this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2026
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Please, pretty please, be the spark that will stop OSS projects from hosting their "support forums" on Discord.
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.
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.
🤮
Who are the morons that keep making these decisions?
Several open source developers in this case
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.
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
Sure, except that Discord was accessible when these were set up. There is nothing stopping Reddit from doing the exact same thing next year.
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.
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.
It's too bad the open source community couldn't find some programmers to help them make an alternative.
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.
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.
Fluxer apparently has that on their roadmap. https://blog.fluxer.app/roadmap-2026/
Sounds great. I hope it has video chat and screenshare or will implement it soon.
They do have those things from what I can tell.
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.
@craigers @other_cat can I ask what was the issue with using matrix as a discord replacement? I would like to propose it to some friends, so it would be good to know if there are some fatal flaws
My issues with matrix were mostly around the voice services.
@craigers oh ok! So far everything seemed to work fine with them. I hope they'll keep being stable in my experience. Thanks for sharing!
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.
Haha I opened a github issue on that and the main Dev confirmed they were getting the HoD.
I saw earlier that Zulip already has that option, but I still would much prefer a regular old forum.
For me this is the biggest probem about Discord and Discord alternatives why not just use Lemmy what's the problem with Lemmy?
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Lol. I can vouch for this.
Hell my friends are still Stans for IRC and will literally argue it has everything you need.
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.
Nonsense. Open source built the web. Open source isn't some new anti fascist trend... What are you smoking?
Yeah and how's that working out, in the context of the subject of this thread. I don't see any open-source communities competing with Google or Microsoft or Palantir.
Open source didn't crumble under the weight of inevitability. It fell apart because corporate interests profiting off of it decided it was more profitable to create cultures antithetical to the guardrails that open source presents to exploitation and co-option.
A las, capitalism wins again. I don't like it, but it's a fact.
It was pruned. It will grow back. It's growing back now. There will be an Internet post American dominance and it will use open source.
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.
IRC still supports most of the FOSS core.
More modern alternatives include Jitsi, Matrix and Simplex. Mumble also works well for voice.
Every time I see Simplex it reminds me of a virus.
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.
Yes, thank you.