alt Hacker NewsSometimes I feel like Discord as been nothing but a bane on OSS. A chat is inherently less searchable than a wiki/forum/documentation, and those sources are often readable without needing to authenticate, which meant that you could find an answer through Google and such. Most project now don't bother with publicly readable and archivable (and so offline viewable) information sources and just rely on Discord. This lead to the same newbie question being answered over and over again, and is a clear degradation of the UX. But on top of that, most people see Discord as a hangout. Almost all Discord server I know have an "offtopic"/"random"/"meme"/etc channel, if not several. This almost inevitably lead to drama on a scale that newsgroups and IRC fellows could have only dreamed off. And considering that a lot of devs are able to create drama over even a mailing list, Discord is turbocharging the ability for nuisance.
Maybe it's my "Am I out of touch ? No it's the children who are wrong" moment, but I really think OSS projects would benefit from ditching discord.
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Strongly agreed. I'd like to see users pushing more for this. Return to IRC, try XMPP or Matrix, put up a forum. Lots of options exist that would be more freedom-respecting, stable, and publicly searchable.
It is. I'm not a fan of Drew Devault, but I can agree with this article of his:
https://drewdevault.com/2021/12/28/Dont-use-Discord-for-FOSS...
The most salient part:
> Using Discord partitions your community on either side of a walled garden, with one side that’s willing to use the proprietary Discord client, and one side that isn’t. It sets up users who are passionate about free software — i.e. your most passionate contributors or potential contributors — as second-class citizens.
You are not out of touch, I rember in the 90s when people recommended using IRC for Linux questions and I hated it.
I didn't want to ask something and interacting in pseudo-realtime with another human being (that could potentionally laugh at me for asking a n00b question).
News groups were a little better for this, but the real progress was when you could search them or later read the answer in Stack Overflow. And the final step here is a LLM agent that has a web/doc search tool and can answer more difficult questions.