this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2023
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Technology

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102
Why projects start with a Discord and not an alternative - Comment found on Mastodon (beehaw.org)
submitted 1 year ago by jherazob@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org
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Original comment, copy-pasted for convenience:

why do so many projects start with a discord and not with a wiki, or github, or web presence?

simply, discord is the fastest, most frictionless way to do the following:

  • garner a community of support ensuring that there is an audience for the project
  • provide access to idea validation for the creators of that project. rapid feedback for their project = rapid progress
  • provide the easy creation of (not necessarily accessible nor good, but) quick resources for the project

forums, websites, hell even github can only hope to match the value proposition of discord, and it's something people fail to take into account when they criticise the move to discord as a file host/forum/wiki/project website

if you want people to make a file host/forum/wiki/project website, they're directly competing with the frictionless, fast, yet unsustainable and frankly web-shit discord. the fast, frictionless nature is enough for people to use and accept, hell, even to make infrastructural to their project

a platform that could create a non-webshit, easy way to provide the value that discord provides, all while being just as fast and frictionless if not faster/more lubricated, would absolutely blow discord out the water

I am a sysadmin and my level of tech friction tolerance is different from the people referenced here leading projects, but I'd like to gather opinions on this, the fact that this regularly happens as described suggests there's a whole lot of truth to it, but i feel like it's overstating the friction, am i wrong here?

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[–] GenderNeutralBro@lemmy.sdf.org 20 points 1 year ago (4 children)

largely buoyed by the good search function

???

Good search function? On Discord? Since when?

I have never encountered a Discord server that is useful for anything except live chat and automated notifications. Which is not an indictment of Discord; I mean, that's what it's for, and it's pretty good at it at small-medium scales.

I use Discord on a daily basis, but when I encounter a project that uses Discord, I just do not engage with it at this point. It's always a mess. Every server has its own arcane rules and mechanisms to access channels, usually with some bot commands that I need to dig through docs to learn. I don't consider it "low friction" at all, even as someone who's been using Discord for many years and always has it open.

[–] saigot@lemmy.ca 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I've seen discord communities that work like this:

Person posts a question in the main chat, people discuss it and reach a resolution, a mod, bot or sometimes the op copies the question, helpful troubleshooting and the eventual answer into a separate channel (usually one of many sorted by topic) which only sees those sorts of posts and acts as a fairly searchable faq.

That format, while labour's intensive, seems pretty effective and low friction (for a user) to me. I'm not saying it's the best tool for job, but it works and is popular which is what really matters.

[–] Reil@beehaw.org 7 points 1 year ago

I've had an impressively easy time finding particular messages as long as I had a decent idea of what servers it might have been in and at least one of the following:

  • Who said it
  • To whom it was said
  • At least a word that was likely said

Which has been way better than most other things I've bothered to search through like Reddit, Beehaw, or Mastodon (especially when it was limited entirely to hashtags). Lord help me if I want to find a particular post or comment on TikTok or Youtube.

[–] megopie@beehaw.org 4 points 1 year ago

Admittedly the only projects I’ve ever used it with were games or mods for games, but I’ve never had issue finding what I need using the search function, it’s got an ok set of search boolean, and with that I can pretty easily skim all the channels or with in a specific channel for certain things or discussions.

[–] radix@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago

I like being able to filter for messages associated with particular users, messages with particular attachments or embeds, and messages before/after specific dates. I like that and you can't get that as easily anywhere else that I can think of off the top of my head (not Google, anyway).