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FLOSS communities right now (i.imgflip.com)

submitted 9 months ago by onlinepersona@programming.dev to c/programmer_humor@programming.dev

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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?

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[-] ono@lemmy.ca 309 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

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 72 points 9 months ago

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 39 points 9 months ago

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 27 points 9 months ago

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 18 points 9 months ago

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 8 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

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 12 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

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.