this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2026
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[–] BlackEco@lemmy.blackeco.com 467 points 1 day ago (5 children)

Please, pretty please, be the spark that will stop OSS projects from hosting their "support forums" on Discord.

[–] nekusoul@lemmy.nekusoul.de 164 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

I wish it was only limited to support forums. I've seen a Linux kernel driver where the Issues sections was closed and you should go to Discord instead. No thanks.

[–] justsomeguy@lemmy.world 121 points 1 day ago

It's horrible. We already had that stuff figured out. Wiki pages and forums to make information accessible even after 20 minutes have passed. Fuck that development and everyone that was/is pushing for that.

[–] zensanto@ttrpg.network 59 points 1 day ago (2 children)

🤮

Who are the morons that keep making these decisions?

[–] foggenbooty@lemmy.world 9 points 1 day ago (2 children)

It's people that don't want to have to maintain things, which I understand. It's trivial these days to host a forum with a cloud provider, or have a github, but Discord is one click. It's not the ideal tool, but one click, no payment, and you have a place everyone can talk to each other.

[–] CommanderCloon@lemmy.ml 1 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

I guess, but even without talking about forums, even a subreddit would at least be publicly accessible and searchable. Using discord is effortless but antagonistic, at least a subresdit would be both effortless and in the service of the public.

Sure, I'd prefer an open source self hosted platform, but I'm hard pressed to find anything worse than discord

[–] UnspecificGravity@piefed.social 0 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

Sure, except that Discord was accessible when these were set up. There is nothing stopping Reddit from doing the exact same thing next year.

[–] sexhaver87@sh.itjust.works 1 points 6 hours ago

Discord is just as inaccessible from the open internet as it’s always been, if not arguably worse so, although you’re right in giving Reddit no further credit in that department.

[–] ferrule@sh.itjust.works 1 points 17 hours ago

This is my biggest pet peeve of OSS projects. Someone writes some code and that is where it ends for them. The rest of the infrastructure is so free and so easy that there is no need for dedication to the project.

[–] ripcord@lemmy.world 39 points 1 day ago

Several open source developers in this case

[–] stressballs@lemmy.zip 35 points 1 day ago (3 children)

It's too bad the open source community couldn't find some programmers to help them make an alternative.

[–] in4apenny@lemmy.dbzer0.com 0 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago) (1 children)

Open source community always loses to capitalists, because people won't do the work unless there's money involved. Otherwise there would be open source alternatives that are better and more popular. What incentive do smart programmers have to help the open source community when they're better off earning 180k+ per year programming for the financial sector? Especially in this ever increasingly oppressive economy. I'm sorry but unless leftists are donating billions to the open source community, it's idealistic at best to depend on them.

[–] stressballs@lemmy.zip 1 points 7 hours ago

Nonsense. Open source built the web. Open source isn't some new anti fascist trend... What are you smoking?

[–] Emopunker@feddit.org 2 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

There is stoat.chat (formerly Revolt). But you wont find much help on Lemmy or Mastodon. A lot of people on the fediverse have an aversion to Discord because when they try it, they have difficulty with it like a senior citizen with a smartphone. Even though Matrix and Discord arent similar, people on the fediverse will still try to recommend you Matrix, because they think Discord is just another messenger and not like having a forum, teamspeak, jitsi and other stuff in one program. And even if you explain it like that, they will be like "but then you can just use a forum, matrix, jitsi and a screenshare program separately" or something like that.

[–] stressballs@lemmy.zip 3 points 17 hours ago

Lol. I can vouch for this.

Hell my friends are still Stans for IRC and will literally argue it has everything you need.

[–] BlackEco@lemmy.blackeco.com 65 points 1 day ago (4 children)

As long as the alternative is not another chat app that is not indexable by search engines. Forums fill the role pretty well, I don't understand why devs would use Discord in the first place.

[–] Zagorath@aussie.zone 22 points 1 day ago

Hear hear!

Matrix is an ok alternative to Discord for what Discord does.

Support forums are not an appropriate use of Discord, or of Matrix. Discourse is pretty great open source forum software. NodeBB forums even added ActivityPub support! I never particularly like when companies use Reddit as a primary communication method, and for the same reason I'd rather they didn't use Lemmy or Piefed, but all of these are vastly better options than Discord, Matrix, or other un-indexable private chats.

[–] other_cat@piefed.zip 5 points 1 day ago (3 children)

Fluxer apparently has that on their roadmap. https://blog.fluxer.app/roadmap-2026/

As part of #3, I'd also like to add the ability to publish forums to the open web. That way, people can discover, archive, and access discussions without logging in.

[–] Emopunker@feddit.org 2 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

Sounds great. I hope it has video chat and screenshare or will implement it soon.

[–] other_cat@piefed.zip 2 points 17 hours ago

They do have those things from what I can tell.

[–] craigers@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

As someone who has spent the last 2+ years testing revolt/stoat, matrix with element, and teamspeak, desperately searching for any viable discord alternative, I'm very interested in this. Where did you come across it? I tried to create an account but stuck pulsing on a loading screen.

[–] other_cat@piefed.zip 2 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

One of my friends' husbands brought it up, so good old word of mouth.

I did notice I wasn't able to get logged in last night, though the night before I was able to make an account without issue. I wonder if they got a hug of death like Stoat did.

[–] craigers@lemmy.world 2 points 16 hours ago

Haha I opened a github issue on that and the main Dev confirmed they were getting the HoD.

[–] itsmistermoon@piefed.social 2 points 1 day ago

I saw earlier that Zulip already has that option, but I still would much prefer a regular old forum.

[–] pkjqpg1h@lemmy.zip 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

As long as the alternative is not another chat app that is not indexable by search engines. F

For me this is the biggest probem about Discord and Discord alternatives why not just use Lemmy what's the problem with Lemmy?

[–] JustEnoughDucks@feddit.nl 2 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

Also not very searchable on engines, especially due to fediverse server name differences, you can't !lemmy because many of the communities don't have Lemmy in their domain or titles or however that works. At least I have only gotten Lemmy results for like 25% of my searches.

[–] pkjqpg1h@lemmy.zip 1 points 22 hours ago

But you don't need Google to search lemmy,. lemmy's internal search is very good and you got whole index (even without an account)

[–] stressballs@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Discord took the place of IRC. Chatlogs for IRC were rarely indexed by most channel admins until after about 2010 when projects like freenode hosted all the open source projects for the whole web.

It was purchased by some right wing billionaire and now it is no longer.

[–] sem@piefed.blahaj.zone 5 points 1 day ago (1 children)

But in a success story for open source software, the entire community migrated from freenode to libera.chat in like 2 days.

The way to defeat enshittification is by disallowing lock-in.

[–] stressballs@lemmy.zip 1 points 17 hours ago

Gen Z will not comply with this. They'd rather lick boots and get bullied by chuds. They treat social media networks like kids in the 80s treated 7-11. And they will not leave.

I deployed several docker containers using an image from this one guy. Later when I needed help with an image I realized the support is provided exclusively through a Discord server. To nobody's surprise the guy is an asshole who shouldn't interact with users.

[–] redsand@infosec.pub 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

IRC still supports most of the FOSS core.

More modern alternatives include Jitsi, Matrix and Simplex. Mumble also works well for voice.

[–] sem@piefed.blahaj.zone 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Every time I see Simplex it reminds me of a virus.

[–] redsand@lemmynsfw.com 1 points 1 day ago

Simplex is the most secure option available with the most resource intense client. I'm a fan, it's much newer so the code is less mature but they're comming along well, hitting roadmap targets, listening to the community and auditors.