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.
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.
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
