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Revolt: Open-Source Alternative to Discord

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Re: Revolt: Open-Source Alternative to Discord

#411

Post by notepad0x90 »

juliangmp wrote: post #402
notepad0x90 wrote: post #363

I think I'm using every chat platform that has wide adaption in tech circles. The one trend I'm seeing is that most of us just use the platform random communities insist on us using, we don't use them out of preference. And those communities choose the platforms because of the support they're getting from companies like discord and the amount of work needed to moderate and administer the community under the platform.…

>If I need support with an open source library of some sort, I don't mind using IRC , MS Teams or anything in between. I honestly cannot think of something worse. Chat applications are not forums and they generally suck at replacing them. Not only does this make topics harder to follow and much harder to find to begin with, it also makes the maintainers bother with the same questions again and again, because users ca…

it sure beats mailing lists. look at LKML. I prefer discord over LKML any day. But some people prefer them over anything else. That's kind of my point, I don't have the time or energy to complain about this, I just want to talk to the right people. No one asked my preference, so in practical terms, it doesn't even matter.

Re: Revolt: Open-Source Alternative to Discord

#412

Post by aryan14 »

elif wrote: post #320
elif wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest flaw of Discord is the federated nature and how disconnected each discord is from any others. As a casual game enjoyer, I found myself somehow juggling over 50 discords in ca 2021, each with their own server rules and conventions for how to use @all tags, alerting thresholds, etc. It's too much burden on the user to manage the incoming information and resulted in a kind of anxiety about reading red marked…

There's also the shady components of discord. All manner of illegal activity thrives behind custom access control. The most notable instance in media is the leaking of classified materials, the creation of swatting/ddos communities which gave us the 'BigBalls' hacker employed by doge, But more sickeneningly recently it allowed this doctor to successfully target countless children, including convincing a 13 year old g…

This isn’t fair to say.

Any platform that’s popular will have its share of undesirable users, out of the company’s control.

Discord has very good moderation in contrast to other platforms (Constant banwaves on illegal/shady servers, terminating accounts frequently, etc)

Re: Revolt: Open-Source Alternative to Discord

#413

Post by skydhash »

rikroots wrote: post #389
Legion wrote: post #352

Pushing what used to occur on web forums into Discord chats has been a net loss for the Internet.

I started a Discord 'server' for my JS Canvas library thing a couple of years ago because - apparently - it was a "good way to build a community". Not only have I failed to build a community, I've grown to hate its UI and confusion of channels. I think Discord is overkill for my requirements. But I still want a (free) venue (which is not GitHub) where people can ask questions and - maybe, just maybe - form a communit…

IMO, you should have different channels of communication: A wiki which has commonly requested information; A manual for references; A bug tracker for issues. I strongly believe that IM should be reserved for active contributors. Forums should mainly be user to user help and support.

Re: Revolt: Open-Source Alternative to Discord

#414

Post by nijave »

happyweasel wrote: post #365
Legion wrote: post #352

Pushing what used to occur on web forums into Discord chats has been a net loss for the Internet.

Absolutely. Information can no longer be retrieved via internet search. Discord and Slack are effectively silos.

Sure but you can search for communities then use the platform-native search. Not as convenient as a search engine natively supporting, though.

Re: Revolt: Open-Source Alternative to Discord

#415

Post by doctorhandshake »

celdon25 wrote: post #405
ZeWaka wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What features are you talking about? I admin a server of 9k. The new onboarding stuff, automod, opt-in roles?

I’ll assume it was pronoun roles unless we hear back

Not sure why you would assume that.

GP was on track - they wanted voice channels, many of them, before we had any demonstrated demand for it at all.

They wanted additional, opt-in roles, so anyone could @ a cadre of self-appointed ‘question answerers’ if they, I guess, (and this still isn’t clear to me), felt as though their question was more important than the questions of those who didn’t elect to do so.

They wanted auto-mod stuff that would maybe somehow automatically answer people’s questions (‘AI’), etc

The software in question (TouchDesigner) is a complex, idiosyncratic, node-based programming environment with a tough learning curve and a GUI dependency that makes question-asking and -answering more onerous than non-graphical programming.

As mods we’ve put a ton of effort into helping the torrent of new arrivals ask better (often less lazy or broad) questions and thus get better answers, more often. Many of the requests we get are well-intentioned but seem to think the reason questions go unanswered is because no one saw them, when it’s obvious to us that in many cases, they’re just extremely lazy questions.

Unreal has a similar problem, in my experience, with the difficulty of asking a question with sufficient information making it common that those willing to help are still only inclined to go the distance with people who are willing to meet them halfway.

Re: Revolt: Open-Source Alternative to Discord

#416

Post by doctorhandshake »

smittywerben wrote: post #336
doctorhandshake wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started and mod a server of about 6k users for a community around a niche software used by professionals, students, and hobbyists. We keep it really simple and focused primarily on people getting questions answered. Recently a small but vocal cadre of hobbyists have been demanding more Discord-y features oriented towards socializing with other users of the software, and our reticence to complicate the server and ad…

Are you a partnered server? Are they even still doing those? I've never been a mod. I'm just an adult who understands Discord's general operations.

No just a community server.

Re: Revolt: Open-Source Alternative to Discord

#417

Post by MisterTea »

_mitterpach wrote: post #31

Note that there have been rumours about Discord preparing to go public, I reckon this might be made in preparation for it. I think it is a wise move to offer an alternative. The design is very similar to Discord, could this possibly even go to a copyright breach or is the bar for that set too high?

> The design is very similar to Discord

And Discords design is very similar to mIRC.

Re: Revolt: Open-Source Alternative to Discord

#418

Post by jdwithit »

Legion wrote: post #352

Pushing what used to occur on web forums into Discord chats has been a net loss for the Internet.

Agree 100%. Not the most important example, but I used to be heavily into World of Warcraft. The go-to place for discussion of high end play was a forum run by the guild "Elitist Jerks". Everything was there out in the open, to be read and indexed and discussed and preserved indefinitely. The forum eventually went away, but the info was still available thanks to the Wayback Machine.

Fast forward to 2020 when Blizzard put out WoW Classic (basically the original 2004 state of the game again, as a nostalgia trip). I was bummed to find that all discussion of the game had moved into discord servers. And not just one. There was a separate discord for every single class (mage, warrior, priest, etc). Sometimes more than one if the community couldn't agree on which was best. Every guild had their own discord. Special purpose servers existed for niche topics. If you wanted to find a piece of information, you had to hope that a helpful moderator had pinned it somewhere, or else rely on a crappy search feature. If a server is shut down or you get banned, all of that info is lost forever. It's a nightmare.

Discord is a perfectly good tool for real time chat. It is a TERRIBLE tool for summarizing and preserving knowledge. But unfortunately it's increasingly being used for that purpose and I do not for the life of me understand why.

Re: Revolt: Open-Source Alternative to Discord

#419

Post by MisterTea »

peterjaap wrote: post #8

So you have the chance to redesign Discord and you decide to stick with the unicorn-puking emoji-littered eye-scorching UX/UI garbage that Discord is? Interesting.

Honestly I much prefer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Comic_Chat

Edit: Bonus, it comes with its own font!

Re: Revolt: Open-Source Alternative to Discord

#420

Post by culi »

juliangmp wrote: post #402
notepad0x90 wrote: post #363

I think I'm using every chat platform that has wide adaption in tech circles. The one trend I'm seeing is that most of us just use the platform random communities insist on us using, we don't use them out of preference. And those communities choose the platforms because of the support they're getting from companies like discord and the amount of work needed to moderate and administer the community under the platform.…

>If I need support with an open source library of some sort, I don't mind using IRC , MS Teams or anything in between. I honestly cannot think of something worse. Chat applications are not forums and they generally suck at replacing them. Not only does this make topics harder to follow and much harder to find to begin with, it also makes the maintainers bother with the same questions again and again, because users ca…

discord's search functionality has actually been incredibly useful. Many forums are notorious for having awful search. This is somewhat made up for by the fact that they're indexable and you can google search that forum instead.

There's also a wide spectrum between chat sites and forums. Threads-centric tools like Zulip can be amazing for a community like that. Some, like rocket.chat, are even search-indexable

EDIT: it was actually Zulip not rocket.chat that has the option to make channels public to the web

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