It’s a little unsettling to think about how much information and knowledge is being locked up in walled-garden servers on discord, basically unsearchable (discord has a search feature, but it’s pretty awful). There’s so many communities that end up moving to it because it serves their most engaged members so well, but it’s terrible for everyone else.
For example, “Voron” 3D printers are an awesome open-source design, but more and more I am directed to their discord to ask questions - many of which were, in all likelihood, asked dozens of times before. It’s great for their engaged members, who are all super helpful - but if it’s a reddit thread I can get my answer almost immediately, rather than asking, waiting and consuming someone else’s time for trivialities.
Sites like reddit at least can be readily searched from a conventional search engine, and can be crawled and stored externally in a pinch. Discord has its place, especially for game communities or other such personal things, but I’m not sure it’s ideal compared to a conventional forum as time passes and more information is built up and either lost or hidden away.
What began as effectively an IRC-like alternative + file hosting and voice support is now being used as a replacement for forums and I think that's where the issue is.
IRC isn't publicly searchable either unless someone was logging it and uploading them to some web server. IRC chats similarly often contain very useful info and answers.
Discord unfortunately doesn't have any native chat export feature so the best that can be done are third-party exporters, copy-pasting or screenshots which aren't ideal and don't end up being indexed as desired even if communities wanted them to be.
Conventional search was a ~20 year solution to navigating the “entirety” of online content when the available content was within the scope of that innovation. That era is coming to an end. There’s just too much content to index literally and too much noise too quantify quality and that problem is getting worse much faster than crawl+search technology can scale.
So new techniques to navigating content are emerging, some of them calling back to pre-search solutions.
LLM chat assistants drop the literal reference requirement by just mushing up all the sources they can and hallucinating something vaguely relevant to incoming questions. They lean into the noise and try to find patterns in it rather than sources.
Meanwhile, “walled garden” private communities like Discord, Slack, Whatsapp/iMessage, and the growing list of login-required social content sites commit to sharing literal source content but address the noise problem by regimenting and moderating how content is incorporated.
There will almost certainly be a next generation “meta-search” that can help you frame and make queries across these walled gardens, but it’s going to take a long while for the infrastructure and business models around that to establish themselves.
In the meantime, this is what we get and what we can expect for a while.
I ran a Discord community that had the privilege of being "permanently banned" from Discord for "distributing cheats" for a game, which was reversed when we explained that no, we actually distribute anticheat software, and discussed cheats quite heavily in order to ensure that the anticheat software was effective. While the ban was reversed after much campaigning and cajoling, Discord Trust & Safety informed us that the data was lost forever.
Unfortunately, we just couldn't back down from the demands to have a discord server, and thus, one was eventually recreated. But the point stands: if you're in a Discord server of sufficient size for something you care about, take note that it can go up in-smoke. If it's a software project, you owe it to yourself to at least have GitHub Discussions so that people aren't railroaded into Discord for everything.
>Unfortunately, we just couldn't back down from the demands to have a discord server
Except you could've, and still can. People need to learn how to adapt. There's no reason a Discord server is necessary for distributing and discussing anticheat software. Thousands of much larger, more important projects are doing just fine without Discord™ servers, and part of it is the people with influence putting their feet down at the mention of Discord, a glorified spyware platform populated with the socially deprived. Discord is rarely ever a key piece of infrastructure necessary for advertising and documentation for the majority of projects that have one attached to themselves.
Why does Discord even care if you're discussing/distributing cheats, so long as you obey the law? Who exactly is the Trust & Safety team supposed to serve?
You lost me at GitHub : sure, the public part of it is being crawled, but it's still a platform (and a Microsoft-owned one to boot !), so if you care about the Web or libre software, you should stay the hell out of it, regardless of the sub-feature you use.
I'm so tired of programming communities using Discord in an official capacity. We are the folks that know better and what it means to lose this information and what it means to require sign-ups and giving private conversations to proprietary entities. If you're choosing it as the sole community of your project, you've alienated folks that value their digital privacy—and it was just as easy to set up an IRC room, Matrix channel, or XMPP MUC on a public server which offer broader platform support and a wider array of clients, and some are even decentralized. Do we not believe in FOSS software for our FOSS software?
Maybe we do, but the mass of people who are just learning is enormous. The idea of keeping this information open and searchable is a cultural thing, and big companies actively undermined this culture with their walled gardens. They became the norm for a vast part of the population. The question is: Can this be reversed?
The mess with Twitter moved a lot of people to Mastodon, we need more events like that.
This is one of the reasons I created Linen.dev(A Google searchable Slack/Discord alternative) I had a decent size Slack and Discord community for my previous project and it became a blackhole of information.
I was trying to join Discord, not having any memory of having used it before. Didn't realise I had an account already, so I made a new one. I was then flagged as "suspicious"(I was on my home network...) and told I had to provide a phone number, to verify my humanity. So I did.
It then tells me that phone number is already tied to an account, bans the new account, the old account, and blacklists my phone number. And there appears to be no recourse, no way to explain that I simply forgot I had an account already. So now I guess discord is just off limits to me.
I see people defending discord for lacking search because hurr durr so does IRC. Well, IRC at least doesn't ban you just for trying to use the service.
I hate having to join discord servers just to see a certain bit of information. It's been especially bad with some open source projects.
I've seen a couple of discord servers using a service called disc.wiki[0]. even though all their actual info is stored and edited in discord, it's then pushed to that service and they can share it without having to invite people into their servers.
Came across it first with a world of warcraft guild who collated a bunch of raid resources there
This comes pretty darn close to what the author is asking!
> Right now every channel is meant to be both transient and permanent. I know that’ll never change, so create a new “Lore” or “Archive” channel where the moderators tap on wisdom and preserve-forever statements or threads, and they get added over there. Think of it as “Pinning” but they’re pinned forever and there’s a bunch of them.
Disc.wiki seems to literally provide a similar feature, check!
> Make it possible to export this Lore/Archive channel to a reasonable file, like JSON or any other text format.
Disc.wiki provides a web interface for browsing "pinned" messages. HTML is a mostly parse-able text format, so check!
> At the very least, consider some sort of “FAQ” feature/contingency that does a similar function to the old-style FAQs, so people can contribute sets of knowledge in a structured manual instead of an endless search for terms from everyone who ever touched a server.
Ok, there's still some room for improvement. Disc.wiki's homepage claims their docs[0] are built on disc.wiki, so something similar could work.
There could be an open source version of both the cms and the bot but that's at least a step in the right direction.
This is becoming a really annoying problem for niche hobbies/communities where resources are already scarce. I think the problem is that accessibility from a search engine was a side-effect more than an intended outcome when people asked questions online. It's too easy to just chat to a real person now on Discord, get an answer, and then have that answer be buried in a matter of hours.
This problem isn't unique to Discord either. In organisations with Slack it's impossible to find answers to previously asked questions, which has in turn caused us to appoint some champions to get people to put stuff in our organisation wiki.
> Vannevar Bush's "library of a million volumes, compressed into one end of a desk" may sound quaint to us today. Bush naively assumed that immediate access to a million volumes would require the physical presence of those million volumes. His proposal -- a million volumes in every desk.
>
> The web, of course, took a different approach. A million volumes, yes, but our desks remain empty. Instead, when we summon a volume, we are granted a transient and ephemeral peek at its sole instance, out there somewhere in the world, typically secured within a large institution.
>
> Two thoughts:
>
> It's interesting that life itself chose Bush's approach. Every cell of every organism has a full copy of the genome. That works pretty well -- DNA gets damaged, cells die, organisms die, the genome lives on. It's been
working pretty well for about 4 billion years.
>
> It's also interesting to consider how someone from Bush's time might view our situation. For someone who's thinking about a library in every desk, going on the web today might feel like visiting the Library of Alexandria. Things didn't work out so well with the Library of Alexandria.
>
>It's not working so well today either.
>
> We, as a species, are currently putting together a universal repository of knowledge and ideas, unprecedented in scope and scale. Which information-handling technology should we model it on? The one that's worked for 4 billion years and is responsible for our existence? Or the one that's led to the greatest intellectual tragedies in history?
That NSA datacenter in Utah is probably at what, a few hundred exabytes of capacity now? They should make themselves useful for once and repopulate all the dead images they've certainly collected over the past few decades.
I've seen this rhetoric since Geocities. Discord is the latest scapegoat in a long lineage of successful products that are paradoxically ruining the internet and holding us back from the digital utopia we all dream of.
Thinking like this leaves out the most decentralized part of the system: people. People are the real repositories of lore, and they're the ones who bring the useful things from place to place. It's a mistake to ever think of the internet as a library. Libraries take the kind of work and time you can never expect at a massively distributed group of volunteers to do. The internet has been and will always be ephemeral.
I don't think anything has ever really been a suitable replacement for forums. Just bring back proboards and PHPBB, with an automatic CC-BY or similar license, and some archiving and exporting tools, and maybe a mobile app.
That’s because forums are themselves an abomination, just create a newsgroup in the `alt.*` hierarchy or set up a mailing list and be done. Just because you insist on using a web browser to access it doesn’t mean everyone should have to. You can use a web-based client and others can use native clients and nobody is locked out.
You need a unique login for every forum, notifications are a mess and usually via email, the UIs are poor and difficult to use, every forum usually has a different theme with different locations for buttons and settings, there's no real time way to communicate so everything takes forever, and everyone has stupid profile footers in their posts that make you scroll twice as much as you should have to.
There are also bugs like quoting a post that has images reposts all of the images again and creates even more pointless scrolling. Or forums that lack even basic image resizing so someone uploads their 24MP photos and it goes way off the side of the screen and makes the post take ages to load.
I'm sure it could all be fixed somehow, but current stuff is just awful and I absolutely dislike interacting with forums.
I've found many useful threads and answers for some super niche and obfuscated stuff on Gitter where you get some discord like benefits (better irc) and is indexed by engines. I liked their model where you can have rooms for topics, repos etc but shame it's hardly used.
Take a look at Groups.io: You can set up a group with both a mailing list and a forum for free, for up to a certain size, and then it’s some minimum price and $0.04/month per user for all the feature.
What if recording everything that transpires on the internet is a mistake?
Yes, I'm aware I should treat everything online as permanent anyways, but surely there's value in making the intentional choice to archive lore vs just recording everything.
Chat has always been ephemera, whether it was on AIM, IRC, or ICQ. Is Discord different? (Again, yes, I'm aware large IRC servers likely archived some of their content.)
The problem that arises here is that a large subset of support and documentation is "locked" behind discord's walled garden. If and when those communities disintegrate there's no real way to get that information back or archive it in some way.
As and example, it's very possible that some Stack Overflow questions from a decade ago are still relevant. If StackOverflow were a discord server then anything from 10 years ago would be impossible to search or completely gone forever.
This isn't about transcribing everything on the internet necessarily, but it is about erring on the side of archival because you don't necessarily know up front what's going to last and what's going to be useful years and decades from now.
It is different when some communities don't even bother with a website and keep asking you to come to Discord for help... which is then not on the Web to be crawled and found !
Whenever I see content organized as chat messages I know that it will fade away. It just moves too fast and in too small chunks to be searched, to be interpreted by humans years after it was created. Add a walled garden, it's dead content. It happened to IRC, it happens to Skype logs, WhatsApp, Telegram, whatever. It's convenient but I know that all my chat-like messages will be lost or at least not as easy to access as my email. Same thing for services like Discord vs web sites or forums. It will take ten years for people to realize it, enough time for them to move to something else, come back and failing to find what they were looking for. Then the next generation of content creators will be on another unarchiveable/unsearcheable medium.
I've noticed lately that Facebook has been implementing every feature that discord has, though some arbitrarily gated to iOS only or phone app only.
It occurred to me that the only functional difference between the two is that Facebook retains its original content relevancy algorithms and this can be seen as a superset of features, with also an almost monopolistic superset of users.
That leaves Discord's only reason for existence largely cultural and generational. Like the submitter, my mind immediately went back to how great IRC was and how over the years it became increasingly difficult to evangelize for what was essentially an increasingly niche culture more than a platform.
My personal time with discord functionally ended accidentally a little over a year ago with a quiet quitting over about 6 months as hundreds of individual discords with their own set of notification levels culminated in an uncontrollable torrent of annoying noises and popups.
It now gives me anxiety thinking about launching the app.
I note that if you are using one of the alternative clients (like Pidgin with purple-discord), they can store local logs that you can then index and search. There is also Harmony for managing your account without touching the Discord website. Note that using unofficial Discord clients can get you banned.
Worse are open source communities only using Slack.
As a normal user you cannot search beyond a very small amount of days without paying Slack money.
Slack, often found in American centred projects Vs European in my experience, possibly where the devs already use slack for their paid startup jobs, and where they don't really understand or like libre software as well as the average German developer.
I was trying to find some info about an issue I was seeing on ESLINT the other day... and they told me to join their discord, I couldn't believe it. No, I'm not going to join the discord for a javascript linter.
The age old question between convenience and safety.
Why did people use imageshack? Because easy, because free. Just write a small plugin for the forum software du jour, or download one, and that's it, you're set.
Discord-Is-The-Docs is just the newest iteration of this struggle, and it's not the only one. How much documentation exists "de-facto" only, sitting in some issue tracking software that may or may not be accessible 4 years from now?
Maybe that is not the issue. Maybe it is merely a symptom of how ephemeral and temporary existing systems are and 'Discord4Documents' is just a lazy way to port all the unsexy documentation to one place so that the ones that need to gorge on it, can.
Unpopular opinion: I don't think it matters too much that we lose all this.
90% of everything is crap. In the case of chat, I think that's more like 99.9% of everything is crap.
The good/important stuff will be repeated and spread outside of its original container. All the good tweets are already on Reddit or Imgur. If Twitter died tomorrow (not as unlikely as it was 6 months ago) then we'd still have a decent archive of the good tweets. All we'd lose is all the dross. The same is true for other platforms; the good stuff gets cross-posted and preserved.
I think it's important that we do forget things. We all say things every now and again that we don't mean, because we're human. I would hate a world where there was a permanent record of everything I've said. I already regret most of my Facebook posts. Also, some answers that used to be correct are now incorrect. We get this problem with tech - I often filter my search for "last year only" when bug hunting because old solutions aren't relevant any more.
I understand that maintaining an archive is important for history, don't get me wrong. I just don't think we need all of it, and I think the important stuff will get preserved through duplication.
> 90% of everything is crap. In the case of chat, I think that's more like 99.9% of everything is crap.
Right but with 90% of everything crap you moved the 10% of good things into closed (for search results) system.
> If Twitter died tomorrow (not as unlikely as it was 6 months ago) then we'd still have a decent archive of the good tweets. All we'd lose is all the dross. The same is true for other platforms; the good stuff gets cross-posted and preserved.
Tweets are searchable and you can't archive.org discord chat easily. Terrible comparison and it is not same for other platforms.
I was trying to get little big planet 2 working on an emulator recently (yesterday) and a lot of information about how to get secret dlc / costumes and use mod tools were hidden in a discord that I only found after a day of searching for the info. someone in the emulator discord recommended a different discord server, which I never would have known about and couldn't find that information anywhere else on the web (archive.org, YouTube videos, alternate search engines)
Discord is a horrible echo chamber for gamers. It is responsible for many of the social contagion-based mental issues and political confusion of our youth and young adults.
Not only FOSS projects should stay away from it, but everyone else too. Don't let your children use it.
[+] [-] Panzer04|3 years ago|reply
For example, “Voron” 3D printers are an awesome open-source design, but more and more I am directed to their discord to ask questions - many of which were, in all likelihood, asked dozens of times before. It’s great for their engaged members, who are all super helpful - but if it’s a reddit thread I can get my answer almost immediately, rather than asking, waiting and consuming someone else’s time for trivialities.
Sites like reddit at least can be readily searched from a conventional search engine, and can be crawled and stored externally in a pinch. Discord has its place, especially for game communities or other such personal things, but I’m not sure it’s ideal compared to a conventional forum as time passes and more information is built up and either lost or hidden away.
[+] [-] Springtime|3 years ago|reply
IRC isn't publicly searchable either unless someone was logging it and uploading them to some web server. IRC chats similarly often contain very useful info and answers.
Discord unfortunately doesn't have any native chat export feature so the best that can be done are third-party exporters, copy-pasting or screenshots which aren't ideal and don't end up being indexed as desired even if communities wanted them to be.
[+] [-] swatcoder|3 years ago|reply
Conventional search was a ~20 year solution to navigating the “entirety” of online content when the available content was within the scope of that innovation. That era is coming to an end. There’s just too much content to index literally and too much noise too quantify quality and that problem is getting worse much faster than crawl+search technology can scale.
So new techniques to navigating content are emerging, some of them calling back to pre-search solutions.
LLM chat assistants drop the literal reference requirement by just mushing up all the sources they can and hallucinating something vaguely relevant to incoming questions. They lean into the noise and try to find patterns in it rather than sources.
Meanwhile, “walled garden” private communities like Discord, Slack, Whatsapp/iMessage, and the growing list of login-required social content sites commit to sharing literal source content but address the noise problem by regimenting and moderating how content is incorporated.
There will almost certainly be a next generation “meta-search” that can help you frame and make queries across these walled gardens, but it’s going to take a long while for the infrastructure and business models around that to establish themselves.
In the meantime, this is what we get and what we can expect for a while.
[+] [-] Shank|3 years ago|reply
Unfortunately, we just couldn't back down from the demands to have a discord server, and thus, one was eventually recreated. But the point stands: if you're in a Discord server of sufficient size for something you care about, take note that it can go up in-smoke. If it's a software project, you owe it to yourself to at least have GitHub Discussions so that people aren't railroaded into Discord for everything.
[+] [-] Slighted|3 years ago|reply
Except you could've, and still can. People need to learn how to adapt. There's no reason a Discord server is necessary for distributing and discussing anticheat software. Thousands of much larger, more important projects are doing just fine without Discord™ servers, and part of it is the people with influence putting their feet down at the mention of Discord, a glorified spyware platform populated with the socially deprived. Discord is rarely ever a key piece of infrastructure necessary for advertising and documentation for the majority of projects that have one attached to themselves.
[+] [-] shitlord|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BlueTemplar|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] busterarm|3 years ago|reply
Wonderful.
[+] [-] slim|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] toastal|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toastal|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bad_alloc|3 years ago|reply
The mess with Twitter moved a lot of people to Mastodon, we need more events like that.
[+] [-] herbst|3 years ago|reply
I can't even tell how often I stopped looking into something because it was too discord based.
[+] [-] paintman252|3 years ago|reply
so basically no one? cause almost nobody actually cares about digital privacy
[+] [-] BlueTemplar|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hardware2win|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cheeseblubber|3 years ago|reply
You can check it out the repo here: https://github.com/linen-dev/linen.dev
Linen.dev/s/cypress slack-chats.kotlinlang.org
You can also google: https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Alinen.dev to see the conversations that has been indexed
[+] [-] mtlmtlmtlmtl|3 years ago|reply
It then tells me that phone number is already tied to an account, bans the new account, the old account, and blacklists my phone number. And there appears to be no recourse, no way to explain that I simply forgot I had an account already. So now I guess discord is just off limits to me.
I see people defending discord for lacking search because hurr durr so does IRC. Well, IRC at least doesn't ban you just for trying to use the service.
[+] [-] loktarogar|3 years ago|reply
I've seen a couple of discord servers using a service called disc.wiki[0]. even though all their actual info is stored and edited in discord, it's then pushed to that service and they can share it without having to invite people into their servers.
Came across it first with a world of warcraft guild who collated a bunch of raid resources there
[0]: https://disc.wiki
[+] [-] taink|3 years ago|reply
> Right now every channel is meant to be both transient and permanent. I know that’ll never change, so create a new “Lore” or “Archive” channel where the moderators tap on wisdom and preserve-forever statements or threads, and they get added over there. Think of it as “Pinning” but they’re pinned forever and there’s a bunch of them.
Disc.wiki seems to literally provide a similar feature, check!
> Make it possible to export this Lore/Archive channel to a reasonable file, like JSON or any other text format.
Disc.wiki provides a web interface for browsing "pinned" messages. HTML is a mostly parse-able text format, so check!
> At the very least, consider some sort of “FAQ” feature/contingency that does a similar function to the old-style FAQs, so people can contribute sets of knowledge in a structured manual instead of an endless search for terms from everyone who ever touched a server.
Ok, there's still some room for improvement. Disc.wiki's homepage claims their docs[0] are built on disc.wiki, so something similar could work.
There could be an open source version of both the cms and the bot but that's at least a step in the right direction.
[0]: https://disc.wiki/docs
[+] [-] emsixteen|3 years ago|reply
Wish it were open source though.
[+] [-] hresvelgr|3 years ago|reply
This problem isn't unique to Discord either. In organisations with Slack it's impossible to find answers to previously asked questions, which has in turn caused us to appoint some champions to get people to put stuff in our organisation wiki.
[+] [-] sovietswag|3 years ago|reply
> Vannevar Bush's "library of a million volumes, compressed into one end of a desk" may sound quaint to us today. Bush naively assumed that immediate access to a million volumes would require the physical presence of those million volumes. His proposal -- a million volumes in every desk. > > The web, of course, took a different approach. A million volumes, yes, but our desks remain empty. Instead, when we summon a volume, we are granted a transient and ephemeral peek at its sole instance, out there somewhere in the world, typically secured within a large institution. > > Two thoughts: > > It's interesting that life itself chose Bush's approach. Every cell of every organism has a full copy of the genome. That works pretty well -- DNA gets damaged, cells die, organisms die, the genome lives on. It's been working pretty well for about 4 billion years. > > It's also interesting to consider how someone from Bush's time might view our situation. For someone who's thinking about a library in every desk, going on the web today might feel like visiting the Library of Alexandria. Things didn't work out so well with the Library of Alexandria. > >It's not working so well today either. > > We, as a species, are currently putting together a universal repository of knowledge and ideas, unprecedented in scope and scale. Which information-handling technology should we model it on? The one that's worked for 4 billion years and is responsible for our existence? Or the one that's led to the greatest intellectual tragedies in history?
[+] [-] Slighted|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] madrox|3 years ago|reply
Thinking like this leaves out the most decentralized part of the system: people. People are the real repositories of lore, and they're the ones who bring the useful things from place to place. It's a mistake to ever think of the internet as a library. Libraries take the kind of work and time you can never expect at a massively distributed group of volunteers to do. The internet has been and will always be ephemeral.
[+] [-] eternityforest|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mtremsal|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] geerlingguy|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eschaton|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Saris|3 years ago|reply
You need a unique login for every forum, notifications are a mess and usually via email, the UIs are poor and difficult to use, every forum usually has a different theme with different locations for buttons and settings, there's no real time way to communicate so everything takes forever, and everyone has stupid profile footers in their posts that make you scroll twice as much as you should have to.
There are also bugs like quoting a post that has images reposts all of the images again and creates even more pointless scrolling. Or forums that lack even basic image resizing so someone uploads their 24MP photos and it goes way off the side of the screen and makes the post take ages to load.
I'm sure it could all be fixed somehow, but current stuff is just awful and I absolutely dislike interacting with forums.
[+] [-] iKlsR|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eschaton|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] EngManagerIsMe|3 years ago|reply
Yes, I'm aware I should treat everything online as permanent anyways, but surely there's value in making the intentional choice to archive lore vs just recording everything.
Chat has always been ephemera, whether it was on AIM, IRC, or ICQ. Is Discord different? (Again, yes, I'm aware large IRC servers likely archived some of their content.)
[+] [-] Root_Denied|3 years ago|reply
As and example, it's very possible that some Stack Overflow questions from a decade ago are still relevant. If StackOverflow were a discord server then anything from 10 years ago would be impossible to search or completely gone forever.
This isn't about transcribing everything on the internet necessarily, but it is about erring on the side of archival because you don't necessarily know up front what's going to last and what's going to be useful years and decades from now.
[+] [-] BlueTemplar|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] velox_neb|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pixl97|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pmontra|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elif|3 years ago|reply
It occurred to me that the only functional difference between the two is that Facebook retains its original content relevancy algorithms and this can be seen as a superset of features, with also an almost monopolistic superset of users.
That leaves Discord's only reason for existence largely cultural and generational. Like the submitter, my mind immediately went back to how great IRC was and how over the years it became increasingly difficult to evangelize for what was essentially an increasingly niche culture more than a platform.
My personal time with discord functionally ended accidentally a little over a year ago with a quiet quitting over about 6 months as hundreds of individual discords with their own set of notification levels culminated in an uncontrollable torrent of annoying noises and popups.
It now gives me anxiety thinking about launching the app.
[+] [-] pabs3|3 years ago|reply
https://pidgin.im/ https://github.com/EionRobb/purple-discord/ https://github.com/taylordotfish/harmony/
[+] [-] thinkingemote|3 years ago|reply
As a normal user you cannot search beyond a very small amount of days without paying Slack money.
Slack, often found in American centred projects Vs European in my experience, possibly where the devs already use slack for their paid startup jobs, and where they don't really understand or like libre software as well as the average German developer.
[+] [-] radicalriddler|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] usrbinbash|3 years ago|reply
Why did people use imageshack? Because easy, because free. Just write a small plugin for the forum software du jour, or download one, and that's it, you're set.
Discord-Is-The-Docs is just the newest iteration of this struggle, and it's not the only one. How much documentation exists "de-facto" only, sitting in some issue tracking software that may or may not be accessible 4 years from now?
[+] [-] A4ET8a8uTh0|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marcus_holmes|3 years ago|reply
90% of everything is crap. In the case of chat, I think that's more like 99.9% of everything is crap.
The good/important stuff will be repeated and spread outside of its original container. All the good tweets are already on Reddit or Imgur. If Twitter died tomorrow (not as unlikely as it was 6 months ago) then we'd still have a decent archive of the good tweets. All we'd lose is all the dross. The same is true for other platforms; the good stuff gets cross-posted and preserved.
I think it's important that we do forget things. We all say things every now and again that we don't mean, because we're human. I would hate a world where there was a permanent record of everything I've said. I already regret most of my Facebook posts. Also, some answers that used to be correct are now incorrect. We get this problem with tech - I often filter my search for "last year only" when bug hunting because old solutions aren't relevant any more.
I understand that maintaining an archive is important for history, don't get me wrong. I just don't think we need all of it, and I think the important stuff will get preserved through duplication.
[+] [-] ilyt|3 years ago|reply
Right but with 90% of everything crap you moved the 10% of good things into closed (for search results) system.
> If Twitter died tomorrow (not as unlikely as it was 6 months ago) then we'd still have a decent archive of the good tweets. All we'd lose is all the dross. The same is true for other platforms; the good stuff gets cross-posted and preserved.
Tweets are searchable and you can't archive.org discord chat easily. Terrible comparison and it is not same for other platforms.
[+] [-] genevra|3 years ago|reply
I was trying to get little big planet 2 working on an emulator recently (yesterday) and a lot of information about how to get secret dlc / costumes and use mod tools were hidden in a discord that I only found after a day of searching for the info. someone in the emulator discord recommended a different discord server, which I never would have known about and couldn't find that information anywhere else on the web (archive.org, YouTube videos, alternate search engines)
[+] [-] setman2|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] darthrupert|3 years ago|reply
Not only FOSS projects should stay away from it, but everyone else too. Don't let your children use it.