Words from a queer, neurodivergent, feminist, Linux sysadmin/dev/advocate and geek.

Recently I accidentally made a Fediverse post which went viral:

stop using discord for your open source communities

That post is short, punchy, opinionated, and prescriptive, which I suspect is the cause for its virality.

Unfortunately, like many micro-blog posts, it lacks nuance, which many replies highlighted. I made the post to vent my frustration at needing to join a Discord server to interact with a community, so it is far from a measured critique of the subject.

This blog post is an attempt to address those nuances in greater detail. This is not an exhaustive analysis, and I’ve resolved to not let “perfect” be the enemy of “done”.

  • douglasg14b@beehaw.org
    1·
    1 year ago

    100%. There are community tools made for this purpose. Make a discourse forum, if your project is on GitHub use GitHub issues and discussions. Discourse is fantastic, and is purpose made with all the features and gamification you could need for community knowledge management and q&a.

    These are actively indexed and can hold a wealth of information that is invaluable to users of your open source project. And decreases the load on you.

    Also, somehow, you can get worse than discord… Slack. Slack servers that wipe anything more than 10k messages ago is absolute cancer for communities and community support…