Building an online community takes more than tools. But the right tool can make all the difference.
  • Creegz@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    3 months ago

    I am getting flashbacks of the mid-2000’s IM landscape. Soon we’ll be using 10 services bundled into some hackjob app that doesn’t support all of the features but keeps the chats in one place.

      • mrspaz@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        3 months ago

        Pidgin was good; it did what needed to be done and wasn’t that bad at it.

        The last service I was using it for was a self-hosted XMPP server for a small group of friends that were all refugees of other defunct services. We ended up finally moving to Slack or Discord (the group bifurcated along game-playing lines).

        Now I’ve got to find something new yet again!

    • Nalivai@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      3 months ago

      It was so great, people ditched it immediately the second any alternative arrived.

      • Buddahriffic@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        3 months ago

        I mean the masses are pretty fucking stupid and I don’t think following them is a good strategy for life.

        Also, reddit was and somehow still is pretty popular and stack exchange is being killed by AI not discord, so that’s not really accurate anyways.

      • XeroxCool@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        3 months ago

        They slowly ditched better services for convenience. The account/login struggle is the barrier to entry that myspace/facebook/discord “solved”. A unique login for each forum, a different set of rules between each, some auto-deletion of supposedly inactive accounts, no photo hosting capability until death bed, yet another set of credentials for the latest photo host, and so on. Nothing was immediate because it took time to build the replacement communities and libraries. The problem is, it took years to realize how inaccessible the information became.

        • Nalivai@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          3 months ago

          If the old service is less convenient that fucking Discord, it’s not better.
          The information is as inaccessible now, just in different ways.
          We never had a good solution. We had different bad solutions, each bad in it’s unique way.

        • Creegz@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          3 months ago

          Discord is a communications platform with tacked on features that resemble forums mostly as a means of organization. It’s not a KB or repository under any circumstances outside of misuse, so why would it have to be good at being searched/indexed?

          • carpelbridgesyndrome@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            0·
            3 months ago

            Because not everything is a bug. People frequently want help and having a searchable place for past discussions it is helpful. Also this was in response to people complaining about forums and implying what came after is better so misuse is very much relevant here. Every modding community and a lot of other dev groups use discord for everything and it is from experience a trainwreck.

          • GalacticSushi@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
            0·
            3 months ago

            Back when Google was a decent search engine you could just search “something site:someforum.com” since the built in search was so ass

            Something Reddit has in common with old forums

          • carpelbridgesyndrome@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            0·
            3 months ago

            Most decent forums were publicly readable online and thus got indexed by actually decent search engines unlike discord. Hence “search indexable”

            I’m not sure why people think that discord search is some kind of gotcha. Its shit.

            • Nalivai@lemmy.worldEnglish
              0·
              3 months ago

              Not denying that it’s shit, I don’t know anyone who’s actually happy with it. But old forums also weren’t built nicely.
              You say search indexable as if it’s a panacea, but you find whatever you want to find with your search engine, click the link, and it is:

              • moved somewhere
              • renamed, so now the link is dead
              • was actually a part of badly implemented endless scroll so it now points to nothing
              • was edited to remove crucial information
              • was put in private and now you need to have 25 karma across three boards to open it
              • someone got butthurt so it’s now defaced
              • all of the above and more.

              So you know that the info was there at some point, but you can’t access it.

              The whole of IT is different levels of shit all the time

              • carpelbridgesyndrome@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
                0·
                3 months ago

                That’s why I also mentioned archivable. Public forums can be archived. If I hit one of those issues I look for archived pages. Deleted discord comments are just silently gone and deleted servers are lost forever

      • amateurcrastinator@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        3 months ago

        maybe you are right. i think people just forgot about it because of all the noise and because all these new platforms force bad habits. just imagine if those platforms didn’t exist where would openai and anthropic be without all that stackexchange/stackoverflow data scraping.

    • baatliwala@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      3 months ago

      Discord became big because of the seamless audio / video / screen sharing. Forums are not even in the same stratosphere.

      • amateurcrastinator@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        3 months ago

        i know, but for casual conversations and banter and a place where to store some knowledge about some topics forums were awesome.

        • baatliwala@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          3 months ago

          Forums work for knowledge storage, but for casual banter real time conversations trump everything

          • sakuraba@lemmy.mlEnglish
            0·
            3 months ago

            yeah, forums are cool but I remember changing to another medium like MSN Messenger to do real time conversations

  • Imhereforfun@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    3 months ago

    I read the article, it’s a good article but it also shows how we don’t really have any options that would match the discord’s functionality and ease of use. Which is very sad.

      • Nalivai@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        3 months ago

        EU doesn’t require age verification (yet). It’s exclusively British thing for now, and we fight hard to keep it this way

        • lost_faith@lemmy.caEnglish
          0·
          3 months ago

          Oh, good, ty. I just made an account last night and will check it out to see if it fits my needs, but this was nagging in the back of my head as others have just decided to bend the knee regardless of jurisdiction.

          • sakuraba@lemmy.mlEnglish
            0·
            3 months ago

            just decided to bend the knee regardless of jurisdiction.

            yeah, I understand why companies do this tho

            from their side it is cheaper to just put the same measures and requirements for every legislation and in discord’s case this is the perfect opportunity to get more data from their users

  • Strider@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    3 months ago

    No, he hasn’t been running a discord server. It’s a channel. Discord is running the servers.

    • jcorvera@quokk.auEnglish
      0·
      3 months ago

      The older terminology, which is still used in the API, was a lot better.

      It was Guild. It was a Discord Guild. Probably because Stanislav was working on it after he abandoned Guildwork.

    • exist@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      0·
      3 months ago

      Users (and I think Discord too) call the communities servers, and channels are the individual topics/threads in a community. It might not make sense from a hosting perspective but people do call it that

    • hperrin@lemmy.caEnglish
      0·
      3 months ago

      I highly doubt that when you start a “Discord server”, there’s any new machinery spun up. There is a near 100% chance it’s just an entry in a database. Nobody’s running a server just for him. So I don’t think there’s even reason to be charitable.

      • Strider@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        3 months ago

        I can only assume it’s on purpose so average users really understand it wrong to avoid the associated negative view. Clever, really. But absolutely evil.

        • Izax@pawb.socialEnglish
          0·
          3 months ago

          This wasn’t intended to be misleading. The term “Server” as in a Discord Server is because, be fore Discord were the days of Ventrilo and TeamSpeak. For many of us gamers used to have to run or pay for their own actual server to have that kind of functionality. Then we’d combine direct calling with Skype for small groups and video. The term made sense at the time, but hasn’t held up to the test of time. Basically Discord solved a problems of having to pay for those servers, and having to use two separate programs.

          • Strider@lemmy.worldEnglish
            0·
            3 months ago

            I’m a it professional (working in enterprise DCs) and have been running ts2 and murmur myself. It was misleading from the beginning and while I do understand your point I can not see a company doing this in good faith, I am too old for that.

          • Ulrich@feddit.orgEnglish
            0·
            3 months ago

            You didn’t provide any evidence that it wasn’t intentionally misleading. Discord was clearly intended to replace communities like IRC, Ventrilo and TeamSpeak so they used language that was familiar to them, even though it was completely incorrect.

  • exu@feditown.comEnglish
    0·
    3 months ago

    They didn’t even untangle the web of half-finished and abandoned XMPP clients

  • betahack@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    3 months ago

    what are the best alternatives for non-tech folks to join and use?.. because that’s who I am going to have to convince

    • stressballs@lemmy.zipEnglish
      0·
      3 months ago

      Spacebar.chat is a really easy one to join that I found. And it’s really a straight clone of Discord but without all the crap. It’s decentralized so you can self host or join and instance and start your own “server” on there.

      You don’t have to understand any of that to use. It just works and looks like Discord.

    • waggz@programming.devEnglish
      0·
      3 months ago

      i haven’t seen anyone talking about it but i started testing out root app and i think it could easily drop in replace my friends discord. you can even import a discord server template with all your channels and roles.

  • thesmokingman@programming.devEnglish
    0·
    3 months ago

    It’s very important to call out this dude either doesn’t understand what a community is or comes from this new generation that thinks docs should be on Discord and not easily accessible.

    Functionality: can it do everything required of a platform for building, organizing, and sustaining a community?

    Somehow Discord gets a 4 there. A chat server is a community of a kind but it will never rise the level of a platform’s community because it is, by definition, somewhat ephemeral and just a bunch of chat logs. There’s a big difference for example between IRC and bash.org for things like AzureDiamond.

  • Dr. Wesker@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    0·
    3 months ago

    If Stoat (formerly Revolt) can integrate screen sharing capabilities soon enough, they will be the closest, user-friendly experience to Discord. Even the UI is familiar, if you come from Discord.

    • CosmoNova@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      3 months ago

      I‘m surprised Stoat is gaining so much traction here. It‘s no open source and will likely go down the same path as Discord if given the chance.

    • hornedfiend@piefed.socialEnglish
      0·
      3 months ago

      I can’t even create an account on Stoat yet. New account confirmation emails take hours to arrive and by the time they do, they are already expired.

      This is not a discord alternative yet and not be for a long time most likely.

      • KSP Atlas@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        0·
        3 months ago

        They’re having issues with their email provider due to the hug of death effect, they did not expect to get so much traffic so fast

        • hornedfiend@piefed.socialEnglish
          0·
          3 months ago

          I understand, but they are losing the train I guess. People are giving up easily when they need a solution fast.

          • IronKrill@lemmy.caEnglish
            0·
            3 months ago

            Their loss. They have at least a month to migrate, probably more before most users get forced to verify, there is no rush. That and an ad-free hobby-run project like Stoat doesn’t gain anything from a massive user increase unless it correlates to an increase in devs or money.

    • Neshura@bookwyr.meEnglish
      0·
      3 months ago

      Apparently that’s already in the backend since december, they’re just getting their infrastructure up to snuff before they enable it

  • Rachel@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    0·
    3 months ago

    Matrix is probably the most well funded and supported open source platform that might be able to compete with Discord but even then it’s not a fair fight.

    Sadly most people won’t leave discord. People will forget about this next week.

    • lepinkainen@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      3 months ago

      They should use some of the funds for UX.

      For gods sakes copy the Discord UI EXAXTLY and replicate the backend with Matrix. That’s it.

      Not whatever they’re doing now.

        • Rachel@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
          0·
          3 months ago

          I think that is one of the problems. People want an exact copy of discord but don’t ask if discord even has the perfect layout and if it should be copied directly. Anyway there are clients like cinny which look similar and other chat platforms like stroat(previously revolt) and spacebar which look exactly like discord and they are not doing massively well either so shrugs.