• Zeon@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      There is FOSS alternatives out there like Revolt or just plain old IRC which is good enough imo. The Discord bullshit is so annoying.

      • Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
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        8 months ago

        All chat programs are shit for long term accumulation of knowledge. Discord, revolt, IRC, they’re all just as bad for it.

        Forums are where you’ll find people who are actual experts discussing because they want to be able to easily reference previous posts by other people.

          • Kecessa@sh.itjust.works
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            8 months ago

            Lemmy/Reddit style platforms are good at generating short term discussions, it’s threaded chats.

            The main features that makes forums the best to accumulate knowledge is bumping and linear discussions. There’s only one discussion that everyone is following if they want to talk about a specific subject, the knowledge on that subject is centralized and keeps accumulating instead of requiring to be constantly repeated because the previous thread is lost to time. The linear discussion means you don’t have to go back up and start reading a different branch to know what some other people are talking about (which often times leads to having many people basically saying the same thing without realizing it), all new replies appear in chronological order and people quote others to provide context when necessary.

            Look on old school forums for more “boomer hobbies” and it’s ridiculous how long conversations can keep going. I provided a link in another reply but the Yamaha WR250 thread on ADVRider has 428k replies since 2013, all that is possible to know about this motorcycle is in they thread and pretty much any question you might have will have its reply in there. There’s car forums with discussions that have been ongoing for decadeS!

            Meanwhile on Reddit of you want to ask a question in a thread that was started 24h ago you’re shit out of luck, no one but the OP will know about it. On Lemmy? Everyone sorts by top 6 hours.

  • OneCardboardBox@lemmy.sdf.org
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    8 months ago

    Firstly, discord is entirely the wrong medium for documentation.

    Secondly, documentation should be at least as accessible as the code. That is to say, if I can view the code without creating an account for some service, then I should also be able to read the documentation too.

    • dustyData@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Documentation is bad enough. But it’s worse when that’s the only channel to get support. I once read a project maintainer boast that they never read the bug reports and issues on github and if anyone had a bug to just chat him up discord. I mean, dude, no wonder nobody uses your software or takes it seriously. Much less want to collaborate on the development.

      • shadow@lemmy.sdf.org
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        8 months ago

        I can’t understand why someone would want to do that. Maybe it’s my help desk and IT upbringing, but for the few software tools and things I’ve made, if you chat me without filing a bug/issue on GitHub, I’m not gonna help you.

        • Baku@aussie.zone
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          8 months ago

          To play devil’s advocate here: sometimes there are genuine reasons to try and request support before making an issue. I’m not particularly smart, nor too techy. If something isn’t working, I’m just going to assume I’m an idiot and I’ve messed something up. If I can’t figure out how to make it work, my first post of call will be trying to find a community related to whatever isn’t working, or on smaller projects I might try and reach out to the Dev. Opening an issue always feels like a “hey, your program isn’t doing what it’s meant to do, here’s what’s wrong with it, please fix it” and not “I think I’ve fucked something up, can you please help?”

          I suppose it depends what you’re developing though.

            • shadow@lemmy.sdf.org
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              8 months ago

              Yep, and if it becomes a frequent request, add clarification to the readme / wiki / documentation.

              Also, if you push folks towards issues, then they become indexable by search engines! So even if you have a solved problem you can at least find that… Discord? It’s a black hole.

            • JustEnoughDucks@feddit.nl
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              8 months ago

              And then get it insta-closed withing 20 minutes saying that “this is a problem with your setup, not the software” even when “my setup” was literally setting up their project using their documentation (docker compose files).

              That is how developers treat people with questions that they deem “stupid.”

              It turns out their documentation was wrong and some environment variable that they said was optional, was not actually optional and the service would go into a reboot loop without it. I figured that out no thanks to the devs.

  • randon31415@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    How to install:

    Step 1: git clone website

    Step 2: run dependency install script

    Step 2 again: Ha, ha, just kidding, that would be to straight forward. Please install this dependency installer program that only this and two other projects use. Pip grep panda cholotte poetry bash docker numpty anaconda jupternotebook alacazam. Oh, you don’t have it? Well, I’m sure the project page will tell you how to install it and add it to path!

    Step 3: Run " program name" and … “insanely detailed description of what to do once the program opens”

    Step 3 again: When you run it, get error “k*args passed null into program, so eat shit you can’t fix this”

    Step 4: Go to git hub issue page and see people have been complaining about this error for 6 months, but it was working back then when it’s 12 dependency hadn’t been updated yet. No fix incoming since the programmer was a chineese grad student that graduated 6 months ago and stopped working on the code.

    • dan@upvote.au
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      8 months ago

      This is why I like Docker. It’s basically “works on my machine” as a service.

      Similarly, I’m starting to really like dev containers. They’re Docker containers with all the required dev tools already installed inside, and a config so that VS Code knows how to spin up a new container when you want to do dev work on the project. They use VS Code remoting - a VS Code server runs in the container and the regular VS Code desktop app connects to it.

      I was recently dealing with a project that has some Ruby dev tools and it was 100x easier to deal with since they were using dev containers.

  • arthurpizza@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    If the documentation is on discord, there is no documentation. Documentation has to be freely available, otherwise it doesn’t count.

  • DirkMcCallahan@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    Yes, this exactly! I still cannot fathom how Discord took off. It offers literally no advantages over forums, and introduces some massive disadvantages.

    • voxelastronaut@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      It took off because it was objectively the best catch-all communication option for gamers at the time. It’s still the best option for certain use cases like that, but I’ll never understand why people prefer it for projects, troubleshooting, updates, etc. It seems incredibly lazy and unserious to me. And the current Discord mobile layout is absolutely horrible, making for a totally miserable user experience.

      • ILikeBoobies@lemmy.ca
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        8 months ago

        I hated back in 2015 when people were leaving other communication platforms for the lesser option of Discord

        Even today Discord still doesn’t have directional chat and you can’t be in multiple calls at once

        At least mods help mask all the other missing features

        • vonbaronhans@midwest.social
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          8 months ago

          I left mumble, teamspeak, and Skype for Discord.

          Discord is easily the better options among those choices.

          I also can’t think of much use for being in more than one call at once. I dunno seems like you’re just looking for a different thing. And that’s okay.

        • Alexstarfire@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          Discord didn’t, and still doesn’t, require a download. Easier for people to pick up and easier to use on locked down computers.

          • MonkeMischief@lemmy.today
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            8 months ago

            This. Whatever can be used on devices without admin rights, such as work or school devices, for “free”, will get picked up by normie worker drones and college students and minors in droves.

            It’s been pretty handy in a lot of ways, but yeah I do hate what it’s doing to indexable information and it’s only a matter of time before it goes for IPO and suddenly gets way worse seemingly overnight…

    • soggy_kitty@sopuli.xyz
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      8 months ago

      At the beginning it originally had an appeal that anyone could create a voice chat server for free in a matter of seconds.

      Teamspeak needed a hosted dedicated server. Skype was “calls” and not communities. Mumble was hardly known.

      I completely accept why it took off but I hate where it has gone. it’s over complicated and feature creeped electron shite

  • LainOfTheWired@lemy.lol
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    8 months ago

    What makes it even more crazy is 90% of projects are using github/gitlab/gitea or some other modern git platform that literally has a wiki feature built in. And everyone and their dog either knows or could very quickly learn how to use markdown to write the wiki.

    If you want a chatroom at least use matrix as it’s open source and privacy respecting. Though IRC is better for a community. And good old forums are best.

  • DreamButt@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    How does everyone feel about the “isolation” of information exchange? Specifically with systems like discord which encourage you to congregate behind a wall? Historically things like community forums were open to the public and thus indexable.

    • cybersandwich@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Discord could be a decent place for technical support, the way irc used to be used, but unless it’s super active with knowledgeable, helpful people, forums/GitHub discussions and other asynchronous comms channels make way more sense.

      Otherwise it’s like shouting into the void and the signal to noise ratio on my discord channels is really low.

      Plus with forums and discussion boards they can be stickied and indexed to be searched. So the next time someone has that error message they can pull up that exact discussion.

      • A_Random_Idiot@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        Discord is not a place for technical support or documentation, or anything important, ever.

        Search engines can not index discord.

        archive can not archive discord.

        Everything thats in discord, is in its own isolated bubble, that will disappear from history and time should the discord ever shut down, and even if its still up, its not findable by anyone searching for the problem.

        Discord fucking sucks for anything but random bullshiting with friends over games.

    • dan@upvote.au
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      8 months ago

      It’s way worse. At least Excel lets you do database-like stuff. Discord is unusable for long-form posts or any info you want to keep long term.

  • Dra@lemmy.zip
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    8 months ago

    A discord server with absurd amounts of over emphasised text, making nothing stand out, filled with emojis and broken up into different messages and sections at the exactly worst places for legibility.

    No messages are answered in any channel, and you get amazing sense of all of the technology we have to communicate but zero ability to use it.

    • dan@upvote.au
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      8 months ago

      Any of the modern forum systems (Discourse, Flarum, NodeBB) is fine as long as it works. Previous-gen forum systems (SMF, phpBB, MyBB, Vanilla, etc) are fine too.