person backing up his car exploitable with the following four panels:
- person looking ahead. the text below him says, “wow a cool software. let’s check out the community”
- screenshot with the text
Community
The main place where the community gathers is our Discord server. Feel free to join there to ask questions, help out others, share cool things you created with Typst, or just to chat. - hand on gear shift zoomed in, switching to reverse
- person looking behind with the text “nevermind”.
It’s an information blackhole. It sucks everything without any way to find it again. Even the forum and threads options they recently introduced, specifically to address this use case, are severely subpar compared to decades old alternatives.
On top of that, it’s a proprietary walled garden platform. If Discord decides to do anything against the communities for profit seeking there’s nothing, no one could do. Leaving hundreds of software projects without recourse for search, scrape, archive or retrieval in any way for all the knowledge deposited there.
What’s the use case here exactly? Some servers are disorganized af and trying to use the platform in the wrong way. The search function seems to work fine for whatever I need it for though.
Point is you shouldn’t have to join any servers or make any accounts to simply find the info on a search engine. If a website like say reddit.com asked me to make an account just to view some link I followed there I would just nope out and curl the archived copy and grep for exact query, rinse and repeat until information is absorbed. With discord that’s not an option and that sucks.
Just goes back to what the use case is. You’re alluding to a case where Discord is being used for content that should be easily searchable on the wide internet. Platforms like Discord including the FOSS alternatives aren’t good for that by their very design. The notion that every web service should be wide open and searchable is antithetical to privacy, which is ironically often cited as a huge downside to Discord. With the privately hosted Matrix instance I use with close friends for instance being isolated from the wide internet is the whole point.
Discord is advertising itself as a public forum for all communities to call home. They even implemented forum and threading features. Just like their productivity features meant to compete with slack. The features aren’t there to be useful. But to lure users into a golden cage. Discord’s product is not usability, it’s nitro subscriptions. Just like Google doesn’t give two shits about searching and indexing, because their actual product is advertisements. Discord will just follow whatever fad is on the zeitgeist at the moment to ensnare new users. And any feature will be enshittified and mutated to serve nitro sales, never to serve the user’s needs and use cases.
My use case is finding good online communities for my offline interests wherever they exist, and I’ve found some solid ones on Discord. This is why I agree with every point you’ve raised but find them ineffective at making me want to not use it. I value the connections I make with people through the platform more than any of the nerd reasons why I’m supposed to be bad for using it. Ultimately I don’t care about the platforms that much, they’re just transient things which come and go. So I’ll host a Matrix instance until something else is better, I’ll use Discord for running my weekly dnd group because nothing else worked for everyone and it’s been solid for 3 years. “Discord’s product is not usability” …okay I guess I’ll stop using it now. /s That just falls flat. To stop using it the reasons I use it will have to go away.
I’ve faced similar arguments about how I have a Windows machine for media creation, people try to debate me that there’s better alternatives assuming I haven’t tried them or that I don’t prioritize FOSS, but they don’t even have a connection to the scene I use this stuff for and they think some nerd technology argument is a valid reason to stop doing what I love. It’s like yeah every point raised is completely valid, but people will debate the ins and outs of platforms and software before they ever apply them to something beyond themselves.
It’s like okay you don’t like the new Milwaukee battery line of tools, but here’s a kitchen I made with them so just stfu and eat your food.
No one is trying to make you do something. This thread is about the hypocrisy and irony of FOSS projects using a proprietary platform that fundamentally goes against the movement values and principles. No one cares what you do in your life. You are not that important.
“The movement values and principles” is a fairy tale tech hobbyists tell themselves to feel like their consumer preferences have grandiose importance.
90% of your tech usage runs on and depends upon said fairy tale. FFS you’re on a Lemmy instance.
Maybe you consoom mindless corporate drivel, I P2P pirate everything, have never seen an ad and I self host FOSS versions of anything and everything.
If the forum features were used properly it’s not really any different than a traditional discourse forum board. Also being proprietary isn’t always a bad thing, and this is coming from an open source enthusiast. There are alternatives like guilded and another one called riot (not to be confused with riot software).
Edit: anyone want to explain why the down votes? I’m not wrong, you can create forums, pin posts, create forum categories and tag posts, it’s not a black hole if you take the effort and not make it a black hole. People just like to bitch and moan because “discord bad!”. Fuck off with that shit.