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The graying open source community needs fresh blood
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this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2024
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Programming
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Ironically, I think it's the younger ones the ones pushing for discord the most. Some projects opened a discord because it actually made it more attractive to young people.
The question is how to make an open source alternative more attractive.
Jesus I guess I'm the outlier. I hate discord so much it's unreal.
right there with you. when a project/repo advertises discord as it's primary/sole means of communication between and with developers I let out a big sigh and move on to something else.
Are there particular mediums of conversation that get you excited though?
Honestly, I've noticed an uptick in the number of discourse forums for tech related things and I'm all for that. Discourse is documented well and maintained openly, it's indexable by search engines and you can visit and use discourse-based web forums using browsers that aren't capable of js rendering (think lynx). The last bit is a nice-to-have for me, but just being indexable is huge.
In 10 years, I would hate it if every answer I gave or got from a developer is lost to an endless abyss of messages buried deep in an obscure discord guild that a user would have to sift through only after making an account with and installing specific chat software. I hate there being so many hurdles in front of just getting answers. That's a good tl;dr as to why discord is on my shitlist for support/development discussion platforms.
The cheapest tier for Discourse is $50 a month for up to 100 users. https://www.discourse.org/pricing# With self hosting you can probably get that lower at the cost of your time getting it set up and making sure it's cheaper than the options they provide.
As much as we all collectively roll our eyes when we see Discord being used for community discussion, it makes sense from a maintainer's point of view.
Edit: Discourse has free options for creators
Yeah see that's the sort of conclusive mindset that's got us here. I don't mean to insinuate you're wrong for coming to that conclusion, but "It costs money or effort so let's use a worse option because it's convenient" is part of the reason we don't have a lot of good solutions in this domain.
I'll also admit the options these days are limited depending on your goals for a project. If you want to reach the most eyes and have the highest draw of potential contributors, having a discord server makes sense. My gripe is when technical discussion or support take place there.
When technical discussions and support is over Discord it doesn't bother me too much, but when projects don't accept issues anywhere but Discord then I get angry.
Email!!!
Whenever I see Discord mentioned, I run from it, like a vampire from holy water!
What makes you hate it?
Jesus what's to like? It's proprietary software, it has privacy abuses, terrible UI, hate the "servers" thing, consolidated and centralized, no index for search engines, make an account or you're shit out of luck. It plain fucking sucks.
You can make a Discord server in like 1 second for free. It's got mostly good enough tools for managing the community. I get the appeal. If you already use it then it's super easy to just use it for that too. (Except on Android, where you can't easily switch accounts. Maybe iPhone has the same problem though.)
Matrix has the most potential. It was the most admired communication tool in the stackoverflow survey last year.