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FLOSS communities right now (i.imgflip.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/programmer_humor@programming.dev
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4 pane comic of dolan on the left and spooderman on the right

pane 1 (dolan): cum join opensurce cummunity!
pane 2 (spooderman): shure! how joyn?
pane 3 (dolan): Here discord! (with discord logo)
pane 4 (spooderman with tears in eyes): y u do dis?

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[–] 256 points 2 years ago (4 children)

PLEASE I BEG OF YOU, STOP USING DISCORD IN PLACE OF FORUMS AND PUBLICLY ACCESSIBLE BOARDS!

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  • [–] 24 points 2 years ago (6 children)

    While I agree, what might everyday people use to set up forums as relatively easily and cheaply as their Discord servers, and not have them riddled with ads or other clunky elements?

    I'm pretty sure those that may have even been considering forums went to Discord because the only other options were more involved in terms of set up/maintenance and cost, the latter to get something without ads.

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  • [–] 31 points 2 years ago* (2 children)

    Github has discussions. The code is already there anyways

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  • [–] 11 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Microsoft is going to continue to increase their monetization of GitHub. It's going to get worse, not better.

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

    Just hoping we get some github alternative on fediverse, so far Ive seen codeberg but its hosted by a non profit org in berlin... Which is great but for e.g. I cant contribute to the code without creating an account on their instance

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  • [–] 26 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    what might everyday people use to set up forums as relatively easily and cheaply as their Discord servers, and not have them riddled with ads or other clunky elements?

    Discourse is a clean open source forum software that is commonly used for application support and well suited for it.

    Or if your a real die hard for the fediverse, you could set up a lemmy instance for application support. There's even a phpBB frontend for an oldschool forum look and feel for it.

    Usually everyday people don't setup forums, that's the responsibility of the application owner(s) or provider. In this case, the easy option is also the shitty option if measured by discoverability of the content.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Usually everyday people don’t setup forums, that’s the responsibility of the application owner(s) or provider.

    By this do you mean official forums? If so I think this is kind of missing some of the independent forums for software (whether games or media players or the like) or other media, which some sorta-everyday people set up in the past. Many have migrated to Discord not only because it's easy but, I think, because it's simply more cost-effective.

    Forums don't seem to be cheap. Discourse's own managed hosting goes for $50 a month, from one of their partners it's $20, and looks like somewhere in-between if you try to spin it up yourself (e.g. Digital Ocean droplet runs $4 a month, then add in domain, and mail-provider (~$20-35)). Looking at that, it's little wonder so many either opt for official forums, unofficial subreddits, Lemmy/Kbin communities, or Discord servers instead now.

    Maybe if I dug around some more I could find some options for managed hosting (which makes more sense for regular people, I think, to deal with technical maintenance) for Discourse or the like that are cheaper, but I can't imagine one may find much that beats free. Unless there is something, unfortunately I guess we're kind of stuck with the situation as-is barring some pleasant exceptions.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago*

    Yeah, I was referring to official forums for technical support or feature requests and the like. I don't really think that everyday people were usually the ones who setup forums, it is website operators and other techies who set those up. The people who setup an independent forum are not the same people who setup a discord community. Discord has a much lower barrier to entry that usually results in a lower quality information and moderation than a forum would.

    I mean, yeah, forums are harder, for sure. $20-35 monthly for a mail provider seems to high to me; I would expect that to be about the yearly cost. But, I don't really have much experience with an email provider for that use case. Really the problem lies in that a website operator and a community maintainer are 2 very different types of people that rarely intersect.

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

    Matrix chat works pretty well too.
    It's ~ as convenient as Discord. More convenient in certain cases. And one might be able to easily use the API to create an Archive site for all discussions in there.

    In other cases, you have the ability of encrypted conversations, which of course you won't be archiving. Right?

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago

    90% of the projects that i use and other people care about are developed by people that have the technical ability to set up and host a web server. They likely have the cash. It's not exactly outrageously expensive. If it's small enough they dont have the cash for it, they don't need it.

    Im guessing the discord was more of a legacy thing, someone was like "hey im having a problem, can you contact me on discord?" and then suddenly we have the rust discord server.

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

    Discord is more analogous to IRC than web forums.

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  • [+] -24 points 2 years ago* (3 children)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 15 points 2 years ago* (1 child)

    It's awful. It goes by channel and the cursed interface make it hard to search because when you go back after viewing a post it starts at the very top again. Then people shit on you for not searching through loads of shit and normal chat channels to find a bunch of disjointed info woven into random unrelated banter.

    I miss the days when I could search the problem, open a browser tab for each one that seems relevant, and close the tab when it turns out not to be, and have my search tab right where I left it. Discord just gives me an aneurysm every time I open it and try to bungle through the UI. Not to mention being asked to sign in almost every time I open it, and they moved the qr code log in option to be harder to find on the mobile app.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago

    lemmy isn't terrible, but you aren't going to find diehard thinkpad enjoyers flashing them with coreboot here, and you certainly are likely to find much if any documentation on it here either. Maybe reddit. Forums though? Daily occurrence.

    Those "forum" channels are locked behind community servers, for some reason. And also still not a replacement for forums. Still not publicly accessible. Threads also suck btw. Matrix likely wouldnt copy them, because forums exist.

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  • [+] -42 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    But Discord is too convenient.

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  • [–] 28 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    For a quick question yes, but if you try to search a solution for a problem it's actual hell, 1000s of BS messages and countless other problems just thrown in one timeline.

    You can either search through it for hours or ask the question which was answered 10 times before.

    It's as inefficient as it gets

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  • [–] 12 points 2 years ago

    convenient for what? forcing me to join a server, go through onboarding, and potentially even deal with not having enough spyware loaded on my information, at best waiting 10 minutes to say ANYTHING, and at worst not being able to say anything at all.

    Not to mention these on boarding processes can explode and cause problems from time to time. Discord is only convenient for real time chatting, nothing else.

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