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The graying open source community needs fresh blood (www.theregister.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/programming@programming.dev
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[–] 14 points 2 years ago (6 children)

right there with you. when a project/repo advertises discord as it's primary/sole means of communication between and with developers I let out a big sigh and move on to something else.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (5 children)

    Are there particular mediums of conversation that get you excited though?

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    Honestly, I've noticed an uptick in the number of discourse forums for tech related things and I'm all for that. Discourse is documented well and maintained openly, it's indexable by search engines and you can visit and use discourse-based web forums using browsers that aren't capable of js rendering (think lynx). The last bit is a nice-to-have for me, but just being indexable is huge.

    In 10 years, I would hate it if every answer I gave or got from a developer is lost to an endless abyss of messages buried deep in an obscure discord guild that a user would have to sift through only after making an account with and installing specific chat software. I hate there being so many hurdles in front of just getting answers. That's a good tl;dr as to why discord is on my shitlist for support/development discussion platforms.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (2 children)

    The cheapest tier for Discourse is $50 a month for up to 100 users. https://www.discourse.org/pricing# With self hosting you can probably get that lower at the cost of your time getting it set up and making sure it's cheaper than the options they provide.

    As much as we all collectively roll our eyes when we see Discord being used for community discussion, it makes sense from a maintainer's point of view.

    Edit: Discourse has free options for creators

    Eligibility Criteria

    We know creators are not created equally, so we split the criteria or requirements to apply across the different creator groups.

    • Software creators (GitHub, GitLab): 10+ contributors
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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Yeah see that's the sort of conclusive mindset that's got us here. I don't mean to insinuate you're wrong for coming to that conclusion, but "It costs money or effort so let's use a worse option because it's convenient" is part of the reason we don't have a lot of good solutions in this domain.

    I'll also admit the options these days are limited depending on your goals for a project. If you want to reach the most eyes and have the highest draw of potential contributors, having a discord server makes sense. My gripe is when technical discussion or support take place there.

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