God I hope I live to see the day. Discord at first appears like a good IRC wrapper, but the XP of actually using it is fucking gross.
go back to forums. Support in discord is awful. Discord is not as searchable as a forum public on the internet
I want to move my music discord to a forum platform. Can anyone recommend a good FOSS forum with good iOS/mobile app support? Some of the musicians are going to resist if there isn’t a decent, usable, mobile app. It’s been a long time since I set up a forum. Last one I installed on a server was phpBB!
What about this one that you’re on right now?
Maybe Discourse? The mobile website is pretty good and there are also a number of third-party mobile apps.
Excellent. Thank you for the suggestion. I’ll take a look at Discourse.
Yeah, forums please. I hate the idea of troubleshooting information being locked behind some stupid software we can’t easily index and search. Forums can be put on archive.org, you can literally print a page, or save it as a PDF for reviewing later. You can make use of bookmark software like Linkwarden to archive things.
Discord? Not so much. You can use third party software to scrape it and save information, but no search engine can index it. Community building is great, but I loathe having to trawl through tonnes of blithering blathering conversation BS just to figure out where to find firmware for a particular chip I have is.
Makes me want to projectile vomit all over the place, throw my computer out the window, and move to convent.
Thank you! This has always been my main gripe about “collaboration platforms” in general (Discord, Slack, Teams, WebEx, etc). It’s just chat with extra steps, and does not make important information any easier to find.
Oh my gods, the mess that is Teams. When I first started working at my current company I was kind of excited because all of the software just works together. It felt novel, and I was enchanted by it. That quickly died when I realised that it makes finding anything a nightmare. There’s a billion different tabs and solutions for every single individual thing, and even multiple things within the same project. I think the main project I work on has like fifteen different test documents, and good luck trying to find the documentation for pushing stuff live! The only real way to find things is to ask someone who knows. There’s half a billion different search bars and finding the right one is just way too time consuming.
The “searchification” of fucking everything is driving me absolutely insane! No, I don’t want a search bar to be the only way to find things, and hiding the actual file functions does nobody any favors. Having a big prominent search bar in your product only tells me that you’re actively scraping my data to sell to advertisers.
That’s what happens when people don’t know how to use the system properly. They just throw their files and announcements into random places without any thought, and expect everyone to be able to find them.
In cases like that, you just need to ask a more experienced user for direction, because nothing else works. It’s not your fault you can’t find your way around a labyrinth like this. It’s the fault of everyone who turned that place into a labyrinth.
Can we also blame the software? Maybe, if the marketing was misreading. Mostly though, this sort of mess emerges as a result of ignorant people abusing the system.
https://forums.debian.net/ exists for Debian
If we’re swapping out discord, please just go with Zulip… It’s FLOSS, and has a solid company backing it that actually cares about FLOSS (They even bought the product back, after it was sold to a company that was enshittifying it)/
Better. I’d say its fully on par with Discord, minus the dark patterns. There’s a public Zulip instance where you can check it out.
Zulip sounds neat!
Shoutout to https://revolt.chat/ as a Discord alternative too.
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Maybe for the Discord use-case of joining mass-community servers it simply doesn’t have the network-effect yet. I haven’t used it much myself sadly! But I imagine a lot of users had the same idea you did: “Let’s make a server! Aw nobody’s here.”
But I think adoption would grow if we started using it for what a LOT of people use Discord for currently: The micro-server for get-togethers of smaller social circles.
- Voice chat for videogames
- Small digital meet-ups, like artists, churches, clubs, etc.
- Distance-playing tabletop RPGs.
- College study groups.
That’s where adoption starts and snowballs. Unfortunately, I believe the VC-funded data-mining corpo-apps will always have the advantage in scooping up the “I want to join a crowded mass community room” users.
But that’s okay for a start.
The way I see it, we need to be most concerned with keeping our security and privacy amongst our closest associates, and occasionally we’ll need to venture out into the “commercial-net” with our hoodies up and sunglasses on to interact with the crowd, fully aware there’s surveillance everywhere.
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This is probably much closer to discord than Zulip is, tbh. I never knew about it previously :)
Have a look at https://codeberg.org/slidge
Matrix and XMPP don’t even pretend to be Discord replacements.
In that case we could all just use email.
I’d make a blind bet on that over Matrix for suitability.
Having worked on a couple of Matrix deployments over the last year, that shit needs to be simpler and easier, yo? Once the Matrix server exists, it’s easy enough to get people to use it.
Contrast it’s ease of deployment with Mumble for example.
