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'What a great way to kill your community': Discord users are furious about its new age verification checks — and are now hunting for alternatives (www.techradar.com)
submitted 6 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 482 points 6 months ago (5 children)

Please, pretty please, be the spark that will stop OSS projects from hosting their "support forums" on Discord.

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  • [–] 172 points 6 months ago* (2 children)

    I wish it was only limited to support forums. I've even seen a Linux kernel driver where the Issues sections was closed and you should go to Discord instead. No thanks.

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  • [–] 128 points 6 months ago

    It's horrible. We already had that stuff figured out. Wiki pages and forums to make information accessible even after 20 minutes have passed. Fuck that development and everyone that was/is pushing for that.

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  • [–] 61 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    🤮

    Who are the morons that keep making these decisions?

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  • [–] 9 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    It's people that don't want to have to maintain things, which I understand. It's trivial these days to host a forum with a cloud provider, or have a github, but Discord is one click. It's not the ideal tool, but one click, no payment, and you have a place everyone can talk to each other.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (1 child)

    I guess, but even without talking about forums, even a subreddit would at least be publicly accessible and searchable. Using discord is effortless but antagonistic, at least a subresdit would be both effortless and in the service of the public.

    Sure, I'd prefer an open source self hosted platform, but I'm hard pressed to find anything worse than discord

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  • [–] 0 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    Sure, except that Discord was accessible when these were set up. There is nothing stopping Reddit from doing the exact same thing next year.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago

    This is my biggest pet peeve of OSS projects. Someone writes some code and that is where it ends for them. The rest of the infrastructure is so free and so easy that there is no need for dedication to the project.

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  • [–] 36 points 6 months ago (3 children)

    It's too bad the open source community couldn't find some programmers to help them make an alternative.

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  • [–] 68 points 6 months ago (4 children)

    As long as the alternative is not another chat app that is not indexable by search engines. Forums fill the role pretty well, I don't understand why devs would use Discord in the first place.

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  • [–] 23 points 6 months ago

    Hear hear!

    Matrix is an ok alternative to Discord for what Discord does.

    Support forums are not an appropriate use of Discord, or of Matrix. Discourse is pretty great open source forum software. NodeBB forums even added ActivityPub support! I never particularly like when companies use Reddit as a primary communication method, and for the same reason I'd rather they didn't use Lemmy or Piefed, but all of these are vastly better options than Discord, Matrix, or other un-indexable private chats.

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  • [–] 5 points 6 months ago (3 children)

    Fluxer apparently has that on their roadmap. https://blog.fluxer.app/roadmap-2026/

    As part of #3, I'd also like to add the ability to publish forums to the open web. That way, people can discover, archive, and access discussions without logging in.

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    As someone who has spent the last 2+ years testing revolt/stoat, matrix with element, and teamspeak, desperately searching for any viable discord alternative, I'm very interested in this. Where did you come across it? I tried to create an account but stuck pulsing on a loading screen.

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    One of my friends' husbands brought it up, so good old word of mouth.

    I did notice I wasn't able to get logged in last night, though the night before I was able to make an account without issue. I wonder if they got a hug of death like Stoat did.

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    @craigers @other_cat can I ask what was the issue with using matrix as a discord replacement? I would like to propose it to some friends, so it would be good to know if there are some fatal flaws

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  • [+] 4 points 6 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 child)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    Also not very searchable on engines, especially due to fediverse server name differences, you can't !lemmy because many of the communities don't have Lemmy in their domain or titles or however that works. At least I have only gotten Lemmy results for like 25% of my searches.

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    Discord took the place of IRC. Chatlogs for IRC were rarely indexed by most channel admins until after about 2010 when projects like freenode hosted all the open source projects for the whole web.

    It was purchased by some right wing billionaire and now it is no longer.

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  • [–] 6 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    But in a success story for open source software, the entire community migrated from freenode to libera.chat in like 2 days.

    The way to defeat enshittification is by disallowing lock-in.

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  • [–] 3 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    There is stoat.chat (formerly Revolt). But you wont find much help on Lemmy or Mastodon. A lot of people on the fediverse have an aversion to Discord because when they try it, they have difficulty with it like a senior citizen with a smartphone. Even though Matrix and Discord arent similar, people on the fediverse will still try to recommend you Matrix, because they think Discord is just another messenger and not like having a forum, teamspeak, jitsi and other stuff in one program. And even if you explain it like that, they will be like "but then you can just use a forum, matrix, jitsi and a screenshare program separately" or something like that.

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  • [–] 0 points 6 months ago* (1 child)

    Open source community always loses to capitalists, because people won't do the work unless there's money involved. Otherwise there would be open source alternatives that are better and more popular. What incentive do smart programmers have to help the open source community when they're better off earning 180k+ per year programming for the financial sector? Especially in this ever increasingly oppressive economy. I'm sorry but unless leftists are donating billions to the open source community, it's idealistic at best to depend on them.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago (1 child)

    Nonsense. Open source built the web. Open source isn't some new anti fascist trend... What are you smoking?

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago* (1 child)

    Open source built the web

    Yeah and how's that working out, in the context of the subject of this thread. I don't see any open-source communities competing with Google or Microsoft or Palantir.

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  • [–] 0 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    Open source didn't crumble under the weight of inevitability. It fell apart because corporate interests profiting off of it decided it was more profitable to create cultures antithetical to the guardrails that open source presents to exploitation and co-option.

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  • [–] 12 points 6 months ago

    I deployed several docker containers using an image from this one guy. Later when I needed help with an image I realized the support is provided exclusively through a Discord server. To nobody's surprise the guy is an asshole who shouldn't interact with users.

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  • [–] 6 points 6 months ago (1 child)

    IRC still supports most of the FOSS core.

    More modern alternatives include Jitsi, Matrix and Simplex. Mumble also works well for voice.

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