The amount of niche info that would have been found in searchable forum posts in years prior, that has now gotten sucked up into Discord where it can’t be found, fucking blows.
this post was submitted on 12 Apr 2024
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Absolute tragedy tbh, discord won’t be around forever. I weep for all the game knowledge that will be lost
There is, and there has never been value behind discord's closed doors. Don't waste your words there, it is like talking to the wind.
And imagine if public facing forums weren't mostly dead because of the "necroposting" hate moderator brainworm
Oops this discussion from 2017 is the number one google link for your niche topic ? Well, too bad, post in new and maybe in five years it will be #2 post on google for that topic.
Who put the nerds with no friends in charge of human social interaction ‽
I don't know what you mean by "necroposting" hate moderator brainworm". Care to elaborate one what this I and why it is bad?
It's very common for forums to have rules against posting in a thread that hasn't seen any activity for an arbitrary amount of time. When you do that, you will often cause a thread that has fallen from the front page to bump back to the top of the front page. It's not clear why this is a problem, though. Maybe regulars just dislike seeing old topics brought back up?
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Post in a old thread, and often mods will immediately yell at you and close the thread for having committed the crime of necroposting. Which only makes visible the old post for the minuscule but devoted part of the userbase that actually waits in the "thread by last post, chronological order view". Those people by definition, want new stuff and are annoyed by the old thread messing up the feng shui of their post order. Probably an OCD thing.
This is mostly because those old forum software lack a "thread by creation date, chronological view".
So they close those discussions that happen on the timescale of years. They close the discussion that are google's top links. Then they get bored waiting for new and leave for discord. Where nothing is recorded nor searchable. So all this effort and knowledge goes right down the drain.
Yeah. Closing threads after a few days or getting mad at users for replying to old posts is stupid and bandwagony.
Don't worry, I've got a copy and I'll host it all on my Discord!
Well, forums are not real time, and that's what most people these days want apparently.
So, on to the alternatives:
Element / Matrix:
- Lackluster moderation tools
- Voice channels not ready
- Signing up is hard / federation not well explained
Revolt Chat
- Run by very talented kiddies
- Not stable
- Not easily self-hostable
well, the problem is not that forums are not real time. the problem is that people use real time chats for things that should't be done in real time. like guides, which should stand on their own as an organized post, easily searched and found.
"real time" chats, that is, instant messengers, have their time and place. they have been around for a while, but they never really replaced forums. until discord came, which kind of then did. which i guess also resulted from facebook groups, twitter, instagram, and reddit first kind of partially replacing forums, after which then forums really fell out of favor, and discord really is way easier and better to interact with than any of the others mentioned (aside from maybe reddit). people are also just lazy and jusy use whatever works.
and people then started using discord like a forum since forums are almost dead and discord is just simple and easy. so many guides, info, announcements, etc. are put in discord like it is a forum since the admittedly amazing features for roles and bots make it convenient.
it all gets lost in a sea instant messaging organizing. to find something, one must go to one of a a bunch pinned messages in one of the bajillion channels that links to a post (i say oost, it is actually a message) which in turn links to a series of messages where someone knowledgeable posted something useful intertwined with shitpost messages fromither people. if you are lucky, someone made a google doc for a guide, but those also suck, and they are also not easily found unless you know the guy who knows the guy who knows which pinned message in which channel has the link to it.
You can't change how people want to communicate. So you either open a channel for people that won't sign up to a forum or don't get those users. Is it the best type of medium? Doesn't matter for them. It matters to other types of users.
I prefer Forums, but I'm not the type of user we are talking about.
Edit: I don't get why the downvotes, we are having a respectful conversation, if you downvote because you disagree, you are upvoting an echo chamber.
Well, forums are not real time, and that’s what most people these days want apparently.
I think people use discord where it's a bad fit not because it's what most people want, but because it's what's familiar, free, and already in front of them.
If I understand correctly, you are proving my point by saying people chose Discord over others, and then you list their reasons.
No, I am disputing your claim: "forums are not real time, and that’s what most people these days want apparently."
Obviously, a lot of people use Discord, but I think you're mistaken about their motivations. They didn't choose it because they think forums are inferior to real-time chat. We can see that by the massive popularity of Reddit over Discord's lifetime. Rather, they chose Discord because it's what was offered (along with heavy marketing), and because it was convenient (especially for community creators).
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Forums are the best? I still can get info from electronics forums from 20y ago and it's well organized.
I don't see any other alternatives, revolt chat is new and just a discord alternative that sucks as well while element is fricking bad at indexing stuff, you can't search anything there not to mention their bad encryption.
What's wrong with their encryption?
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I just use chatgpt, a sufficient surrogate for the rest of humanity. At least as it pertains to knowledge before 2023.
relying on discord for all your comms
I stopped using Discord a long time ago because the apps on every platforms are unapologetically bloated piles of garbage.
Protip: If your phone gets hot just because an app is open, delete that app.
May I ask what you’re using to replace Discord?
IRC
AIM
ICQ4LYFE
Uh Oh!
msn messenger!
F
SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY!
Matrix, xmpp, IRC or even rocketchat are better alternatives.
Xmpp is acceptable for my friend group. We are eyeing matrix.
It is unsuitable for knowledge preservation, like IRC and discord.
Once again, privacy-disrespecring discord is nuking things to keep its own ass safe. FOSS devs, when will you ever learn?
Matrix is literally there.
Just host your own god damn servers alongside your webpage (assuming it's not running on Guthub pages)
I looked into matrix servers the other day for an unrelated reason and tbh the amount of resources they ask for is way more than you need for a webpage (dendrite asks for 1gb ram minimum for a number of users, and that's without accounting for postgres)
So that's an absolute lie, I run synapse + WhatsApp bridge with 500MiB. Dendrite is supposed to be more efficient
That’s what their docs say:
At an absolute minimum, Dendrite will expect 1GB RAM. For a comfortable day-to-day deployment which can participate in federated rooms for a number of local users, be prepared to assign 2-4 CPU cores and 8GB RAM — more if your user count increases.
That’s not accounting for Postgres.
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I meant that more along like hosting it alongside your web page on a VPS or something.
I got that. What I mean is that you can easily have a tiny 256mb VPS for a bunch of static websites or even some WordPress and the official matrix servers would require you to easily double or triple the bill.
Dunno what devs use or spec to host their webpages or if they also use it for some dev work like building packages or something else.
So if there are spare ressources, might as well use it.
And this lack of transparency is a great example of why I avoid Discourse.
I avoid Discourse
Discord. Discourse is open source forum software: https://www.discourse.org/
Well, that's a new one. I'm sure that I typed Discord, but evidently I failed. Thank you for pointing that out. I could blame auto correct, but even that is hard to check, since my keyboard recommended next word follows an evolution that I'm unable to grok.
As an aside, thanks for the link, I hadn't heard of the discourse forum software.
Fun fact: Suyu wouldn't have their current problems if communication happened on self-hosted Discourse instead of 3rd party Discord.
Similar to how GitLab can be selfhosted; Spacebarchat could be a good alternative; but at that point why not just do forums?
Like vinyl and Polaroid cameras, I want bulletin boards to make a comeback.
I want bulletin boards to make a comeback.
Kinda telling that the project uses Matrix chat.
Fuck discord.
Go to Matrix.
Why discord gets involved is stupid. This is why you self-host these things.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Both Suyu and Sudachi began as forks of Yuzu, the emulator that Nintendo sued out of existence on March 4th.
Developers of Yuzu’s forks also claimed they were changing the code further, among other practices, in an effort to avoid pissing Nintendo off.
But it’s possible that people were sharing Nintendo’s cryptographic keys, firmware, or even entire pirated games in these servers despite those commitments.
Even if Suyu and Sudachi were infringing, Discord’s policy does not suggest it would permaban, much less nuke entire servers, on the first offense.
Discord did not answer questions about whether these users were repeat copyright infringers, had received any previous warnings, or were forwarded any takedown requests.
Nintendo isn’t just targeting Switch emulators with its latest round of takedowns but also some of the tools that aid them: it sent DMCA takedown requests to GitHub to remove 27 forks of the Sigpatch Updater, as well as Lockpick_RCM, kezplez-nx, and Incognito_RCM, which help Switch owners and developers obtain encryption keys.
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