this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2024
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discord is totally the best thing. Anyone on the internet want to explain why I'm wrong?
It's an information blackhole. It sucks everything without any way to find it again. Even the forum and threads options they recently introduced, specifically to address this use case, are severely subpar compared to decades old alternatives.
On top of that, it's a proprietary walled garden platform. If Discord decides to do anything against the communities for profit seeking there's nothing, no one could do. Leaving hundreds of software projects without recourse for search, scrape, archive or retrieval in any way for all the knowledge deposited there.
What's the use case here exactly? Some servers are disorganized af and trying to use the platform in the wrong way. The search function seems to work fine for whatever I need it for though.
Point is you shouldn't have to join any servers or make any accounts to simply find the info on a search engine. If a website like say reddit.com asked me to make an account just to view some link I followed there I would just nope out and curl the archived copy and grep for exact query, rinse and repeat until information is absorbed. With discord that's not an option and that sucks.
Just goes back to what the use case is. You're alluding to a case where Discord is being used for content that should be easily searchable on the wide internet. Platforms like Discord including the FOSS alternatives aren't good for that by their very design. The notion that every web service should be wide open and searchable is antithetical to privacy, which is ironically often cited as a huge downside to Discord. With the privately hosted Matrix instance I use with close friends for instance being isolated from the wide internet is the whole point.
Discord is advertising itself as a public forum for all communities to call home. They even implemented forum and threading features. Just like their productivity features meant to compete with slack. The features aren't there to be useful. But to lure users into a golden cage. Discord's product is not usability, it's nitro subscriptions. Just like Google doesn't give two shits about searching and indexing, because their actual product is advertisements. Discord will just follow whatever fad is on the zeitgeist at the moment to ensnare new users. And any feature will be enshittified and mutated to serve nitro sales, never to serve the user's needs and use cases.
My use case is finding good online communities for my offline interests wherever they exist, and I've found some solid ones on Discord. This is why I agree with every point you've raised but find them ineffective at making me want to not use it. I value the connections I make with people through the platform more than any of the nerd reasons why I'm supposed to be bad for using it. Ultimately I don't care about the platforms that much, they're just transient things which come and go. So I'll host a Matrix instance until something else is better, I'll use Discord for running my weekly dnd group because nothing else worked for everyone and it's been solid for 3 years. "Discord's product is not usability" ...okay I guess I'll stop using it now. /s That just falls flat. To stop using it the reasons I use it will have to go away.
I've faced similar arguments about how I have a Windows machine for media creation, people try to debate me that there's better alternatives assuming I haven't tried them or that I don't prioritize FOSS, but they don't even have a connection to the scene I use this stuff for and they think some nerd technology argument is a valid reason to stop doing what I love. It's like yeah every point raised is completely valid, but people will debate the ins and outs of platforms and software before they ever apply them to something beyond themselves.
It's like okay you don't like the new Milwaukee battery line of tools, but here's a kitchen I made with them so just stfu and eat your food.
No one is trying to make you do something. This thread is about the hypocrisy and irony of FOSS projects using a proprietary platform that fundamentally goes against the movement values and principles. No one cares what you do in your life. You are not that important.
"The movement values and principles" is a fairy tale tech hobbyists tell themselves to feel like their consumer preferences have grandiose importance.
90% of your tech usage runs on and depends upon said fairy tale. FFS you're on a Lemmy instance.
Nah it depends on physical infrastructure and programs which aren't capable of having values and principles. You mean people ascribe values and principles as their motivation for working on said programs, which I don't doubt.
Programs and infrastructure people built for a reason, and those reasons are always political. Everything is political. Even the very internet system you use being open to the public and the world is a result of some political decisions decades ago, nevermind FOSS.
Gates once called Linux communism and yeah, he was right. FOSS is the closest thing to practicable communism.
It's a route of exploitation. FOSS developers aren't often paid for their labor, and what they produce is often commodified by capital. Products of people's leisure are exploited basically, and they justify it through this moral framework, but no class dynamics are impacted and actually the opposite, they become reified even more.
If Linux or foss had the ability to impact political economy in some communist way we'd have seen it by now, so this is like a deus ex machina myth for tech hobbyists to elevate themselves, an evangelical tech religion. As a Marxist myself this stuff just makes me laugh, the irony of a creature like Bill Gates calling something communist and embracing it with pride.
If you want to put faith in technology and the internet changing the world for the better, just realize since the dawn of all this stuff wealth inequality and economic stresses have only increased until a full blown crisis in 2008 of the consenting economic model. Now as these stresses turn inward we see it culminating in what we might call neofascism.
Capitalism subsumes, that's no surprise and that's a function of it, it's nothing specific to technology, you can buy Das Kapital at amazon.com now and you could buy it in a book shop run by capitalists before. Disco Elysium while fiction - has excellent commentary on this as well when it comes to critiques.
Technology is value agnostic, more obvious than ever with information age era tech, but at least in my experience, it has done way more good than bad, I don't think I'd be alive without the internet honestly and the efforts of FOSS and the culture of information sharing and all of it has been to the detriment of both cultural and capital control.
The thought that I'd pay for media is something scary and otherworldly, the thought I'd be gatekept from accessing certain information instead of just being able to find info I'd be dead without.
Just as income inequality has widened (which is not as a consequence of any specific technology anyway turn of the 20th century was far worse) , and the reactionaries get more brazen, we see global class consciousness on a scale previously unseen and the openness of the average person to progressive ideas and critiques of the establishment.
Gates didn't embrace Linux, MS did after him and their "embrace,extend,extinguish" approach failed massively, for every FOSS project that gets taken over by capital there are so many more that don't and can't.
We're on one right now, I would like to believe. Time will tell of course. But your doomerism while entertaining is counterproductive. I think it's okay to be indifferent, but to actually actively advocate FOSS as politically useless is just doing the capitalists' demoralization for them.
Maybe you consoom mindless corporate drivel, I P2P pirate everything, have never seen an ad and I self host FOSS versions of anything and everything.
Right, you're establishing a moral superiority by your consumption model. I have the same consumption model but not vain enough to think the way I watch movies has any moral significance.
If the forum features were used properly it's not really any different than a traditional discourse forum board. Also being proprietary isn't always a bad thing, and this is coming from an open source enthusiast. There are alternatives like guilded and another one called riot (not to be confused with riot software).
Edit: anyone want to explain why the down votes? I'm not wrong, you can create forums, pin posts, create forum categories and tag posts, it's not a black hole if you take the effort and not make it a black hole. People just like to bitch and moan because "discord bad!". Fuck off with that shit.
If we don't care about FOSS or privacy or whatever, Discord is good as a chat service, but it really isn't a replacement of something like a forum, website, or wiki.
Good place to ask a question, not a great place to look for the answer to a question yourself.
Ignoring the foss issue discord just needs slightly better fuzzy search and it would be amazing. Right now I'm usually able to find related discussion but it takes a few different keywords and I know that there's probably something im missing out on because a single character is different...
From my experience with discord, more than one conversation is often happening at the same time in the same channel. For servers that are active enough, this can be as fast-paced as the chats in live streams.
Trying to parse if the answer that "OrthoDonkulous" gave is for the question that "Headshots247" asked, that "ProgrammerSox" asked, or that "BelieveUsFoetusJesus" asked is sometimes difficult.
Discord adds streaming channels and effortless multimedia which is huge. What I do on Discord isn't possible on these other examples.
It depends on what the goals of the project/group are.
Roughly 100-(1/∞)% of the time I don't want anything involving video or sound, but I could see some projects/groups where things like streaming or audio would be useful.
I don't have an issue with discord itself, it just seems to be being used as the default for nearly everything now, even when it shouldn't be.
It's legit bad for certain uses like any platform, sometimes people try to use it for those things. Linuxbros don't like the idea of Discord in general regardless, for them the platform takes president over whatever people do on it, and assume that since the platform is bad anyone who uses it is stupid.
I don't really care about the platform if it has good communities on it, and I've found a lot on Discord which I haven't found anywhere else. I'm on an electronic music production server where people share works in progress, help each other, big names in the scene use it out of genuine interest as well. I've shared my own stuff and connected with people in the scene across the world to share our project files and instrument presets etc. Don't really care about Discord though and would gladly use any platform with a community like this on it. Saying "Discord sucks" and referencing legit reasons why isn't going to convince me it hasn't been useful for passions I have offline.
Also I've hosted a weekly dnd sesh on Discord for three years now after we went through basically every other platform through trial and error. We had no loyalty to anything and Discord has just been the one that works. Super great for organizing a campaign we run through a virtual table top platform.
A lot of the FOSS alternatives are way better at a technical level, I use Matrix for our friend group's privately hosted chat server every day. Haven't found anything comparable to the communities I've found on Discord though.
Is appending -bros to anything you don't like lingo du jour amongst the gen alpha 12 year olds or something?
you don't realize this, but it's actually your comment that identifies you as very young, not his.
Do you mean like the "oh no no %thing%bros" or "%thing%bros on suicide watch" that 4chan did on like /a/ and /tv/ and such pre-election tourism?
Not really sure if it has a name but that was a distinctly different phenomenon that's long since evolved into appending -chads and -cels in lieu of -bros. You're out of touch old man. This is new and homegrown to the pre-musk twittersphere.