I don’t want to do taxes, I don’t want to get an appointment with the hair dresser, and I don’t want to go back to Aikido because the pandemic is still ongoing, even if many people stopped caring.
Discord has been a net positive in my gaming life. 😒
@loke posted:
I get unreasonably angry when I see people promote the use of Discord. Especially when said people are using it for discussions about open source projects.
@suetanvil replied:
Eh, maybe? Discord has a really low barrier to entry and everyone knows how to use it. … Discord has a lot of problems but it may be a better idea to push for mitigating the problems (e.g. by scraping the threads and putting them in the project’s wiki) than to rail against it outright.
And I think I have to agree.
Discord has features IRC does not have for tightly knit groups, like gaming groups in my case. Persistent messages, editable messages, media upload, an easier admin interface… I understand why it is popular. These features are good! And sure, IRC probably offers this as well, with certain servers, and certain clients, but it’s not wide spread. I don’t know about it, that’s for sure. Perhaps XMPP has the features? Again, I don’t know about it. Whoever has the features is not making any headway.
So this is where there’s no point in railing against Discord. I gave up after a few years and my gaming life has markedly improved. I just push hard for keeping records on the wiki and not to rely on pinned messages.
And yes of course, I hate the “no other clients” policy (but note that Bitlbee has a plugin that is awkward to setup but at least it works), the legal stuff (but IRC is basically lawless in comparison so not sure if that’s actually better), the ads (but adblockers work), and the tracking (fuuuuh, adblockers, again). I like the idea that I can support Discord by buying Nitro for my servers (but I don’t and I haven’t set up any myself).
So… the situation is bad, but I still use Discord. My main server is the one Wanderer Bill administers: Grenzland.
I use Discord but not for free software projects, though. There, groups are much larger, IRC is good enough, I don’t need logging, image uploads, and so on. And I still prefer people to document the stuff that’s worth keeping on a wiki. So if you’re on the Emacs channel, please use the Emacs wiki. 😁
#Software #RPG #Social Media
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Well, as far as I know they aren’t publicly traded and still a private company. They also seem to be above board with their flaws and how they make their money.
So if you are going proprietary for this sort of thing, this would be one of the better ones. As long as they stay independent and don’t go all crypto...
– PresGas 2022-08-16 20:31 UTC
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Crypto-currencies truly are the bane of our industry.
– Alex 2022-08-18 16:57 UTC
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True, Discord works reliably and is fun and entertaining to use. It seems to be the one service folks tend to agree on these days, when it comes to organizing gaming groups. It’s good to have these groups and communities. I enjoy that a lot. Still, Discord is not my favourite. I wish people would be more thoughtful about the software they use.
Also, these days I’m starting to feel tired about instant messaging in general. Asynchronous communication has it’s advantages, too. We can (and do) still use what’s been there a long time: Email, Blogs, Wikis. Good thing is, we can still link out to our blogs and wikis from Discord. Using Discord as if it was a non-persistent medium like IRC might be a good approach. Put the things we want to keep elsewhere has the advantage of not locking out those, who don’t want to use Discord.
It’s hard to see what might be viable alternatives. I for myself would be happy to organize a gaming group around an email list server. However, it seems email has fallen into disfavour for many, maybe becaouse it’s associated with work and spam. Matrix probably offers a lot of what folks like about discord. I never got into Matrix yet, so I can’t really tell. A gaming dedicated tilde maybe? integrating wiki, matrix, jitsi and a list server? I can already see the Discord users shrug and move on ... 🤔
– Wanderer Bill 2022-08-20 07:31 UTC
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We did try a Signal group but it fell into disuse. Perhaps too intrusive? And all those channels in Discord help channel the discussion, where as Signal offers no such grouping.
We tried IRC by nobody else joined.
There’s still Mastodon for small stuff that doesn’t scale.
Perhaps if we had a private forum. Some super simple sqllite + static HTML based thing? NoNonsense Forum is some PHP thing that claims to be simple.
But… I *found* people on Discord. When I set up my own, I have to *bring* people.
– Alex 2022-08-20 09:28 UTC