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Why projects start with a Discord and not an alternative - Comment found on Mastodon (beehaw.org)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It absolutely is a thing. Network effect matters. Usability matters. Open source/community solutions usually lack that (and the lack of familiarity makes it worse).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Discord's usability is terrible for Open source communities. It never gave me the impression that it was designed for anything more than game chat rooms. The topic separation and discoverability is poor. Even Zulip does a much better job at it.

Open source maintainers always ask you to search the bug tracker/forums before asking a question. The same maintainers make their own life hard when they choose Discord, because the history is simply a black hole as far as search engines are concerned. Just use a discourse forum or something similar.