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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.
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!
This, exactly.
Discord sucks at what it wasn't designed to do... Shocker. That doesn't make it bad.
It sucks at what it was designed to do also. One of the trashiest UIs I've seen, and buggy af. It's barely gotten any better too.
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.
Why do people do this when there are already Github discussions and issues?
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 brought this up in a project Discord once and they told me "this is just the way projects do it now, get used to it".
I left that server right away.
They added forum-style posts a while ago, which greatly improves usability. But I won't use it regardless, due to privacy issues.
Sounds like a very neat feature, but IMO still not great for people outside of the discord server esp. if the threads can't show up in a search engine
Everyone in this comment section is yelling about how bad discord is, telling people to use forums or matrix instead. No one is asking "why?". Why aren't people using forums or matrix? Because the path to user growth isn't guilting people into the 'morally correct' choice, it's making a product they want to use.
Why are small communities using discord over forums? Well, we're talking about small projects, hobbies, and volunteer work. Hosting a forum costs both time and money - renting server space and configuring/managing both the forum and the server. Making a discord channel is instant and free. You want your favorite project to have a forum? Then take up the mantle of hosting and maintaining it yourself. You want all projects to use a forum? Develop a forum system that you absorb the hosting costs for. Neither of these exist, so communities use discord.
Why are small communities using discord over matrix? I'm in my 30s, I spend all day on my PC, I've taken a couple years of college courses in programming. Figuring out matrix was annoying for me. I had to figure out which client program to use, I had to navigate the less-than-ideal way of joining servers, and there was a difficulty curve for understanding the program's features and how to use it. It wasn't impossible, but it took effort. Discord doesn't. For every step of friction, a product will bleed users. Matrix is cumbersome to set up and use, and it's copying something that already exists and does it better for the end-user experience. It shouldn't be surprising that people prefer discord. Want that to change? Start contributing code to matrix and refine the user on-boarding process.
Instead of stating opinions, ask questions. That's how things get changed. No amount of moral grandstanding will change end-users, no matter how correct you might be.
Honestly a lemmy community wouldn't be a bad format. It's basically a forum
Normally I'd say that reddit/lemmy are poor choices for a community - but if the competitor is a live-chat like discord? Yeah. Lemmy is better.
Project leads would just need to make sure to direct users straight to a specific instance that allows instant/unmoderated sign-ups, or else that element of friction will occur -- and certainly not start the whole "there's many instances, pick the one that's right for you!" spiel, or users will give up immediately. I thought similarly about matrix - on-boarding users to a matrix community would be helped by explicitly writing a guide for them to do so, but then we're back to step 1, where making a discord channel is quicker than writing instructions.
Matrix was confusing. Lemmy wasn't. That should say something because Lemmy is already considered confusing by a lot of people.
A Lemmy community would be 1000x better than a discord community and there’s literally thousands of servers where you can create one of those.
I don't get discord at all. It seems like the worst parts or IRC and the worst parts of webforums mashed together with no redeeming values added. I can't find anything, I can't tell what conversations are over, I can't figure out any of the in-jokes. If the place is too dead it's completely devoid of anything of value, if it's too big everything of value gets buried.
I've tried to take part in a couple of servers, those attempts have never last more than a couple hours.
That's was my exact experience on a pokemon go server. So many channels and conversations that notifications are useless and searching for the information I needed was difficult. Just one giant group chat which is awful for storing needed, retrievable, information imo.
Made me never want to step into discord again.
It's great for smallish groups of friends bs-ing or collaborating, but bigger than that I've always found it painful
But, some people can apparently keep up with the firehouse of comments on Twitch streams while they make me not want to bother with it at all, so...
It has probably the worst UI of any site or app. I can never find the settings I need to modify or what the heck I’m looking at. It tells me that there’s a new reply specifically to me but I can never find it because it has long scrolled up in the history.
I tried posting an image using the app on my phone but it kept ignoring it. Somehow I magically hit the right button and it included it in my reply. I had no idea.
The content is hidden from the world unless you sign up and join, so the knowledge captured on a discord server is essentially useless.
It’s definitely a mashup on irc and web forums, but infinitely worse.
I don't care if people use Discord to talk, it's only when that's where the documentation, faq, etc. is.
I do care about people using discord to talk when it’s the only place to talk and there’s 300 conversations on top of each other and 15000 messages/day. Also, Discord sucks for finding out who’s responding to you and its window seems to grab a random point in the chat and say “new messages”. I mean, I might have been 2000 messages behind but now I gotta scan them all to see if anybody actually responded.
I would take a busy forum any day.
I think I might make this my fucking profile picture, I am so sick and tired of this.
The other day I finally got myself to join the discord of a small early access game to give some feedback/ideas I thought would fit the game really well.
I posted in the right ideas subchannel but then I also made the mistake of saying in the general “hey what do y’all think about this idea!”. I didn’t spam it, I spent awhile writing my idea out in a clear and concise fashion to post in the idea channel, tried to make it lighthearted and even made a bad photoshopped image to go along with it, and then I mentioned it ONCE in the general chat.
The only two people who responded either in the idea channel or in general were two people in general that immediately jumped down my throat, saying I was begging or advertising (by saying I wanted a feature in the wrong place once?)… and everybody else was just silent like that is a sane way to great people at the door to a community.
I hate discord so much, what an awful place to try to organize anything. Either there are only a couple of firehose channels where interesting conversations are diluted into inscrutability by low effort jokes and meme posts or someone taking up half the chat window to say something only to one person… or there develops an ever increasing suffocation of hyper over-organized channels where the only conversations allowed proceed along strict boundaries for what is considered “on topic” for that channel (and thus the possibility space of conversations becomes a series of tiny islands, unconnected from anywhere else conceptually).
This last point might seem like an oddly specific pet peeve, but I have noticed over and over again that the kinds of people who enjoy setting up discord communities and creating an extremely organized system of subchannels just don't understand how the way that feels good for them to structure the world actually critically fails to capture the organic, living aspects of it. In my opinion one of the major reasons people enjoy microblogging services like twitter so much is a structural resistance to "discord channel organizer brain" kinds of people taking hold of communities and making them into their personal pet organization project that makes them feel good at the end of the day when "everything" can now have a perfect spot. Human conversations and interactions derive their genius from being messy and stepping over boundaries, if you make it so every type of conversation has one precise corresponding spot in some mess of subchannels it is very difficult for it not to mortally wound the living fiber of conversation. The problem with Discord, is again, you HAVE to do this when you get any more than 15 people in a Discord channel or the whole thing becomes unmanageable.
It just doesn’t work for a software project ANYWHERE along the continuum of a handful of firehose channels to a confusing web of subchannels and I hate it. Either way, the search is utterly useless in terms of helping curate a body of expert conversations (like say a Reddit-like or forum) but that won’t stop people hanging out in discord all day yelling at you for asking a question that has already been asked before…. in a chat room…. where the whole point is conversations repeat as different social groups join and leave…?
Did I mention I hate discord?
I think discord works for up to perhaps a dozen people. Big servers are pointless to engage with, they flow too quickly to be useful.
Discord seems okay for chat, but not good for information that is going to be retained and indexed. Isn't this already known? Why is this news?
I guess because people still use it. It might be obvious, but it isn't common knowledge. All people are ignorant about most things. There's just too much to know and not enough time to learn it unless you're forced.
You ditch discord because it's bad for organizing projects
I ditched discord because it's proprietary
We are not the same
Discord is only convenient for those already using it everyday. For everyone else this is a high barrier to entry, especially when you actually care what software you use.
I can’t ditch discord. They won’t even let me in via browser because I “failed the captcha”.
(Not that they’d tell me this somewhere in their UI, this is the server response.)
my failed attempts at registering on discord:
every damn time they require a phone number.
The transition to Discord for communities really sucks. It's impossible to find information now that everything is gated to unsearchable servers.
I am OOL, why so much discord hate lately? I have never used it…
Discord is a real-time communication system that also has a built-in history feature. This type of communication promotes conversational interactions, which are really hard to search for complete ideas about problems and their solutions, and those solutions are not indexed by internet search engines, which makes it extremely difficult for people to discover useful information on the platform even with the available history.
The asynchronous nature of web based forums promotes communication in more complete ideas (though this is clearly not always how communication happens) and they are indexable by search engines.
Just look at how people discover solutions in Reddit posts so frequently when searching Google, but nobody finds solutions in chat logs, even IRC which has been around for decades and is often archived in a search indexable site where chat logs are posted.
Edit: I swear that wasn't written even a bit by AI.
Edit: I swear that wasn't written even a bit by AI.
That's the beauty of it. Tomorrow, it will be.
(When an AI copy/pastes your answer to someone asking about choosing the correct iphone power brick, or something.)
It would be nice if more people used Matrix. From my experience though it seems like not a lot of people check in on it regularly because the niche communities they follow are on Discord and even though bridges between Matrix and Discord do exist they are often neglected and fall of out sync.
Worst example I've ever seen is 3dVista - a fucking facebook group. Discord would have been amazing in comparison.
Had to see it to believe it. On their website, under Support > Forum, you're redirected to their Facebook group. This is criminal.
My biggest issue with discord is that I'll get pinged, and have no fucking clue what pinged me.
Even if I get to the notification, often I don't get it right away, and often I don't open it right away either. So when I click on it, which, in most chat like apps will take you to that post/mention/whatever, it just takes me to the channel where I was mentioned. I'm left with no earthly idea why I'm in this chat or what was said that prompted the notification.
When I'm actively in discord, this works okay, since the mention which prompted the notification is likely the most recent thing said, or at least, close to it. The problem is, I'm almost never actively in discord.
I find that if I use discord all the time, which is rare, but happens.... Then I don't mind it so much. However, if I don't use discord all the time, then it's less than useless. I get notifications all the time and I just end up dismissing them because by the time I get to it, there's no chance I'll be able to figure out why I got the notification in the first place.
DMs and very very small communities are an exception, since the volume of messages is so low that generally, even if I get to the notification hours later, the message that prompted the notification is still one of the most recent handful of messages.
To this end, my list of pros and cons for discord are: Pros:
I feel like the people who run any given community, who are centered around discord, don't have problems with it, since they're pretty much always on it. For someone who isn't always plugged into discord, it's a horrendous nightmare of missed messages and notifications that take you somewhere unexpected. Any complaints about this generally falls on deaf ears because the people in charge, who picked that the community should be in discord, use it so much that they don't really have any issues with it.
Compare and contrast with a competing text-chat service like slack. In general slack doesn't do voice, so there's some differences there, but talking strictly about notifications and such: the notifications frequently arrive within seconds or minutes at most, when you select them, it takes you to the channel where the alert came from, scrolled to the post where the mention that prompted the notification is located, with the specific mention highlighted for clarity. From here, you can scroll back to get context, and scroll forward to see other replies. Contrasted with my experience in discord, you select the notification, you're taken to the channel where the notification originated, and scrolled to a random point in the recent history of the channel. Does this section contain the mention? Maybe, but probably not. Nothing is highlighted. Good luck.
I get frustrated with these platforms trying to turn into these 'do it all' applications. discord was fine before they started adding all the bullshit in everywhere. it was a great chat place with 'rooms' for different groups of people or friends. kinda like how spotify seems to be trying to morph into some social music sharing crap. i don't use spotify to be social, i use it to listen to fucking music.
Discord has done for reproducible support what panty hose has done for finger fucking.
Given that most of these projects are on GitHub, why not use the new GitHub discussions feature. MonoGame are ditching their forum in favour of it, because it's cheaper (free) and easier to maintain. Though they still have a discord for chatting about game development and progress on their games.
Discord has recently introduced a forum-like thing but it's not indexable by search engines and the built in search only works if you get the exact title. Basically rubbish.