Ask HN: User communities that aren't Discord? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: User communities that aren't Discord?

Anyone aware of a user community product that has the simplicity of chat threads without the complexity of Discord/Slack? We’re trying to build a space where people can give feedback and meet other users but most in our audience don’t already use Discord (and wouldn’t find a ton of value in it to make it worth the download).

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Zulip is a pretty nice option

https://zulip.com/

The only option imo.

i tried contributing to a community on zulip and its a devastating borderline disfunctional user experience compared to discord

The idea behind Zulip is great, but the UI is horrible. (Slow, clunky, ugly)

Developers can put up with it, but regular people will hate it.

I agree the slowness is a deal breaker. (Note: I tested it out a few years ago, but never went beyond that prototyping phase)

Zulip is stellar. I'd kind of forgotten about it, but I went on Bytecode Alliance's Zulip recently it was so much better having threads and conversation interleaved together like they do. I was quickly able to assess the last couple months, and subscribe to a couple async ongoing threads. Rarely have I experienced a chat system so able to be async.

https://github.com/zulip/zulip-terminal/releases/expanded_as...

Does Discord even have a command-line client?

Thoughts on this comment about it? https://programming.dev/comment/11056421

All they really say about Zulip is "it's just another corporate messenger". I don't really have much to say about that.

What about just an old fashioned forum? Discourse (not Discord) is still around and is great for threading.

To me an old fashioned forum would be something like phpBB. Discourse-style forums are relatively new and IMHO much worse in terms of UI. I really don't get the appeal.

What don't you like about Discourse?

I grew up in the phpbb/vBulletin era, and even back then it was a common complaint when Discourse first came out. Never quite understood the hate myself, but I'd love to hear your thoughts?

Frankly, I don't like almost anything about it. The dynamic loading/endless scrolling instead of pages, the silly navigation bar, the "x time later" instead of the exact date and time, the narrow post width...

I get "dumbed-down, mobile first" vibes from the UI, kinda like Twitter, which is the last thing I want for a forum with thoughtful discussions. And it's also more bloated/slower than classic forums (https://danluu.com/slow-device/).

I think the best forum software right now is XenForo. But even phpBB and many similar free alternatives (MyBB, SMF,...) are better than Discourse. Those can also be heavily customized (might be true for Discourse too, but I doubt it would improve it much).

I see. Thank you for sharing! I'm not affiliated with the forum software, but I do manage a discourse instance at work and was just curious about your UX thoughts.

I appreciate the details!

I don't like infinite scrolling either, and I agree that there's a lot of wasted space in the default layout.

dont like the lack of hierarchical structure

Discourse is written in ruby, and it's not as performant as I would like. Discourse isn't really suitable for running on, say, a Raspberry Pi 5. It's even somewhat sluggish-feeling at times, running on a 4ish year old PC as a server (which my own org does, in a Docker container in Debian). We have a low user count, so that sluggishness seems unreasonable.

To give a concrete example of what others are saying and why I also really do not like discourse, the performance issues in combination with other bugs and limitations makes it extremely clunky for large threads. Go to something like [0] and try searching for a piece of text. In both Firefox and chrome, the discourse search box totally breaks for me: I can navigate to the first result, but after that future attempts to bring the search box up fail unless I go back to the original link and search again (ie remove the comment id suffix from url). The native browser search of course is not sufficient because 90% of the thread is not loaded, and the lack of proper pagination makes it hard to search with external engines. After a few months of frustration I finally learned about the hidden /print endpoint to dump the thread into a single page which helps, but still does not give me warm fuzzies about discourse.

I already prefer native browser search and proper pagination instead of loading the page on-demand, but if none of these bugs existed, I could at least tolerate the decisions. Given the bugs though, these design choices really grind my gears in a special way.

0: https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/please-test-autoinstalls-for-...

If most of your audience doesn't use Discord, you're in a good spot. In the web dev world, so many projects use Discord that it's a massive benefit to just be in the server list with them. I felt my project had to use Discord.

It's been a while since I investigated solutions, but I really wanted Matrix to be viable at the time. I would check out https://element.io/ and see if it works for you.

Saw that another user linked to Hall (https://usehall.com).

I'm the founder and we're building a customer community platform exactly for the use case you describe.

Our focus is on a simple and intuitive user experience that is familiar to non-technical end-users. We've also tried to make it as frictionless for them to sign up and start contributing (nothing to download, passwordless sign up and login). You also maintain full control and data ownership of your users (unless Discord).

Keen to hear any feedback, and why / why not if what we've built would work for you?

Have a look at Discourse https://www.discourse.org/

Also, BuddyPress has a new major update (v14) that's worth checking out.

OSM recently migrated to Discourse instead

https://c.osm.org

Theres gitter.im and the various "Matrix" clients but honestly it's horrible, it's the Linux desktop of chat.

Flarum is a really nice open source forum

https://flarum.org/

I've been keeping my eye out for something more responsive (in an AJAX-like way) than phpBB, but less bloated than Discourse (as it's written in ruby). Something Open Source, decently low-effort to maintain (I like Debian), could run on a Raspberry Pi 5 for a small community, and doesn't require docker. This might be suitable. Thanks for the endorsement.

I'd also say Matrix, as this is where the most communities are today that are not on propietary platforms.

Although the UX is not that great, when logging in via a new device, as it takes long to do the first sync (the new syncv3 protocol is supposed to fix this but it's still in beta)

A direct Slack alternative would be mattermost.

https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost

matrix is like IRC + obligatory GPG.

most new users keep losing identity because they have no idea they are using vector.im as their "nicksrv" of sorts and that their recovery code and password are not their session key. it's a disaster.

but having webapp and phone apps help adoption.

this is very very confused.

the key you use in Matrix to get at your historical messages /is/ your security passphrase/key (assuming you set it up).

the vector.im identity server is just a phonebook to let people discover you based on email address if you so desire.

the UX in Element is clearly a disaster, given nightmarish confusions like this. we have tried to fix it in Element X and stuff like https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals/blob/and... which is looking promising

IRC is very lightweight. Matrix feels rather at the other end of the spectrum. The IRC protocol is very simple. Matrix feels very complicated.

real-life IRC is also extremely complicated. But you can use it incrementally.

e.g. no identity, no dcc, no figuring out the individual-and-very-particular nicksrv on each instance, etc.

I honestly don’t get chat for communities (and I spent a lot of time in IRC). Without starch and structure, knowledge is constantly being lost and there is no way for newcomers to quickly get up to speed if they happen to be a timezone or two away from the “core” community. Forums and Discourse are so much better that I have to ask why it isn’t obvious.

The Todoist folks also make Twist, which is in this family and looks simple and pretty nice. Not sure why it has so little uptake. https://twist.com/home

Just one correction that Discord does not have to be downloaded as it works in the browser also. And you don't even need to provide an email address at first. As such, the barrier of entry is quite low.

You will quickly get flagged/banned and/or asked for a phone number/email address for verification. I've lost 2 accounts to this.

I refuse Discord after eventually having every account get blocked pending phone-number verification. In my country that's effectively KYC (impossible to get a SIM card without govt ID).

Depending on IP and usage, this may happen at any point between registration and several years later.

https://usehall.com/

I think Simple Machines still exists

What do you mean by complexity? How is using any other solution less complicated?

Discord's UX feels quite bad. It's overwhelming and readability is bad. That'd be my biggest complain when it comes to "complexity".

Never heard this complaint ever. I would argue all other solutions that are usable for the majority of people have much worse UX.

My thoughts exactly. It's one of the most overloaded and confusing UIs I've seen

when I was building finclout, I thought it makes more sense to organize conversations horizontally and vertically instead of the current UI paradigm where everything is vertically scrolling.

This makes my scroll wheel sad.

How about a reskinned Element Messenger Web or Hydrogen?

Have you looked at Telegram?

I do believe it might cover everything you need, very simple compared to Slack/Discord. Has groups and bots.

I started using Telegram after trying to setup Slack as a family platform.

The big problem Discord solves is that nobody wants to create YetAnotherForumAccount.

do people really consider this that much of a hassle

takes 1 minute to do

and no need to make/remember passwords with a password manager

> do people really consider this that much of a hassle

Yes, I consider this a huge hassle

IMO Discord is a non-starter for many tech people due to privacy issues and frequent/random phone number requirements. I and many others are completely unable to use it even if we wanted to, because immediately after logging in you get hit with a phone wall. Not everyone gets this but it indeed happens to a wide enough array of people to be quite problematic IMO.

TBH I consider that a feature, to guard against spam and trolls.

My ideal project forum is one where anyone on the internet can read the forum, but contributing to the forum requires some bare minimum effort of creating and verifying a new account. Both of those are the opposite of what Discord does.

> TBH I consider that a feature, to guard against spam and trolls.

It doesn't stop spam and trolls though, that will always exist, it stops real users who can't be bothered with yet another account.

I frankly don't mourn the loss of users "who can't be bothered with yet another account". Putting thought and effort into forum interactions takes longer than creating an account, so someone incapable of the latter is usually incapable of the former.

Idk if I have ever seen a spam account on a tech support forum. Like not a single spam post.

Edit: on a discord*

Have you ever managed one? I have, and it's a regular occurrence. Though not necessarily something that ends up being visible to every user (unless you happen to be around precisely when it happens, before we delete the content).

Seems hard to square spam being more of a problem in discord when visible spam is observably much less than in other forums

If only we could standardize on a federated SSO solution for all sites.

https://xkcd.com/927

Like, a forum?

Why not both? Zulip!

IRC

Element

Kosmi https://kosmi.io

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