4 pane comic of dolan on the left and spooderman on the right

pane 1 (dolan): cum join opensurce cummunity!
pane 2 (spooderman): shure! how joyn?
pane 3 (dolan): Here discord! (with discord logo)
pane 4 (spooderman with tears in eyes): y u do dis?

  • ono@lemmy.ca
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    10 个月前
    • Terrible format for archiving knowledge
    • Terrible tool for retrieving knowledge
    • Locks community access behind a corporate license agreement
    • Hands control of community-created content to a corporation
    • Prevents indexing by web search engines
    • Antithetical to interoperability
    • Privacy-hostile

    A web forum is far better in most cases. If you can’t manage to run your own, there are plenty of lemmy servers that will do it for you. Even an email list (with searchable archives) would be better than Discord.

    If you have collaborative documents that outgrow the forum format, use a wiki.

    If real-time chat is needed, irc or matrix.

    A project hosting its community on Discord is a project that won’t get my contributions.

    • elrik@lemmy.world
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      10 个月前

      I recently went through these exact pains trying to contribute to a project that exclusively ran through Discord and eventually had to give up when it was clear they would never enable issues in their GitHub repos for “reasons.”

      It was impossible to discover the history behind anything. Even current information was lost within days, having to rehash aspects that were already investigated and decided upon.

      • corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca
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        10 个月前

        would never enable issues in their Git…

        That’s a worrying sign for a project.

        Did you clone their Git and start tracking issues there? ;-)

      • wrekone@lemmyf.uk
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        10 个月前

        It’s the “see no evil” approach. If you didn’t report the issue while the admin was online, then they aren’t compelled to do anything about it. Convenient for the project maintainer who doesn’t actually like maintaining things. Awful for the rest of us.

    • corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca
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      10 个月前

      A web forum is far better in most cases

      It’s sad when a web forum is better than the tool you’re considering. Bumps, aggressive garbage collection, no Resurrection, it’s weird.

      I’m old, I guess. I miss NNTP, mainly for the archived posts I could discuss with the authors for an updated take or revised solution or some clarification. And yes, I know there’s a good webUI front-end for an NNTP server as a back-end. ;-)

      • ono@lemmy.ca
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        10 个月前

        On the bright side:

        Aggressive garbage collection and automatic thread locking are optional settings in most web forum software I’ve seen.

        Lemmy shares some of the important parts of Usenet, and could develop into something that comes close.

    • Omega_Haxors@lemmy.ml
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      10 个月前

      The worst thing is that the mods can ban you for any or no reason, locking you completely out of the information they’re providing. That is beyond an unreasonable amount of power that they can have over a user, and you just KNOW they’re going to use that for political reasons.

      Also the fact they can delete stuff in a way that makes them invisible to law enforcement, so a lot of illegal shit goes down there too. Combine that with the naturally hierarchal structure of discord leads to a lot of people using that power to abuse some of the more vulnerable members and of course once you call it out, poof goes the messages and poof goes your access to their server.

    • SurpriZe@lemm.ee
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      10 个月前

      Perfectly summarized and the stance everyone should take for the wellbeing of any community. Look at cs.rin.ru for example.

    • JustEnoughDucks@feddit.nl
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      10 个月前

      Lemmy also doesn’t get indexed by web search engines. I have yet to find a single post from lemmy on google or DDG even when specifically searching

  • vvv@programming.dev
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    10 个月前

    it’s awful and I hate it. I generally prefer not to have a shared identity across communities, and there’s no way to create a usable discord identity without a phone number.

    • snooggums@kbin.social
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      10 个月前

      The worst part is that they act like you can set up an account without a number, but then it acts like there is ‘suspicious activity’ and requires you to verify with the phone immediately.

      Just rant into this yesterday trying to set up a work account as my work phone is not a mobile phone with sms.

      Was registering really suspicious?

      • deweydecibel@lemmy.world
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        10 个月前

        Wait I thought this was dependent on the channel?

        I’ve got a Discord account, on a lot of different channels for FLOSS and other things, and I’ve never set up a phone number. I have occasionally come across certain channels that I can’t join without one, but the vast majority I’ve joined don’t seem to require it

        Not to defend Discord, by the way. It’s fucking terrible and I despise this trend of telling people to come to your little private clubhouse to learn more about your software so I can sort through a bunch of obnoxious gif and image spam, while using an absolutely terrible search engine.

        • snooggums@kbin.social
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          10 个月前

          That is what the help files say, but when I tried to register a work account yesterday it did the verify you are human, then said there was something suspicious and sent the email verification, then said there was something suspicious and is now requiring a phone verification even though I did not enter a phone number.

          At no point was I ever signed in and able to even pick a channel. This all happened while trying to log in for the first time through the browser at work with my work email. I guess that someone else might not hit that phone requirement as I only tried to do the registration once, but it is in no way limited to joining a particular channel.

        • vvv@programming.dev
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          10 个月前

          Sometimes it depends on discord itself finding you suspicious, for some definition of suspicious. perhaps a user agent whitelist? lack of Google cookie?

            • vvv@programming.dev
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              10 个月前

              I’ve had it happen on servers where that moderation option is not enabled. My worst experience was trying to join a friend group’s discord via an invite link shared with me. I was prompted to create an account with email, and I did. I was then shown a read-only view of the server: I could see all messages and other folks could see I joined and 👋 to me. I could not send messages myself, however, without verifying with a phone number. Further, I couldn’t use a Google voice number (my primary number) to verify, nor my “real” number which was associated to another account.

    • Scoopta@programming.dev
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      10 个月前

      🤔…is this a new requirement? I have 2 accounts. Neither with phone numbers and it’s never asked me for one

        • Scoopta@programming.dev
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          10 个月前

          Ah, I’ve only had one guild require it and I told them to fly a kite XD…I thought this was becoming a general thing and I was going to be really annoyed

  • rimjob_rainer@discuss.tchncs.de
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    10 个月前

    Discord separates and controls possibly useful information from the public internet. It’s one of the worst platforms to use.

    • Appoxo@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      10 个月前

      Well…Forums need to be maintained. Discord is free and easy and fast to use.
      Discord should allow the servers to be browsable. But you can only participate by logging in.

      Doesnt Disqus handle it like that as well? Same account on every website utilizing disqus?

      • Magnetar@feddit.de
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        10 个月前

        easy and fast to use.

        It just isn’t, if you don’t already have an account with them. And even then, I personally find ich horrible to use.