I never understood this obsession of open source projects with Discord. Why is Discord treated as if it was somehow different from all the other commercial offerings?
It's more than open source. A political party I tried to join organized via Discord. A hardware project offered support only through Discord. Seems most "communities" have one now. But I hate Discord and it's a poor tool for those jobs! A subreddit might have been better as I wouldn't need an account to view proir posts for troubleshooting, or organizing meetings.
Young people love it. Slack isn't right for "communities" as it's very specifically marketed as a work tool (and it's unless for community organizing building with how it's structured money wise now). IRC is probably too difficult an idea for young people to get behind + they like streaming their video games and movies. I guess it's like if teamspeak meets irc. Either way, if you wanna get old people and young people together for some community and want the tech to be low friction, discord seems to bridge that gap very well.
I watched a few open source projects I was a part of move from Slack to Discord. Slack wasn't a great fit IMO, but Discord has always felt much worse to me.
I'm not a gamer so I only used Discord for those open source projects, maybe it'd be different otherwise. It always seemed that most of Discord's efforts went into new features rather than keeping things stable. The constant churn and restructuring of the UI is a huge pain in the butt, and with a larger server we spent way too much time moving around channels and managing automations and rules.
It has a better interface than everything else by a long mile. People like using it. I like using it even though voice call quality is way worse than competition, the app is bloated and slow but the interface is just so nice: readable, clear, intuitive.
I and my core group of friends spends well over a thousand dollars with Discord each year for our server boosts and their nitro accounts all because we wanted a premium, no-ads experience for our private community. If a server owner doesn’t want this, they should be able to opt out. Discord can kill the golden goose if they aren’t careful.
The reason I'd always resisted Discord as much as possible is because it was obvious it had no viable business model. Between a commitment to no ads and having nothing reserved for a paid tier worth paying for it was obvious it would either need to be acquired (I still am shocked Amazon didn't buy it) or ignore it's commitment to users and start introducing ads.
The actual, real usability of Discord is way better than IRC's, it's not even close.
Every time I tried to join IRC it has been a massive pain in the ass. So first if you want to join anything on libera.chat, you have to register through NickServ and provide an email, which is already nonsense. Why would email be required?
And here's the neat part: you can't register if you use Tor/VPN/whatever, which is mad funny and very ironic, considering how IRC is supposed to be this "hacker culture" thing. "Oh but please register from a residential IP", really?
Not saying Discord is better in this particular regard, but still.
If someone says "this isn't a problem with IRC, just a libera.chat thing", well it doesn't matter because it's the de-facto network for most everything open-source.
Notice how I'm not even mentioning all the really obvious usability aspects, like voice/video chat, images and everything else. The general nerd response seems to be "who needs that anyway"/"just send links instead". Literally noone cares about that, it's wasting time, people will just use Discord, which has all the features that are (rightfully) expected.
[+] [-] weinzierl|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] skidd0|1 year ago|reply
Or an email address.
Or a contact form.
But no, only the aptly named Discord.
[+] [-] neom|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] _heimdall|1 year ago|reply
I'm not a gamer so I only used Discord for those open source projects, maybe it'd be different otherwise. It always seemed that most of Discord's efforts went into new features rather than keeping things stable. The constant churn and restructuring of the UI is a huge pain in the butt, and with a larger server we spent way too much time moving around channels and managing automations and rules.
[+] [-] bluecalm|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Levitating|1 year ago|reply
Discord aimed to replace TeamSpeak and Skype but it is such a stable platform with so much customization it can be used for almost anything.
People even use it as a customer support system or as a command and control center.
My university uses Discord, my skydiving club uses Discord, many FOSS communities use Discord.
Discord has also open sourced quite a few of their tools.
And Discord has always supported the creation of bots via their stable REST api.
[+] [-] wintermutestwin|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Inf0s3c|1 year ago|reply
Really not that hard to understand.
IRC sucks, federated systems suck (not that they have to, they just do right now)
Be the change you want to see in the world and make something that works better than Discord and fits with your philosophy.
Why better? Because no one else cares about your philosophy they will only go through the motions to jump ship if it’s a better fit for their routine
[+] [-] hombre_fatal|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] iwontberude|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] blueboo|1 year ago|reply
https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/
[+] [-] ocdtrekkie|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] avgDev|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] qweqwe14|1 year ago|reply
Every time I tried to join IRC it has been a massive pain in the ass. So first if you want to join anything on libera.chat, you have to register through NickServ and provide an email, which is already nonsense. Why would email be required?
And here's the neat part: you can't register if you use Tor/VPN/whatever, which is mad funny and very ironic, considering how IRC is supposed to be this "hacker culture" thing. "Oh but please register from a residential IP", really?
Not saying Discord is better in this particular regard, but still.
If someone says "this isn't a problem with IRC, just a libera.chat thing", well it doesn't matter because it's the de-facto network for most everything open-source.
Notice how I'm not even mentioning all the really obvious usability aspects, like voice/video chat, images and everything else. The general nerd response seems to be "who needs that anyway"/"just send links instead". Literally noone cares about that, it's wasting time, people will just use Discord, which has all the features that are (rightfully) expected.
[+] [-] ChrisArchitect|1 year ago|reply
More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39891263
[+] [-] infinitezest|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] skidd0|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] k8svet|1 year ago|reply
If only a bunch of folks had told us EXACTLY THIS WOULD HAPPEN.
[+] [-] ratg13|1 year ago|reply
You get what you pay for.
[+] [-] StopHammoTime|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] nextlevelwizard|1 year ago|reply
If you run ads you suck. If you cant run your shitty website without ads you shouldn’t be running a website.
[+] [-] Am4TIfIsER0ppos|1 year ago|reply
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