The rampant use of Discord in FLOSS project is really disheartening. To join yet another Discord channel to receive any kind of support or discussions around the project, is off-putting.
Discord is the worst. The siloing of tons of information that should be publicly searchable and accessible via a public forum, but instead it's siloed off into this closed wall with shitty search.
I actually wish Lemmy was better searchable as well. I think Lemmy could be way better and drive adoption if it had a cross instance search engine / indexer.
I'm unsure. I use jerboa, maybe it's that. But search doesn't really search the content of posts. I.e. how I can google something, include reddit in the search terms, and find a relevant post(s)
Now. Fuck google, but I want to be able to do the equivalent with Lemmy posts.
Having (re)started using IRC recently, I can see it being a good alternative. But more accessible options like Matrix and Discourse are being overlooked.
Matrix the protocol & its blockchain-like eventual consistency model is incredibly expensive / wasteful to run since it requires duplicating all data to all servers for the entire history. Matrix uses so much storage & RAM on a machine. Medium-sized servers regularly close their door due to costs—which further pushes users to the de facto centralized hub in Matrix.org (or servers they host for others) which basically has a copy of all metadata on the network (scary since it was originally funded by Israeli Intelligence … so one might assume they still have access to that data). If a system isn’t accessible to a run for groups on a budget, it isn’t radical/revolutionary.
If you don’t care about the centralization or E2EE, IRC/IRCv3 covers all the bases. If you want decentralization with more features, XMPP + OMEMO + MUCs, covers the rest. Neither of these are resource hogs while having over a decade of extra stability. Matrix 2 is just trying throw a rug over the problems of eventual consistency—but under it is a fundamental issue to the protocol.
But aren't room contents indexed and accessible from any client ?
With a Discord account, you can search in a Discord channel for any servers you have access to, as well as any of your private chats. This means you need to sign up with a commercial account and agree to lots of tracking and data selling, it means that information can be withheld by banning someone from a server, and that information could become very inaccessible relying on people screenshotting it and posting it on other places as has happened with information from Discord servers several times.