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this post was submitted on 12 Apr 2024
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Have you considered that the person you consider smart is focusing all their brain power on their projects and they don't have time to set up and maintain a website? That's what discord is for, an easy, quick and dirty community aggregate
While there's truth in your words, there are alternatives that require little effort. Even a IRC channel would have been better.
Discord is not only a terrible bad application, it's the equivalent of writing posts on medium. If and when they decide to gatekeep your content, there's nothing you can do.
Or matrix which is far more modern and user friendly than IRC.
Always easy to say this in hindsight.
IRC is considered unsafe too to a certain degree with pirating folks.
Also let me emphasize this: for every discord server shut down like this, there are 100+ servers with almost the same purpose that still exist and will continue to for at least the next 3y.
If you are doing development as a hobby, you just don't have the time to use a different system, get used to that system, and then critically convince everyone else to go there too. Just look at Lemmy, I want it to be great as well but we have to accept that a few tiny steps more in the day to say usability of a system can be the difference between Twitter and Mastodon. And before ppl are saying "well Twitter was there longer", sure but that doesn't mean we cannot see the trend for growth that does or doesn't exist.
you completely missed the point here:
the issue that those aren't around NOW, the issue is that they WILL inevitably disappear eventually and every shred of knowledge platformed there will be irretrievably lost to the void.
discord is a black hole for information:
it sucks information in and deletes it from existence.
that's why it's bad.
the time frame doesn't really matter here.
That's still not really the purpose of discord, and I think you have actually missed the point. It's not an informational archive, it's a tech support line, and oftentimes one which can be used to improve the FAQ and documentation, which is usually found on GitHub or independently hosted, and is usually light enough in weight that it can just be copy pasted anywhere or even included in software. For much of these kinds of software, creating an incredibly comprehensive and well-organized FAQ isn't as large of an up-front priority as mashing bugs. Of that use case, what strikes you as better, the app that everyone already uses, or IRC?
Not easily searchable, only solves the problem of the user who is currently being interacted with, and on top of that a forum does everything you mentioned but better because it is indexed in the web, meaning the next person with that problem will probably find the forum post before they contact you. No one is taking these discord chats and updating FAQs with them, and if they were, they could save that time by just having a forum that is indexed by search engines. IRC isn't the best option, but it limits corpo takedowns like this so at least what you have doesn't randomly get nuked one day. Altogether, moving from forums to discord is a massive downgrade and much information will be lost in the Discord Exodus that will come with time as the company consumes its users for the shareholders.
Why do you think this is, though? This really hasn't been my experience, people are usually pretty quick to add shit to the FAQ if it actually comes up ime.
You're also relying a lot, ironically, on Google, when you advocate for using search engines as a repository for forums. Google is not that good anymore, and most forums don't come up. For a niche software, do you think the specific forum for that software would actually come up 99% of the time, or would the results just be flooded by a bunch of youtube tutorials and posts to random subreddits and other forums about irrelevant shit that you weren't looking for? If you were even lucky enough to get results in the first place, that is. Partially this is due to things moving to discord, but partially it's due to Google having an effective monopoly on search engining.
If you're just going to like, go to a forum and use the forum's internal search. One, it probably sucks because they always have these stupid idiot rules like no common words and it has to be in a range of 4-40 characters and no symbols, shit like that, which sucks. But also, you can do the same thing with discord and just navigate to the web version and then just look up what you wanted to find on the chat logs and read an old conversation. They seem functionally pretty similar in that respect.
Moderating a forum to protect against random people spamming you with CSAM attacks is also more time-consuming for a small developer, and it's also time consuming to redirect people to previous threads when they inevitably come in and post shit that's already been asked about, which is also going to breed probably a more insular culture than discord, as impossible as that might seem. Again, you're also waiting like 2 days for a response, and this is especially stupid when you're dealing with a back and forth, because not everyone is going to put in the effort to present their problems as thoroughly as possible and present you with like an actual bug report or screenshots or anything. They might not even know what to search for or ask about, and then they're completely fucked. It's easier to manage discord because of it's more active nature.
Basically, the problem is this: Forums put more responsibility and onus on the users to adequately present their problems in a more easily parsable format, and better search for solutions to their own problems. It's not a mystery, then, why people might prefer to use discord, in my mind.
That’s not what discord is for if you are doing anything where a big corporation wants to muscle you around.
and thats also the reason why this project is now gone...
also you are pretty much "paying" with all you information and since they started heavily monetizing Discord you will pay even more as they soon will start to sell you conveniences or essential features. Also Tencent you know, which is pretty much like Nestlé, so it should be avoided.
Creating a channel on freenode takes seconds
I will say this, if you are a Lemmy user, sure probably.
But I did a simple websearch for "how to set up a freenode server." The very first 3 things I saw (what fits on the screen) were a page full of syntax, a 13 minute YouTube video, and a page where the first thing that's written is literally "Internet Relay Chat is a difficult thing to get used to, especially for people who were born into this world of full graphical interfaces and messaging web apps that handle user interaction seamlessly."
For the average user, creating a channel does not "take seconds" if you need proof, discord. Its popular because it is so easy to use and the numbers back that up
Uhm, freenode already exists, you don't have to set up another server just to create a channel. There are clients that are embeddable into webpages as well, so joining an existing channel could be as simple as opening a page for a new user.
Otherwise it's just install a client, select freenode and join the channel.
I challenge you to find a non tech savvy person who can do this In under 10 minutes.
Lemmy is absolutely an echo chamber of the tech minded, you have to remember most people wouldn't be able to even get on this platform because that "little bit of effort" is way too much for them
Lol everybody did this in the '00s and '10s. It's literally "copy this text in that field".
Stop treating people like idiots.
Not for a minute, no.
Huh, I thought it was just a chat room to get to know people.