that you might want to search a specific group for information rather than the entirety of the internet.
What happens inside is unknown from the outside.
Then just...go inside? These aren't password-protected communities.
This is why every single FOSS project using discord loses the right to call themselves FOSS
Uhhhh no that's not how that works.
an issues page is equally free, has way, way better features to relate an issue to patches and releases, and is actually indexable.
No I will not sign up for ze discord chinese data harvesting op
If your project isn't something I can index through a search engine - you don't have a project. Want a forum? Make a subreddit or better yet a Lemmy community.
Discord is great for friends, bad for projects. I'll never have a discord for a project because I don't want to answer the same questions over and over.
That’s the problem. I know of a couple video games where the publisher closed their forums and opened a discord channel. I have no idea why people view them as equivalent things.
Users don’t move everything from an already existing forum to Discord. It’s not like people are going there because they want to use it as a forum, lots of forums have been replaced by discord (like in the screenshot of this post). To reiterate the metaphor someone used already, it’s like wanting to eat a steak but the only steakhouse gives you a plunger instead of a knife.
Awesome in FOSS matrix rooms: there are threads, but people never use them. Its horrible, they dont even jump on the boat. You could literally have one message = one topic and everything in a separate thread...
Making it easier is not the problem. The problem is having the search function actually find the messages you are looking for. The biggest problem I have with it is that word order matters too much. "Keyword1 keyword2" will find different messages than "keyword2 keyword1". Not only that, but it will also search for different variations of the word with no way of preventing it from doing it. If there is a solution for these problems, then no one is taking about it.
I mean, I get it, but when the wrong tool is used so ubiquitously, you have to start asking questions about why people aren’t using the “right” tool. Forums seem to end up being hostile to newcomers, with all this “did you search the forum first you fucking noob?” mentality. Having a living place for real-time questions and discussion just feels better, same way email exchanges feel terrible after using Slack for so long. You can still have incredibly toxic people in real-time chat servers, obviously, but there just seems to be less overall stress to keep the posts in the forum “pristine” or… whatever that was.
Not being able to search for old content is a huge con to real-time chat. Even if the history is retained forever (in self-hosted instances), real-time messages just aren’t the best bits of data to recall later like forum posts. Clear drawback.
Still, people are using discord, not to spite forums, but because it works, is free, and is easy.
Forums seem to end up being hostile to newcomers, with all this “did you search the forum first you fucking noob?” mentality. Having a living place for real-time questions and discussion just feels better, same way email exchanges feel terrible after using Slack for so long. You can still have incredibly toxic people in real-time chat servers, obviously, but there just seems to be less overall stress to keep the posts in the forum “pristine” or… whatever that was.
Tbh you can find similar hostility to newcomers in Discord servers, simply swap some words about for a, "Did you read the pins you fucking noob?" mentality. It's very much the old forum kneejerk response of, "Did you read the rules/stickied posts?" simply in a different context. As you note though, you'll find assholes in any communication medium.
Also, to your point about a place for real-time questions & discussion, that's also to its detriment for anyone out of sync with a server's more active hours, which I think is kind of an understated argument against it among the usual criticism found in these threads. Sure search is one thing, but the asynchronous nature of a forum is imo one of its greatest strengths, especially considering how flaky and/or inundated Discord's inbox/mentions can be.