this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2026
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I hope that discourages open source projects and similar communities from using discord as forum / user support.
Yep, hate when I want to follow some project and they link you to X, Reddit and Discord lol
I've had to dismiss several potentially-useful projects for this reason. In fact nearly every FOSS project I come across has no open platform for discussion.
Sometimes there is a Discourse forum but those are just awful from a UX perspective, and even then the devs rarely reply to anything there, mostly leaning on GitHub.
Its maddening, isn't it? They can write what's often a full stack web facing application and they can't spin up and host some pre-rolled forum VM? I have one in my laundry room and I'm the most amateur sysadmin ever.
Need support? Contract us on @SupportThatNeverReplies on Shitter (the nazi-everything app)!
I can say as a member of the PCSX2 project that I understand why we and other FOSS emulators use it as official support – but nevertheless wish that we didn't. We've discussed practicalities before, and the project doesn't stay there just from inertia or because of personal preference; there are major practical reasons to prefer it over a forum (which we have), a wiki (which we have), or Matrix.
I'd be willing to endure the pain points and to scale back support in order to be off of that shithole, but I also get that's a fringe minority sentiment shared by only a couple others. All of us would be tech-literate enough to use a client like Signal or Element for intra-project discussion, but very few people would come to Matrix for support (nor would we probably want them to due to the much greater moderation burden per end user), and the chatroom model – to most of us – is much easier for support than a forum. The only reason I'm still begrudgingly on Discord is for PCSX2.
I share your hope, but I seriously doubt this will come even close to dislodging us. Smaller projects, perhaps.
Putting valuable help, trouble solving and FAQ stuff into a discord is … annoying. You cant find it again. So it will only help the original poster
We do also maintain docs. I put a lot of effort into the Setup ones but got burnt-out before really getting into the other ones (which need a lot of work). And for actual bugs, we use GitHub.
Discord's search functionality is reasonably robust, and as long as you're already there, you can usually find old conversations about the problem you're having. The biggest problem is that it's gated off from the wider Internet, which is shitty.
I think what we all like about it over forums for providing support is that it's closer to real-time communication, it's more flexible (conversations can flow in and out of each other instead of being permanently stuck in one subject-specific thread), and it's more casual.
Maybe they've changed something since I last tried getting help via Discord, but I found the search feature extremely lacking. I never have trouble finding someone else with my same question/problem, but there's no means of viewing replies to the message in question, or even whether anyone replied at all. One is required to manually browse potential hours or days of messages in the hope of following a conversation chain that might not even exist. This is made even worse by the fact that replies to a message aren't necessarily registered as replies because they're just subsequent chat messages.
Damn it. I did not come here for a reasonable and valid explanation.
ಠ_ಠ
Begrudgingly puts away pitchfork
I get it, but if bigger projects don't move to alternatives, those alternatives have a lot less pressure to evolve. If a big project bites the bullet and moves, then there are more technically minded folks with a vested interest in making the platform better.
Thanks for the insight.
https://stoat.chat/download
Stoat looks promising as an open source alternative
Absolutely not.
Stoat (formerly Revolt) is an utter shit-show of alt left and right extremists and the development is dead in the water. They’ve claimed to be working on feature parity with Discord for years now. Not to mention the developers jumping ship and the whole “Stoat” rebrand. Not to mention, their email verification server is just hosted on a homelab setup which has lead to a plethora of users being unable to receive their verification emails, resulting in them requiring a manual approval via emailing in… which guess what… those are also failing to come through!
Don’t touch Revolt/Stoat. It’s no better.
Honest question, would something like stoat allow forum threads like in discord but being accessible through a classic forum style webpage through matrix protocol in order for it to beindexed by the wider web?
Why would you do this though...
Because one of the things I find most annoying about discord is how the information is much less accessible. Before you could search something on google and find some niche forum talking about it. Nowadays that forum is probably a discord server and the information is hard to find
How does running it through Matrix solve that problem?
It doesn’t, I just like the matrix protocol for privacy.
Looks promising...
but why is it always electron?
Because people want fancy animations, images, videos, stylized text, etc. And the easiest way to accomplish that is to just use a browser under the hood.
FOR REAL BRO
Theyve been around for a few years and I'm still not really impressed. No E2EE, No federation if the people running it go belly up. You might as well use signal ATP.
As far as I understand it can be somewhat federated using the matrix protocol? https://matrix.org/ecosystem/bridges/stoat/
This isn't federation, its a bridge. Theres also a bridge for Discord, Telegram and Signal, but none of those are federated either
Ah I get it now!
I just tried to sign up for it. Installed app and signed up, it wouldn't go through. So I go to web interface and create an account there. I've waited ONE HOUR for email verification, and NOTHING. Asked to resend verification, they made me click through 5 captivas, and still NOTHING. Moving on from stoat.
Misconfiguration with SMTP is likely or their SMTP server is under maintenance and you just tried at a poor time.
Granted for a production environment there should be some notice to users.
It's even simpler than that... Their SMTP server is just hosted on a homelab and has notoriously been terrible for uptime. They've had consistent issues with emails not being sent or received and that's not even the icing on the shit sundae for Revolt/Stoat.
Which is a great reason to dump SMTP altogether. It's a messaging platform FFS. If you need to send someone a message, do it on the platform.
There are layers to this.
Persistent chat rooms are here to stay.
As a user? I dislike this. I am sure you do too.
As a developer who gives a shit about the users? The number of times I have had to spend sometimes upwards of a dozen back and forth emails trying to explain to someone that I am not lying to them and the answer they found on the forums are for a bug that was fixed 5 years ago... Let alone having to, politely, tell a greybeard to shut the fuck up because they keep telling people to search instead of ask for help...
Whereas a more ephemeral approach that actually encourages people to ask questions? Yes, it does cause long term issues when someone is trying to debug a project that has been on life support for years. But, by and large, just checking the current FAQ and then asking in a chatroom results in a better experience for the users, the devs, and the community managers trying to bridge the gap. And... you should really try to avoid being dependent on said EOL software. Not always possible but... yeah.
And that isn't going to change. So they'll either stick with discord or use something MUCH less stable... like Matrix.
This is bad.
It isn't just long-term, it causes issues right off the bat; no fix is searchable. All fixes require a community member to respond.
For the user this causes significant delays. A problem that could be solved in minutes with a search now requires hours or days for someone to respond to their specific problem. A problem that likely was already solved 10 times before. And god help you if the server is active, your problem might get burred instantly and no response will ever come.
For the support people, they have to answer the same questions over and over and over because there is no way for users to search for and solve their own problems.
These issues compound on each other as support staff burn out and users get tired of waiting. Leads to people just going elsewhere.
For me, a lack of support forums signals the creators don't care about the software working right and don't care the software will be unmaintainable the moment they step away. Ie: a lack of support forum is a strong signal to find greener pastures.
Incorrect. While I find the search capabilities of Discord (and the Discord/Teams likes) to be... bad, it isn't THAT much worse than a phpbb in a lot of ways.
What you lose out on is the ability for search engines and, increasingly a concern, LLMs from being able to index it. I shouldn't have to explain why that might be a "pro" as far as the folk actually doing support are concerned.
As for delays? If it is a well supported bit of kit, a quick search and a skim of the FAQ (Discord is actually really nice for having a way to aggregate questions like that in an almost ticketing like system) is going to cover the major stuff. And my experience (on both sides) with Slack et al is that users are generally glad to help out.
It does suck because, unless it is a super common issue, you need to actually ask a question and interact with a human. But it also tends to mean that people are a lot faster to have you run a few tests rather than respond once a day to a thread.
Tell me you've never provided support without telling me you've never provided support, heh.
You think it's a PRO that nobody can search for your support info!? No you absolutely need to explain that...
Yeah, I have to back you up here. This person's alleged experience is completely divorced from my experience working on PCSX2 and tells me they have no idea what they're talking about. We have to answer questions over and over and over again, but usually there's a command to quickly give a canned answer.
And the questions aren't repeated because there's no way for users to search (there is); it's because it's usually lightning-fast in that kind of environment to just ask and because dedicated help forums are a form of selection bias. You're generally going to get more thought-out questions from users who use dedicated, thread-based support forums because either a) they needed to make an account just to ask that question, b) they already have an account and so are more dedicated than the average user, or c) all the others who didn't want to make that investment either just gave up or found the answer some other way.
Edit: I guess people who have no experience with FOSS user support are upset at reality. Next time, give me a list of things you want me to say, and I can bring that along with some choccy milk and some ointment for your sore ass.