this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2023
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Technology

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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 jherazob@beehaw.org to c/technology@beehaw.org
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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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[–] millie@beehaw.org 11 points 1 year ago

I've been working on a Conan exiles rp server for the past 9 months that automates a lot of the bookkeeping and game logic that's usually relegated to humans and rule sets. In my experience with other servers, an excessive use of staff discretion leads to nepotism and bias or at the very least ample opportunity for its appearance.

A big part of automating some of these tasks is enabled by the use of webhooks. Rather than track every player character's information in a ticket that the user needs to submit, a bunch of scripts strapped to NPCs post the information via webhooks to a discord channel that's only viewable to those with the appropriate rank.

Without easy webhook integration, this wouldn't be possible. Never mind that all those tickets i was just talking about are made, organized, and recorded via discord bot.

A well set up discord server can be a huge boon to a project, especially if it's public-facing in any way. For game servers or mods it's especially useful, because the chance of your target users having it is very high.

Discord has experienced a little enshittification, but it's largely been inconsequential so far. Meanwhile, Matrix is cool but nobody has it and it doesn't have the same tools. Even with the cross-posting there's a need to risk your discord account or server and it isn't fully integrated.

But like, discord has aaaalll this community management and automation stuff built around it, most of which is pretty intuitive and well supported. That's hard to compete with.