Am I the only one who hates that the place for "discussion" is Discord? I feel there are better options but I see it far too often these days... sigh
TechTakes
Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
Discord is terrible. But it’s also easy to set up & easy wins out over good but annoying every time.
My biggest issue with Discord is that most discussion boards moved there and it's ridiculously hard to find anything there. Plus it's a privacy nightmare..
Yup. Discoverability in Discord servers is dire. The privacy issues are the bonus shit topping.
“How dare you not read through six months of discussion threads in order to find the last time your question was answered” is such a great way to welcome newbies to a project.
Discord is actually pretty good at the thing it was designed for: realtime comms between friends, both text & voice. It’s terrible at everything else & I wish people would stop using it, but it doesn’t seem like that’s going to happen any time soon.
what do you mean you don’t want to beg answers out of the most hostile parts of an inevitably toxic, entrenched discord community just to know how to fire up the expensive open source hardware you’ve purchased? oh the search feature discord is actively making worse didn’t surface any answers? then suffer
*scene*
...It's Fine, Guize. discord totally won't hold all this history and context for ransom the moment it suits their income model or it feels convenient to do so, they're not like Slack. look at all these free features! we need to learn nothing from the past!
god.... I just want to enjoy being able to post gifs during this conference? what's so hard to understand?! ....gah, stop overreacting so much...
*/scene*
(just in case it's hard to tell, I'm rather not a fan of this state of affairs)
[e: lemmy ate my scenetags [e2: wow it has really shitty filters for this]]
but the alternatives don’t have the group voice chat and screen sharing and nazis I use for gaming. therefore I will continue to use discord for everything, especially the non-gaming stuff it sucks at
I remember sorta kinda getting back into lulnix maybe 15 years ago? something like that, and being astounded that people were expected to ask and get answers on IRC. Discord is just an extension of that .
Oh yeah and almost all those projects on IRC got hosed by the Andrew Lee takeover of Freenode.
I'm curious about this...got a link where I can read up?
Here's my writeup
https://gerikson.com/blog/comm/Farrago-of-Freenode-fuckery.html
Thanks. This is pretty crazy.
Someone “accidentally” blocks a CIDR /16 block.
Haha. This made me crack up.
Ah thanks I was also curious, but not curious enough to ask.
this seems like an even earlier, worse, and faster enshittification than what happened to reddit, but nobody learned from it
It was super-niched, effectively no-one gives a shit about IRC.
I'm not aware of any complete histories, but these two articles have the gist of it, while unfortunately missing out on a LOT of the weird things that Andrew Lee said while doing it:
https://www.theregister.com/2021/05/26/freenode_irc_takeover/
Ctrl + F is hard
Seriously though it is frustrating because it's not web search discoverable at all (unlike the web forums of old) and discords search function is very hit or miss in my experience.
Maybe unpopular take here, but I love discord as an excellent fit for specific use cases. I think plenty of groups that should be web forums use discord wrong, but for several of my favorite communities:
- They are better smaller, I don't necessarily want or need them to be discoverable aside from word of mouth.
- They are better without search history, because the discussion is more ephemeral and personal instead of assuming that anyone is digging history in after hours
- Ad hoc voice chat rooms is a useful boon because of exactly 1 and 2.
- No ads. Yes I understand the privacy issues, but I would still prefer to have opt in subscriptions, no ads, and my chats are harvested than many alternatives for small communities that need to subsidize costs. (Again fediverse, if not ads, requires a buy in in terms of technical operational costs)
- Trivial to build specialized addons in the case your community has a need.
Good examples for me are: Friend of Friend Groups for organizing dinners or parties Online gaming communities Book clubs Co-worker chat alternative to slack
I'm a little surprised that people feel like Discord does a good job of (4) and (5). On (4), Discord's ToS used to permit Discord to resell your personal data in bulk (and still might allow it; haven't read the ToS in a while), all guilds are co-located in a single database, and rumor is that three-letter agencies are allowed to make relatively complex queries against that database. On (5), Discord is well-known to ban alternative clients, hacked clients, API clients, extensions, addons, and even chatbots, without any due process or recourse.
Like, yes, it's a nice service, but is it really that much nicer than Mumble or IRC?
Discord is really shitty software. I all but refuse to use it
Unfortunately it's the best popular one. Like I use Teams, Slack and Skype at work and oh god are they terrible, using those makes me long for Discord.
I find it baffling you include Slack in this list, as though it's even a fraction as bad as discord
Fun detail, before discord there was other similar chat gaming software also running with full web browser capabilities. I did some digging at the time while I was using it and found it has using adobe flash which was several version out of date. (at the period where a lot of the exploits going round were flash based), stuff like this makes these kinds of chat apps a bit of a risk (teams/slack/skype etc similar (Edit: if I had said electron based apps here I would have looked a lot better than editing it later), I heard if you really are security concious/paranoid you use those apps only via their website versions (as most browsers have reasonable security nowadays)). Up till a year ago (before they put it behind a text file setting you have to enable) they even made it easy to open the development console which malicious people used to socially engineer people into compromising their account. The discord thing isn't in the same risk category as the flash thing but still funny how high the shooting yourself in the foot risk was for the gamer app.
It's because the people who say stuff like the above have complete control over the discussion.
People have been modifying the code to copy housing designs without permission from the original designer. As such, it is in the housing community's best interest for updates to the code to no longer be published. The MakePlace community agrees with this approach too.
I might not respect the terms of free software licenses, but MMO interior designer IP rights are sacrosanct!
You have your laws and licenses, but I have the makeplace community, lets agree to disagree (on discord? Please come to my discord, im lonely).
Absolute chad move, bravo.
Proof that we still need the GPL
we need something much stronger and less encumbered than the GPL, a license that went far out of its way to emphasize that it isn’t communism, no sir, in fact some of its best friends are libertarian pedophiles
Can I ask for elaboration? In the context of GPL and free software licenses in general, "strong" and "encumbered" tend to refer to roughly the same thing, i.e. conditions requiring that the work and derivative works to be also distributed as free software.
Nothing in the license text of GPLv3 or GPLv2 reads to me like deliberate distancing from communism or anything else other than nonfree software. Do you have a different interpretation of the text or are you basing the claim on something else? Sure, RMS is not a socialist nor is the FSF a socialist organization, but I'm not aware of them "going far out of their way" to disproportionately emphasize the GPL's noncommunism. OSI and ESR arguably have, given their more corporate focus and particularly ESR's far right views. You also have to take into account that associating free software in general and GPL in particular with communism has been a deliberate smear tactic against them, so a lot of the ink spilled about the un-commieness of the GPL has been in response to its equally or more anti-communist opponents.
Designing a truly communist software license that still makes sense in the capitalist context of international copyright law seems like an interesting exercise. I like that the GPL has a whole preamble to explain the intent and values behind its terms, and that it manages to essentially invert what would normally be an exclusive privilege granted by copyright into a communal obligation enforced via the same. A communist equivalent would be something like exploiting property rights to ensure that some capital asset remains de facto collectively owned.
I think the (A)GPL manages to implement some radical and admirable principles while acknowledging that we live in a society [bottom text]. Even if the software licensing interests of some libertarian pedophiles happen to sometimes align with mine and what I consider the common good, they don't get to claim the license as theirs any more that I get to declare it to support my ideology.
my favourite thing about AGPL is it makes so many of the wrong people absolutely shit
And this just solidifies my choice to use the AGPL for most of my projects