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”.
I wonder if it’s due to younger people’s lack of understanding file structure. All modern operating systems offer the user the blackhole theory of storage where you just plop all of your files into one big unorganized storage bin.
It’s so bad that computer science students are entering college without understanding what folders/ directories are.
So it makes sense that people who use discord are comfortable with the idea of just having one big pile of discussions instead of having them broken up separately.
Unfortunately, it’s a big mess to navigate.