this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2024
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Amongst many other reasons, my biggest is it's not searchable by search engines.
If someone else is having the same problem as me with some software, and someone else has figured it out, it should show up on the first page of a Google search regarding it.
If it doesn't, the tool the community is using is entirely unfit for purpose.
Open source communities should be all about tearing down walled gardens, not living in them.
That's why we made forum.2009scape.org for our project. Yet the SEO is so bad that nobody finds anything we put there anyways.
At that point it still has an advantage over discord in that if I know it exists I can narrow the search on Google (if it's still not showing up, then there's a misconfiguration going on)
With discord I have to join the community and hope that discord search isn't shit.
Oh and I'm not gonna install discord on my work laptop—so if I'm looking at something for work I'm shit outta luck
If you explicitly add site:ourforum or quotes around large blocks of text, our forum does show up, but to appear anywhere near the front page naturally is a full-time job and not something we have the resources to dedicate.
I think, unfortunately, things like GitHub discussions are the best place for users to find things off Google, but at the end of the day you're still trusting a profit driven proprietary company
Yeah I'd agree it's a bit shit that it often has to end up somewhere like GitHub, but it's at least searchable, which (for me at least) is an absolute necessity for any community where people go to troubleshoot.
Tbh, using "site:blah" is what I'm referring to when I say about narrowing the search. Kinda just do that if I know roughly where I'm looking in order to cut through the shit, but I'll put my hands up that maybe that's not especially typical.
that makes sense, thank you for explaining
You are right, when I was trying to get acquainted with Gentoo for instance, I found most of my problems solved in a forum or wiki, if they had discord I wouldn’t have gotten nowhere probably and would’ve just ditched it
I don’t think you understand how terrible search engines are for niche communities. I’d bet most lemmy posts don’t show up. You’re far better off just joining the community and doing a search within discord than wasting your time scraping through bad search results.
If I know the community exists, I can narrow the search on Google
.... Unless it's on discord because in that case it'll never show up
And if the community I'm looking for is regarding something I'm working on, I'm not putting discord on my work laptop, so shit outta luck
Doesn't work most of the time for my communities.
Sounds like a personal problem you don't want to work around.
I'm sorry, you want everything that's on your discord going through whatever monitoring software your work puts on your laptop?
A lot of places won't even let you install third party software without going through IT—and I'll bet you most IT departments aren't going to authorise you installing discord.
This is a very common situation, not a personal problem.
Weird take.
Just like every other job you bring it up to the IT department and work around it.
Tell me you've never worked with a corporate IT department without telling me you've never worked with a corporate IT department.
It's not a professional tool, and it's clearly not positioned as one. There's no way in hell you get that through any remotely professional IT department. Aside from many other reasons, they can't lock it down from an information security perspective (effectively legally required to avoid falling foul of things like GDPR), that alone makes it a massive denied response.
Well gee, I hope you don't use texting, phone calls, emails, private forums, social media DMs, or talk to anyone IRL, because those aren't searchable either!
This argument seems like reaching for something to complain about rather than having a legitimate problem with discord. If anything, you don't like the "large group chat" paradigm, but that's like hating a screwdriver because it's not a hammer.
This is about the official community around a piece of software being shoved inside a opaque box. It's shitty.
I have plenty of social groups on discord, that's the correct usage of the tool.
Your example is more "everything is a nail when you're holding a hammer"