• klangcola@reddthat.com
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    10 months ago

    The biggest problem with Discord is that its an information black hole. Its not properly searchable and not indexed by search engines.

    Discord is fine for casual chat, but horrible when used for forum-type discussions and even worse when used for documentation.

    You see the same problems being discussed and solved again and again, but you cant just “link” someone the solution like you could with a forum thread cause its spread out over 3-10 chat messages that are interleaved in-between other topics being discussed in the same room

    Anything of long-term value for the project (forum-type discussions, documentation etc) should not recide in Discord

    • Blackmist@feddit.uk
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      10 months ago

      There’s going to be a lot of shocked Pikachus when the inevitable enshittification hits, and suddenly they charge to host all the documentation and wiki pages. All that barely maintained stuff will just vanish overnight.

      • Omega_Haxors@lemmy.ml
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        10 months ago

        You would think that people would learn not to put all their eggs into one corporate basket after Facebook fucked everyone over…

    • Pantherina@feddit.de
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      10 months ago

      Chat in general is so flawed when talking about multiple topics at once. At least when people dont use matrix threads, spaces and rooms correctly.

    • Kayday@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      I have all the issues with Discord that you mention, but struggle to find a better alternative. Do you have any recommendations?

      • RvTV95XBeo@sh.itjust.works
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        10 months ago

        Forums. Phpbb, Mybb, hell even discourse is better than discord. If you’re specifically dealing with a coding project, most git repositories offer an issues page and wiki you can use.

        • toastal@lemmy.ml
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          10 months ago

          And if you want something realtime, IRC & XMPP are low-resource chat options—with the latter being federated & can offer encryption for private rooms.

            • toastal@lemmy.ml
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              10 months ago

              There’s still been a time & place for realtime communications where the history preservation doesn’t quite matter… it can be some general recon of a problem to know what to even ask so as to not clog up the signal-noise for SEO or even if it’s mostly off-topic banter to relate to community members.

    • KᑌᔕᕼIᗩ@lemmy.ml
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      10 months ago

      Any non-trivial support enquiries should be directed to log a bug report/formal support request regardless of the community platform you’re using. Discord isn’t any worse than IRC in this regard and we’ve been offering support via the latter forever.

    • alive_posted115@lemm.ee
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      10 months ago

      I think a happy medium for this is to rely on GitHub issues for support, and then people can discuss each issue on GitHub or Discord

      • toastal@lemmy.ml
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        10 months ago

        Both are proprietary, closed source from US-based, for-profit entites. Same problem arises.

    • Mahlzeit@feddit.de
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      10 months ago

      A solution would be to save the chat log as a text file. An LLM might be able to turn it into FAQ format with little oversight. Of course, someone would still have to volunteer the work.

      Obviously, Discord doesn’t want that sort of thing since it lessens their hold on a community and the people in it. They could decide to cause trouble.