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this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2024
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Right into the trash.
Discord is still a legitimate form of contact and support for a lot of people. Out of interest, where do you see that line? I can only see Discord mentioned alongside e-mail and some other (even less tasteful than Discord) contact methods for support.
To all those downvoting I'm not saying that Holesail is using Discord correctly, just saying that just having Discord (or any other chat platform) as an option shouldn't be an instant red flag and it depends on how the project actually utilises it.
Very first line of the GitHub readme. As a support tool it's mostly useless, endless similar or identical questions answered differently or not at all and none of it indexed by search engines for use on the web.
It's an awful data silo / black hole that increases volunteer load.
I've tried to use it to ask for help on a couple of other open source projects and I thought that I was using it in the wrong way, that I was missing something. So...I was not! I don't understand how people could use it for support. Guys talking over each other, questions mixed and lost between other people's chats, terrible!
Every time I've joined a large group chat, I've always wished there were hundreds more people talking over the top of each other to make the whole communication thing more efficient!
We use Discord rather extensively but we don't have this problem. I don't think the issue is Discord itself (or for that matter any chat, be it IRC or Matrix) but the way it is used. I think it unfair to just blacklist a project just because it uses it.
We use Discord for team chat and conversations, the instant nature of a chat app suits this purpose far more than an async platform like a forum for us. This is either commonly known or transient info, not something we are interested in preserving. Long form conversations (like the status of our OS packaging) that require input over a long period goes into a forum topic.
We also use it for support for short form questions and help - anything more than a quick answer or "active" help then we recommend filling in an issue form or using the forum.
If a question comes up more than a few times then we make sure that it is documented - either in an FAQ or in the main documentation as it is clear that information isn't readily available or easy to find.
I'm not necessarily defending their use of Discord as I don't know exactly what they are doing but it does seem they don't have any alternative community areas. In contrast, yes we have a Discord but we also have a Lemmy community, a Subreddit (I'm honestly against keeping that one going but we would rather not shut out users from support), Mastodon and forum.
So no, it doesn't increase volunteer load in all cases, it is a valuable tool for us. Not that I'm wedded to Discord in particular (I'd honestly prefer to migrate it all to Matrix) but the idea of a chat platform for projects is not a bad thing by itself, it is how the project uses it.
The problem is not that Discord is used as a contact method the problem is that Discord chats are not indexable so if someone has a problem and gets solved its gets lost on the chat logs and its not like a forum.
There's a lot more problems than that lol
I know some subreddits where people ask the same questions over and over, all day every day. They don't read the rules/sidebar, they don't read the stickied posts, they don't read the automod response and they don't search before posting. if you mention any of those they immediately turn defensive and abusive usually. it's incredibly frustrating.
I think that is more of a comment on incorrect use of such a platform and it would be the same whether it was IRC or Matrix. I've put a more detailed response to another comment if you were interested - https://lemmy.ml/comment/11850496
Discord requires an account to even view a server, and the layout for forum support style questions is not there.
The same could be said of Matrix though, I don't think you can see a Matrix chat without an account either. Discord does have a forum layout... ish. It is pretty bad though and not something we use as a forum. It is used but really only as a way to separate topics in what would be a busy single chat area - more akin to something like Zulip. Even IRC channels tend to need you to connect with a nickname but unlike the others you can't see chat history without a bouncer set up and at that point you have basically made an account in all but name.
Why are you even mentioning matrix? We don't want a chat server corpo or not, we want a real functional forum with topics and history and indexed by search engines, not a single chat log that disappears into the void after 24 hours of use.
I feel you haven't been reading what I've been saying if you are claiming a "single chat log". The whole point of what I'm saying is that there are various forms of communication that can be used in a project and the one I'm part of literally couldn't function with an async-only forum type setup. Chat is for temporary, transient communication. Forums (and by extension Lemmy/Reddit) are for longer form async discussions with defined topics. Both are valid as has been the case all the way back into the days of having both a mailing list and IRC channel for a project.
Yeah matrix is even worse than discord for usability and finding things.
Just use a normal publicly readable and indexed forum like has been common for the last 30+ years, I don't understand the obsession with chat clients for this purpose.
You know IRC has been used alongside mailing list for open source software communities and projects for literally decades right?
But not in place of, no one is trying to say no chat clients ever, we just don't want only chat clients.
But... that is exactly what I've been saying since the start... If used correctly there is no need to instantly reject a project just because it uses Discord, or any other chat, as one of its options.
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