this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2023
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Technology

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102
Why projects start with a Discord and not an alternative - Comment found on Mastodon (beehaw.org)
submitted 1 year ago by jherazob@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org
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Original comment, copy-pasted for convenience:

why do so many projects start with a discord and not with a wiki, or github, or web presence?

simply, discord is the fastest, most frictionless way to do the following:

  • garner a community of support ensuring that there is an audience for the project
  • provide access to idea validation for the creators of that project. rapid feedback for their project = rapid progress
  • provide the easy creation of (not necessarily accessible nor good, but) quick resources for the project

forums, websites, hell even github can only hope to match the value proposition of discord, and it's something people fail to take into account when they criticise the move to discord as a file host/forum/wiki/project website

if you want people to make a file host/forum/wiki/project website, they're directly competing with the frictionless, fast, yet unsustainable and frankly web-shit discord. the fast, frictionless nature is enough for people to use and accept, hell, even to make infrastructural to their project

a platform that could create a non-webshit, easy way to provide the value that discord provides, all while being just as fast and frictionless if not faster/more lubricated, would absolutely blow discord out the water

I am a sysadmin and my level of tech friction tolerance is different from the people referenced here leading projects, but I'd like to gather opinions on this, the fact that this regularly happens as described suggests there's a whole lot of truth to it, but i feel like it's overstating the friction, am i wrong here?

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[–] abhibeckert@beehaw.org 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

When someone posts on Discord, they will often get an answer within seconds. I don't recommend or use Discord, however I absolutely do recommend every project use a realtime chat service of some kind.

With GitHub or a forum it's likely to be overnight if you get a response at all. That fundamentally changes the type of content people are willing to post.

Projects should eventually have a website and an issue tracker and a chat service and an email address and a mastodon account. But you don't need to create all of them at once...

And a chat is always where I start. In fact I usually start discussing my idea in a chat room of some kind before I've even decided to start work on the project at all. 99% of the time the discussion ends with me deciding it's not a good idea.

[–] JCPhoenix@beehaw.org 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Discord, they will often get an answer within seconds.

That's what IRC used to be for. I was gonna say it was annoying to get something like mIRC installed and set up, but that's not even true since there are plenty of one click web clients. My subreddit used to have a channel on a reddit-affiliated IRC server and we provided a link to our IRC channel. Don't even have to register a username on most servers to join a channel and idle.

Being text only, however, means no reactions emojis and preview of images and videos and all that. Which I can understand be kinda annoying these days. Plus servers didn't necessarily talk to each other. There wasn't/isn't federation, or if there is, most servers are not federated. But if you're just dropping in for a one-off question, that shouldnt' matter.

[–] Helvedeshunden@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

No reactions, emojis, previews of images and videos? Sounds like heaven.

[–] progandy@feddit.de 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Depending on the servers and clients that is no longer true. https://ircv3.net/

[–] Helvedeshunden@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago

Good thing some clients will remain incompatible with the new features, then. On the other hand, IRC clients have always been some of the most configurable pieces of software with lots of options to choose from, so I am sure it will be possible to avoid most of the nonsense even in v3 clients.