[thewebguyd]

And those are the exact same reasons I loath the trend of discourse moving into discord groups, or slack groups, hell I've even seen Facebook groups.

None of those are reachable without an account and in many cases an invite (private by default), they are not indexed by search engines, they are proprietary, cannot be exported or archived, etc.

It's asking for knowledge to be lost.

[62]

> It's asking for knowledge to be lost.

You say that like it's not already happening. It's happening. Many technical chats are only happening on discord now. Everything single day the volume of current technical knowledge gets smaller.

[throw7]

Yes, I was hoping to check out ladybird browser project, but they use discord.

[pwdisswordfishz]

There are other problems besides access. The big one being that the people that you'll find on Discord are the kinds of people that you'll find on Discord.

[replwoacause]

Yeah I tried to use Discord on two different occasions and each time I hated it.

Why do people want to share information someplace that gets lost to the sands of time?

[setopt]

> Why do people want to share information someplace that gets lost to the sands of time?

I mean, it’s the same reasons people used IRC for decades, and some people were unhappy if channels saved and published the IRC logs.

Informal asynchronous communication arguably has its place, and many people are more willing to speak plainly and without overthinking if what they say is not expected to be publically readable for decades.

Even if, of course, in public chat rooms someone could always record and share what is said without your consent, and if most people don’t say confidential things in public chatrooms about technical topics, there’s still something about a mailing list or forum that makes me personally speak less plainly compared to ephemeral channels.

[abnercoimbre]

I'm gradually switching our in-person community to Revolt [0] because we want to self-host and own the data. (Discord offers extreme convenience, but it's a black-box for-profit platform.)

We don't want casual discourse to be indexed to the public. Instead we'll host a wiki system soon that bubbles up technical chatter into worthy articles.

Is that a reasonable compromise?

[0] https://revolt.handmadecities.com

[thewebguyd]

It's definitely better than discord in that it solves the data ownership problem. It's not federated, still centralized to your own revolt server - but I think that's OK for private groups anyway, or ephemeral discussions (unless Revolt can be federated, I'm not familiar with it)

My concern is more the trend of open groups, even open source projects, centralizing around discord both for dev discussion, community discussion, and technical support. There's incredible value to those discussions to be indexed and searchable on the web, like the good old days of public forums. Actual work took place in public, on mailing lists and forums. It could be indexed and scraped, even just archived to my local machine.

[skydhash]

If I see discord, I just go the other way, or use the code as is.

[bombcar]

The distinction between chat and email and forums was helpful mentally to compartmentalize - you’d expect people to act differently (forums even have things they call “chat” threads that are more like chat).

The problem the “bubble up to Wiki” is that you need a specific subset of people with the technical know-how to understand the issue and solutions AND the time and desire to update the Wiki.

One thing that can help is being absolutely a tyrant and insisting that discussions about bugs, etc happen on a bug tracker- or at least the resolutions go there.

[abnercoimbre]

Good advice, appreciate it!

[theshrike79]

I can live with requiring an account and not being indexed by search engines.

But the fact that Discord itself can't search Discord is beyond stupid. It's just a void of knowledge, people help other people, answer questions

And then they do it again, because search is completely useless.