FLOSS communities right now
FLOSS communities right now
4 pane comic of dolan on the left and spooderman on the right
pane 1 (dolan): cum join opensurce cummunity!
pane 2 (spooderman): shure! how joyn?
pane 3 (dolan): Here discord! (with discord logo)
pane 4 (spooderman with tears in eyes): y u do dis?
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- Terrible format for archiving knowledge
- Terrible tool for retrieving knowledge
- Locks community access behind a corporate license agreement
- Hands control of community-created content to a corporation
- Prevents indexing by web search engines
- Antithetical to interoperability
- Privacy-hostile
A web forum is far better in most cases. If you can't manage to run your own, there are plenty of lemmy servers that will do it for you. Even an email list (with searchable archives) would be better than Discord.
If you have collaborative documents that outgrow the forum format, use a wiki.
If real-time chat is needed, irc or matrix.
A project hosting its community on Discord is a project that won't get my contributions.
I recently went through these exact pains trying to contribute to a project that exclusively ran through Discord and eventually had to give up when it was clear they would never enable issues in their GitHub repos for "reasons."
It was impossible to discover the history behind anything. Even current information was lost within days, having to rehash aspects that were already investigated and decided upon.
would never enable issues in their Git...
That's a worrying sign for a project.
Did you clone their Git and start tracking issues there? ;-)
It's the "see no evil" approach. If you didn't report the issue while the admin was online, then they aren't compelled to do anything about it. Convenient for the project maintainer who doesn't actually like maintaining things. Awful for the rest of us.
A web forum is far better in most cases
It's sad when a web forum is better than the tool you're considering. Bumps, aggressive garbage collection, no Resurrection, it's weird.
I'm old, I guess. I miss NNTP, mainly for the archived posts I could discuss with the authors for an updated take or revised solution or some clarification. And yes, I know there's a good webUI front-end for an NNTP server as a back-end. ;-)
On the bright side:
Aggressive garbage collection and automatic thread locking are optional settings in most web forum software I've seen.
Lemmy shares some of the important parts of Usenet, and could develop into something that comes close.
Perfectly summarized and the stance everyone should take for the wellbeing of any community. Look at cs.rin.ru for example.
Lemmy also doesn't get indexed by web search engines. I have yet to find a single post from lemmy on google or DDG even when specifically searching
What do you mean by specifically searching? Because it totally comes up for me.
Ooh! A post with claims backed by evidence!
That's most likely due to low rankings. Lemmy doesn't prevent it.
Open source search engine SearcxNG works very well with Lemmy posts and comments.
So nice, right? Just being able to curate where your search engine pulls result from... I wish I'd discovered it sooner
I've had Lemmy post first result in Google idk what your doing
Use "site:lemmy.world" (for example) at the end of your search