1686
Never again (lemmy.world)
submitted 9 months ago by renzev@lemmy.world to c/linuxmemes@lemmy.world
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[-] JoMiran@lemmy.ml 313 points 9 months ago

One of the stupidest trends of all time.

[-] Zeon@lemmy.world 80 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

There is FOSS alternatives out there like Revolt or just plain old IRC which is good enough imo. The Discord bullshit is so annoying.

[-] Kecessa@sh.itjust.works 125 points 9 months ago

All chat programs are shit for long term accumulation of knowledge. Discord, revolt, IRC, they're all just as bad for it.

Forums are where you'll find people who are actual experts discussing because they want to be able to easily reference previous posts by other people.

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[-] JoMiran@lemmy.ml 60 points 9 months ago

I have been playing with the idea of a documentation.org. Something publicly funded (mostly through corporate and individual donations) that hosts technical manuals, white papers, guides, links to video tutorials (likely YouTube), FAQs, and even links to Discord and/or forums if they exist. Documents are public, free to index (no login to view), version controlled and held in perpetuity.

Obviously there is much more to it, but I think we have reached a point where something like it is required.

[-] flamingos@ukfli.uk 41 points 9 months ago

Aren't you basically describing readthedocs.io?

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[-] Babbiorsetto@lemmy.sdf.org 20 points 9 months ago

First thing that comes to mind is https://devdocs.io/about

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[-] Treczoks@lemmy.world 34 points 9 months ago

That's not the point. The point is that pointing to Discord means that there simply is no documentation.

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[-] OneCardboardBox@lemmy.sdf.org 221 points 9 months ago

Firstly, discord is entirely the wrong medium for documentation.

Secondly, documentation should be at least as accessible as the code. That is to say, if I can view the code without creating an account for some service, then I should also be able to read the documentation too.

[-] dustyData@lemmy.world 49 points 9 months ago

Documentation is bad enough. But it's worse when that's the only channel to get support. I once read a project maintainer boast that they never read the bug reports and issues on github and if anyone had a bug to just chat him up discord. I mean, dude, no wonder nobody uses your software or takes it seriously. Much less want to collaborate on the development.

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[-] LainOfTheWired@lemy.lol 156 points 9 months ago

What makes it even more crazy is 90% of projects are using github/gitlab/gitea or some other modern git platform that literally has a wiki feature built in. And everyone and their dog either knows or could very quickly learn how to use markdown to write the wiki.

If you want a chatroom at least use matrix as it's open source and privacy respecting. Though IRC is better for a community. And good old forums are best.

[-] brbposting@sh.itjust.works 22 points 9 months ago

Matrix

Open Element iOS

Start stopwatch

Syncing completes

Stop stopwatch

I have eight rooms added to the Matrix client! And Lemmings tell me it’s not Element, things are just slow.

Hoping they were wrong and I’m doing something wrong or this is totally atypical (e.g. connected to a really slow server).

FOSS is worth tradeoffs. Unindexable corporate software is regressive. But! Need some more speed over here! Individual chats/rooms are slow/buggy too.

[-] brian@programming.dev 17 points 9 months ago

try element x, on android it opens almost instantly. still in beta though

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[-] DirkMcCallahan@lemmy.world 153 points 9 months ago

Yes, this exactly! I still cannot fathom how Discord took off. It offers literally no advantages over forums, and introduces some massive disadvantages.

[-] voxelastronaut@lemmy.world 92 points 9 months ago

It took off because it was objectively the best catch-all communication option for gamers at the time. It's still the best option for certain use cases like that, but I'll never understand why people prefer it for projects, troubleshooting, updates, etc. It seems incredibly lazy and unserious to me. And the current Discord mobile layout is absolutely horrible, making for a totally miserable user experience.

[-] ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca 20 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

I hated back in 2015 when people were leaving other communication platforms for the lesser option of Discord

Even today Discord still doesn’t have directional chat and you can’t be in multiple calls at once

At least mods help mask all the other missing features

[-] vonbaronhans@midwest.social 24 points 9 months ago

I left mumble, teamspeak, and Skype for Discord.

Discord is easily the better options among those choices.

I also can't think of much use for being in more than one call at once. I dunno seems like you're just looking for a different thing. And that's okay.

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[-] soggy_kitty@sopuli.xyz 60 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

At the beginning it originally had an appeal that anyone could create a voice chat server for free in a matter of seconds.

Teamspeak needed a hosted dedicated server. Skype was "calls" and not communities. Mumble was hardly known.

I completely accept why it took off but I hate where it has gone. it's over complicated and feature creeped electron shite

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[-] wholemilk@lemm.ee 54 points 9 months ago

tbf discord is good for organizing activities in games with online multiplayer. definitely shouldn't be used for documentation in place of forums though.

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[-] art@lemmy.world 148 points 9 months ago

If the documentation is on discord, there is no documentation. Documentation has to be freely available, otherwise it doesn't count.

[-] JasonDJ@lemmy.zip 61 points 9 months ago

Friendly reminder that open source projects don’t just need coders contributing to them.

Technical writers are very appreciated.

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[-] kittenzrulz123@lemmy.world 119 points 9 months ago

[-] tdawg@lemmy.world 111 points 9 months ago

How does everyone feel about the "isolation" of information exchange? Specifically with systems like discord which encourage you to congregate behind a wall? Historically things like community forums were open to the public and thus indexable.

[-] Godort@lemm.ee 116 points 9 months ago

Hosting documentation on Discord is like hosting it on IRC.

While a useful tool in its own right, it's entirely the wrong choice for this job.

[-] tourist@lemmy.world 63 points 9 months ago

I have a strong suspicion that 90% of that shit is not being backed up. If a server gets deleted for whatever reason, all the documentation is extra gone with a side of never coming back.

No wayback machine, no wget, no open source. Add in server moderators can go rogue or get hacked at any given time. Recipe for catastrophic shitshows

[-] kautau@lemmy.world 36 points 9 months ago

Discord provides no way to backup and restore a server. There are freemium third party products and some rudimentary open source tools that do so, but yeah, it’s wild how much information about open source software (this also applies to the game development community) is just in a proprietary walled garden with a single point of failure.

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[-] Pika@sh.itjust.works 88 points 9 months ago

It's actually quite worrisome, many projects exclusively have their troubleshooting or support on Discord now what's going to happen years down the road when all those Discord servers have closed or no longer active and the invite links expire this is going to be a vast knowledge base that's just lost to the world

[-] Hootz@lemmy.ca 44 points 9 months ago

This is why going back to the moon is so hard, when msn groups closed back in the early 1970s we lost alot of very precious knowledge.

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[-] skeptomatic@lemmy.ca 65 points 9 months ago

Opened a discord link for info the other day...looked like a fucking Las Vegas casino. The.fuck.

[-] jaybone@lemmy.world 62 points 9 months ago

What the fuck happened to README.md.

Or man pages.

Or readme.txt.

Or a goddamn wiki.

[-] ARk@lemm.ee 29 points 9 months ago

best I can do is please react to the #roles channel with a ❤️ to unlock the channel. what's that? you're looking for a fix to an issue you're having in an older and supported version of the app? well sucks for you and suck my d*** we've already deleted that channel a long time ago who needs that old info anyway

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[-] callyral@pawb.social 50 points 9 months ago

Documentation is different from technical support and neither should be done on Discord.

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[-] avidamoeba@lemmy.ca 28 points 9 months ago

Never clicked on one of those Discord links, never will.

[-] Crafter72@lemmy.world 26 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Imo this kind stuff probably because these "dev" having safe space on those discord servers rather than using something properly setup site/forum.

Heck you can make your own documentation using github/gitlab built in wiki or if you want something fancier, setup a site using JAMstack/static site generator, pick suitable theme then use gh page to host it.

I even more hate this stuff when the files is gated inside discord server, dude out of all possible file hosting services why the heck you would use discord?

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[-] flatpandisk@lemm.ee 23 points 9 months ago

I have been lucky and haven’t seen this. What a horrible thing to do.

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[-] Anti_Face_Weapon@lemmy.world 21 points 9 months ago

There are so many tools to make documentation for your project. LATEX is a great one, and you can use it to easily host your documentation online. And it's really not difficult at all to do by hand. If you can have it on discord you can certainly have it in a repo.

Maybe it's a cynical ploy to increase community engagement with their project by getting them into the discord. Regardless, it gives me The Ick. Very gross.

[-] renzev@lemmy.world 28 points 9 months ago

LaTeX is great, but I prefer Markdown for software documentation (bonus points if your flavor of markdown supports LaTeX-style math). Standard LaTeX is geared towards typesetting and formatting, which is great for reports and journals, but not so much for software documentation, so you end up with a lot of boilerplate. Markdown syntax is also more accessible to beginners, I feel. And if you have a really big project that requires features like cross-references, there's things like myst markdown.

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this post was submitted on 28 Jan 2024
1686 points (98.3% liked)

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