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Stop Using Discord

malenfant.net

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Re: Stop Using Discord

#21

Post by hprotagonist »

poulpy123 wrote: post #19

I totally agree, and also stop using FB groups it's even worse. But the issue is no replacement is proposed by the author. Discord has the advantage of: - being free - being maintained by someone else - being used by a lot of people, so no need to create a new account for many users - being very useful as a chat and growing organically as support from there I don't see many competitors available. For example discours…

libera.chat is free. the network doesn’t compel registration, even! (though some channels do)

Re: Stop Using Discord

#22

Post by Groxx »

mikl wrote: post #10
Insalgo wrote: post #4

Any recommendations for a free engineering community forum?

https://www.discourse.org is great, best forum software I ever saw. You have probably used it already somewhere. They have a paid hosting offer, but you can also self-host it for free. And it’s open source.

> Managed forum hosting from $50/month

Yeowch. $50/mo is a huge cost for anything that's not making money.

Re: Stop Using Discord

#23

Post by beeboobaa3 »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #18
Svip wrote: post #13

Where is the Wordpress.com (i.e. commercial hosting) for forums? I maintain a SMF forum that's lasted since 2000, but I get why most people aren't jumping into creating a new forum, because it's rather tedious compared to Discord. Hell, better ask instead; where is the Discord but for forums (real ones, not Discord)?

Isn't that just Reddit?

No, on reddit you are subjected to the reddit administrators their policies. You have no real control. The user interface is also awful if you're interested in content older than a day.

Re: Stop Using Discord

#24

Post by hprotagonist »

Svip wrote: post #13

Where is the Wordpress.com (i.e. commercial hosting) for forums? I maintain a SMF forum that's lasted since 2000, but I get why most people aren't jumping into creating a new forum, because it's rather tedious compared to Discord. Hell, better ask instead; where is the Discord but for forums (real ones, not Discord)?

discourse has a few commercial hosting platforms. communiteq is one i’ve used.

Re: Stop Using Discord

#25

Post by 542458 »

mikl wrote: post #10
Insalgo wrote: post #4

Any recommendations for a free engineering community forum?

https://www.discourse.org is great, best forum software I ever saw. You have probably used it already somewhere. They have a paid hosting offer, but you can also self-host it for free. And it’s open source.

I don’t get the love for discourse. I’m not one of those “every webpage should work without JS” purists, but Discourse seems intent to reinvent basic web features with JS and has some performance issues and as a consequence of both often (maybe when hitting something not in cache?) takes ages to load during which time you get nothing but a poorly-styled loading throbber, you can’t even read the content as it loads in. Even official instances are incredibly slow at times. One topic on https://meta.discourse.org/ just took over 30 seconds to load for me. Discourse just feels somewhat overengineered.

Also anything that’s $50 a month doesn’t compete at the low end (which is where most OSS discussion hosting would exist) with Discord, which is free.

Re: Stop Using Discord

#26

Post by lulzury »

I don't like Discord as much as the next person, but people use Discord because it's convenient. Why do people prefer Discord to IRC when the latter is free, open source, and indexable?

Re: Stop Using Discord

#28

Post by CM30 »

beretguy wrote: post #2

The rest of the quote: > Stop using Discord for anything else than just chatting. Stop dumping knowledge into a black hole. Use forums. Use the open web. Future nerds will thank you.

This is the key part here. There's nothing wrong with using Discord to chat about random stuff. If you're talking to your friends about your latest night out or playing online games with a community, then Discord is fine.

The issue is how some communities use it as a wiki, documentation and forum replacement for information that should be available on the public internet. This is a huge problem for speedrunning and modding communities, which seem to love using Discord and Google Sheets and other awkward 'must know the link to access' tools for information that should probably be in a wiki somewhere.

Re: Stop Using Discord

#29

Post by Svip »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #18
Svip wrote: post #13

Where is the Wordpress.com (i.e. commercial hosting) for forums? I maintain a SMF forum that's lasted since 2000, but I get why most people aren't jumping into creating a new forum, because it's rather tedious compared to Discord. Hell, better ask instead; where is the Discord but for forums (real ones, not Discord)?

Isn't that just Reddit?

Mostly, yes. Particularly in the terms of "Discord-difying forums". But you cannot have multiple subforums for your community on Reddit (unless you do something weird with subsubreddits, but those won't be clearly visible). Discord allows you to have several channels. Additionally, I'd like an alternative that isn't threaded like Reddit and HN. Threaded communities have their place, but classic chronological topics also do.

Re: Stop Using Discord

#30

Post by lobsterthief »

Svip wrote: post #13

Where is the Wordpress.com (i.e. commercial hosting) for forums? I maintain a SMF forum that's lasted since 2000, but I get why most people aren't jumping into creating a new forum, because it's rather tedious compared to Discord. Hell, better ask instead; where is the Discord but for forums (real ones, not Discord)?

It’s called Discourse and it’s really great
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