Recently I accidentally made a Fediverse post which went viral:
stop using discord for your open source communities
That post is short, punchy, opinionated, and prescriptive, which I suspect is the cause for its virality.
Unfortunately, like many micro-blog posts, it lacks nuance, which many replies highlighted. I made the post to vent my frustration at needing to join a Discord server to interact with a community, so it is far from a measured critique of the subject.
This blog post is an attempt to address those nuances in greater detail. This is not an exhaustive analysis, and I’ve resolved to not let “perfect” be the enemy of “done”.
I wish people would stop trying to use Discord as an information repository/hub. It’s a chat program. It’s designed for people to engage in transient, real-time back-and-forth communication, not to store discussions or information for long-term use. I get so cranky at people who insist that Discord can be used like a web forum when it so obviously sucks nuts at it.
A forum has content that can stay up indefinitely, where the message history on narrowly defined subjects is packaged into a convenient container and is visible as far back in time as one cares to go. It’s easily searchable, and old discussions for which a user has new questions can be brought back up to the top of the list, in full. Trying to recreate that kind of functionality on Discord is not only stupid, but also generally futile. It’s the exact opposite of what Discord is intended to be.
I wonder if it’s due to younger people’s lack of understanding file structure. All modern operating systems offer the user the blackhole theory of storage where you just plop all of your files into one big unorganized storage bin.
It’s so bad that computer science students are entering college without understanding what folders/ directories are.
So it makes sense that people who use discord are comfortable with the idea of just having one big pile of discussions instead of having them broken up separately.
Unfortunately, it’s a big mess to navigate.
Yeah, that’s my biggest issue as well with Discord being used as a community forum alternative. The searching is extremely bad and limited and the since it’s “chat-like” you won’t find the replies to the discussion easily.
I almost never see someone link to a Discord past conversation on fixing an issue/problem solving. It’s a one-way black hole.
Absolutely. You can’t really search Discord communities and it is genuinely bad if you want to keep some important information for others to use. Channels were messy enough and the introduction of threads has made things even worse. I was once a moderator of a Discord server and I can say that moderation capabilities are (edit: were?) also very limited to the point where moderating a relatively active (2k+ members) server was getting a 24/7 job and we had like 7 mods(!).
I can’t grasp the whole concept of Discord servers even though I was moderating one. They’re bad as a knowledge base, they’re bad as a discussion platform, so why do people keep creating them? Moreover, why do so many open-source oriented communities (e.g. pine64) use the proprietary platform that is Discord? The only reason I see is solely the fact that Discord is very well known, and many people use it. And the situation is getting even worse: as far as I am aware Discord, which was initially created for communication between gamers, was widely used during the pandemic for online classes and a lot of development teams even use it as an alternative to Slack.
I can’t grasp the whole concept of Discord servers even though I was moderating one. They’re bad as a knowledge base, they’re bad as a discussion platform, so why do people keep creating them?
I mean, as a chat room, it’s fantastic. It’s a massively upgraded IRC (except in terms of the ease of discovering new servers), with QOL features I didn’t even know how badly I wanted back in the old Yahoo! Chat days (such as the ability to spin up a temporary thread to take an in-depth conversation out of the main channel without going to DMs). It’s for discussions that happen right now and are not meant to be conserved forever because, generally speaking, they’re not expected to be that important. I love discord for that, because I miss chat rooms.
But it’s absolutely garbage for being a repository of static knowledge. Releasing patch notes only in discord is ridiculous.
If you were trying to manage a server with 2k active users 7 mods isn’t all that much. Assuming for a moment this was a little while ago (discord did release some pretty nifty mod tools over the last year or so) and you had not set anything up in regards to third party bots.
With the newest discord modtools in addition with third party bots discord is in my experience very good to manage for a chat platform. Certainly much easier than IRC ever was and still is for that matter.
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Of course not all 2k were active but the server definitely had a very active and dedicated core of users and we had many newbies joining almost everyday. The worst I remember, actually, was when one of our admins decided to promote the project on TikTok (for some reason) and his content was blessed by the algorithm. It was a literal meat grinder.
I’m not sure if there was even something that could have been automated. Like, of course you could automate banning raiders or spammers, iirc we had that, but what is there to automate when you’re dealing with plain xenophobia/racism/homophobia (and this was not a rare occasion)? Introducing word filters might work in some contexts but this was not the case since it was a very multilingual server. Well, server-wide filters would be useless, channel-wide filters could be helpful, though, but I doubt there is a way to implement them without bots, unless Discord introduced such capabilities.
Good to hear that a lot has now changed for the better though but it would not really improve my experience back then simply because the community of discord servers can sometimes be pretty awful. Maybe it’ll go away as Discord is getting way more mainstream nowadays but even just a few years ago it was a very specific kind of people that joined Discord and they were not always nice.
Putting a community on Discord also means locking it (and all the information you create over time) behind Discord’s license terms, policies, and whims.
I care about my users. I wouldn’t ask them to agree to those terms, let alone allow Discord to be gatekeeper of my communities.
Worse yet. Install a whitelist firewall or have a look at the connections required to access Discord. You will immediately stop using it. It involves dozens of undocumented raw IP address connections and weird ports. Top this off by telling me what their business model is and how they are profitable. They provide no documentation whatsoever about what they are doing and why. The best explanation anyone has ever given me when asked why they use discord is, ‘because everyone else is doing it.’ That is idiotic nonsense.
The issue is a social platform is useless without the social aspect. If someone’s entire friend group is on one site, they’re unlikely to move to another. Trying to get the whole friend group to move is also easier said than done due to inertia and t eother members of the friend group also being in communities and friend groups that aren’t on the new platform. Now imagine that on the scale of a site like Discord and combine it with FOSS alternatives often have fewer features, less software support (for bots, clients, etc), and higher barriers to entry and you have a recipe for disaster for many new social media platforms. ~Strawberry
This is aptly timed for me—I spent some time this weekend trying to decide what chat service to use for a project of mine. I’m just starting to try building the community, so it feels like I should have a chat ready if/when people start showing up.
I didn’t consider Discord because I wanted to stick with free software, for the reasons outlined in this post and other similar ones. In the end, I settled on Zulip, but would be happy to reconsider (so far, the chat is just me talking to myself!) if anyone wants to suggest an alternative or has experience in a similar situation.
Supposedly Revolt is FOSS and is similar to Discord. I haven’t tried it yet, though.
I would use Matrix, because it’s completely open and distributed (like the fediverse). I’m not sure whether I would use a public server or host my own.
Matrix is also good for private chats, offers end-to-end encryption, and is gaining on Discord in terms of features, so anyone creating an account would likely end up finding it useful for more than just my little community.
Thanks! I did consider Matrix as well, and in fact just set up a personal server yesterday. I was worried about it being too high of a barrier to entry (the reason I stayed away from my first instinct, IRC…). At least Zulip is intuitively just a chat app, even though it might turn people away who don’t want to register for yet another account. One option could be to add Matrix and IRC bridges for Zulip, in the hopes of keeping everyone happy?
I’m still not sure what the best way forward is. It’s a tricky balance between promoting FOSS and remaining widely familiar.
Eh, I have a serious love-hate relationship with Matrix. For groups its fine. But trying to communicate with individuals on matrix is a major PITA, because of its end-to-end encryption which causes constant issues, IME. It’s great, in theory. But, in practice is just far more of a PITA than its worth.
I’ve been considering switching to Matrix for individual texting. What makes it a PITA in your experience? Is it hard to create conversations, do messages not get delivered, or is it something else?
If you aren’t on the same server, encryption doesn’t always work very well, and you semi-frequently end up with conversations where you can’t read each other’s messages. Id you try get signed out of your app on a given device, you’ll likely lose past conversations. Etc. It’s just… obnoxious.
entirely agree with this blog. If you are running open source or Free software communties, don’t use discord to facilitate conversation.
100%. There are community tools made for this purpose. Make a discourse forum, if your project is on GitHub use GitHub issues and discussions. Discourse is fantastic, and is purpose made with all the features and gamification you could need for community knowledge management and q&a.
These are actively indexed and can hold a wealth of information that is invaluable to users of your open source project. And decreases the load on you.
Also, somehow, you can get worse than discord… Slack. Slack servers that wipe anything more than 10k messages ago is absolute cancer for communities and community support…
Also, somehow, you can get worse than discord… Slack.
We go can deeper…
MS Teams
Please no
As an open source developer.
Fuck that. Discord allows me to do so much and centralize communication. Small developers do not have the manpower to monitor multiple communications. I know people love to tout matrix, but it’s features pale in comparison to discord.
Additionally, 99.9% of your users are already on discord. The other 0.1% are going to bitch and whine about the fact that you’re not using matrix.
Why not use a forum so that search engines can actually index information from the support site? Users are capable of going to forums. ~Strawberry
Users are capable of going to discord. The vast majority of your users already have a discord account too! Awesome!
Forums are a pain in the ass to moderate and maintain. If you need a knowledgebase, wikis exist.
If I may ask, what makes Discord less of a pain to moderate? And forums also tend to be good for users to ask more obscure questions that aren’t likely to be easily answered on a wiki and for other users to be able to look them up later. ~Strawberry
Discord has forums and enabling slowmode means that you can enforce longform content in them. The search in discord is better than any search in phpbb by miles, this isn’t even an argument.
Discord moderation is easy. See something, right click, perform action. Automod. Bots. The entirety of the “Safety Setup” section on discord servers. Verification levels. I mean, it’s not even remotely close. People arguing that forums are better are either delusional or have never really owned a remotely active discord server.
However, content in Discord servers can’t be indexed by search engines. ~Strawberry
This is something I said even recently here but the general consensus is that “it’s fine”.
It’s incredible how much people tend to just dismiss a valid concern when it’s not an immediate threat to themselves.
It’s also about the barrier of entry. Discord has a barrier, but it is not high. The fact that this platform is their commercial product ensures that issues are minimal (well…). For non tech-savvy people and those who don’t have time / don’t want to put in time to troubleshoot and figure things out this is the reason they go for these commercial solutions.
Just my observations from trying to switch friends and family over to free open source alternatives. It was a huge hassle to even get people to try out and move to signal, but signal has lowered the barrier quite a bit and now it’s stable (was not always as fast and stable as now).
I do not like when a community asks me to join their Discord server if I need support on something. Not everyone uses Discord and some that do do not even want to be using it. I use it for work and friends, I wouldn’t use it otherwise.
I would much rather be on matrix… but discord sure is convenient.
Have you tried Revolt? It’s supposed to FOSS and offer similar functionality to Discord. I keep meaning to try it, but haven’t gotten around to it yet.
I do have a few of questions about that site that basically explain why people haven’t moved there. Does it have the same level of software support (bots, clients, etc)? Does it have a similarly large set of large and niche communities to Discord? Does it have a barrier to entry as low or lower than Discord? Is there both a large incentive for friend groups and communities to move to Revolt and a large disincentive to stay on Discord that the average person cares about enough to act upon? It doesn’t seem like the prognosis for Revolt overtaking Discord is very good, unfortunately. I wish I knew how to overcome all of that and the network effect but I don’t, unfortunately. One major problem is that it’s not unlikely that Revolt servers could become effectively centralized in practice if it does overtake Discord simply because the vast majority of people to not have the time, knowledge, or resources to read and modify Revolt’s code and/or host their own web server. ~Strawberry
I think we already know what would have to happen to get people to move. Discord needs to screw up and drive people away. Like why most of us are here. Lemmy was around for years, it had most of the problems you list, less software support, fewer communities, higher barrier to entry, it still has most of that actually. Reddit gave Lemmy its chance, by screwing up their own platform, Discord will need to do the same thing to see an exodus.
That isn’t all though, Revolt needs to be ready, to have communities and people talking about it, while Discord pisses its users off. Matrix already has that capacity, the question is if/when will Discord screw up?
That’s another major problem. Waiting for that is like waiting on the lottery to read your number. Well, maybe not quite the lottery, more like some sweepstakes that’s kinda popular but not really? I don’t know, you get the point. ~Strawberry
I absolutely agree. We have no idea if its ever even going to happen, Facebook has never had an exodus the way Twitter and Reddit have, for example. There are also a variety of scenarios where Discord fails and no one migrates to decentralized FOSS platforms. Some AI product steals our attention more effectively than social media, or the infrastructure supporting the Internet breaks down, or climate chaos upends all our lives and no one has time for Discord or anything like it. Frankly, I expect something like that to be what does in most online platforms.
I think you’re right in your original comment, it’s probably not gonna happen.
IRC, anyone?
Matrix, anyone?
Why not both?
1000% came in here to say I wish we all still just used IRC. Soooo hard to find a good, active IRC channel about a topic I care about these days 🙁
Plus, Discord is real pissy about 3rd party clients. I mean, at least theirs is good, unlike…well… But I just want to run everything from the command line without being banned, dammit! RIP cordless T_T
