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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

IRC > Discord

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

Technical writers are very appreciated.

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.

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.

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

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.