Idea: Create a discord group

[sherkhan30452]

Well most End-User doesn't have an github accounts as it is meant for computer programmers or developers. I suggest to create a Discord group since it is most popular among many users as well used by most FOSS developers to get feedback at one place.

[rodlie]

Yeah... It was something I considered, but it's another place I need to monitor/manage. It will also fragment stuff, as most people will use Discord to submit issues etc, and they (the issue/info/feedback/whatever) will not end up on GitHub (where I want it).

But, if this is something people want I can of course do something about it, but don't expect me to be active there.

[rodlie]

When the community get large enough (I don't know how many users there are) we can setup a Discord, but we need one or two persons that are willing to moderate the group (I only login to Discord one or two times a day, if at all).

[doc-halo]

There's a subreddit with only 5 people. So maybe direct people there for now.

[sherkhan30452]

There's a subreddit with only 5 people. So maybe direct people there for now.

Can you please share link to that reddit group.

[doc-halo]

https://www.reddit.com/r/frictiongraphics/

[kaixoo]

I can manage the Discord server if you want. I agree that most people aren't going to do the effort of creating a github account, etc. And then don't know how to report properly. So Discord can be a good place to gather user feedback. There are ways to organize a discord server, specially a little one.

Other apps like Inkscape have a real time chat for their developers to keep in touch easily, and gather feedback.

[dejayc]

I like the idea of being able to get real-time-ish feedback about new feature ideas, coding implementations, etc.

[dejayc]

UPDATE: I wonder if people would be supportive of having an unofficial "Friction User Group" Discord server to collaborate on sharing ideas and tips and tricks for Friction.

[brendanhowell]

I really like the initiative but I have some reservations about Discord.

I know Discord is very popular in certain groups but it's an extremely proprietary thing that is controlled by one company. With any platform service it's just a question of when, not if, they will change the terms of service and screw you over. If you put tons of special knowledge and centralize the community there you will be entirely dependent on the good will of a bunch of business guys who want to get rich. In the long run, you will regret it.

Using a proprietary service to support a free/open source project is also a bit inconsistent to the values of the whole endeavor. To make a comparison - imagine a organic food activists meeting at McDonalds, consumer activists meeting at Walmart or e-waste activists meeting at the Apple store. I realize that not all users identify as "activists" but I hope you see my point.

Also, Discord is not so well loved among people over 30. I don't say this as a grumpy-old-man complaint. I mean to say that the people who do use Discord services tend to skew towards a very specific demographic, so if you have that as the center of your community it will inadvertently exclude a lot of people who don't get discord or have the spoons to get into it.

The idea of having a place for community exchange is a great one but I think it would be better served by a different service.

[rodlie]

I have no problems with Discord in general, but it's not a good place to keep or find information. I also don't like fragmentation, projects like this should have a unified place for community communication etc.

---

Regarding the proprietary stuff, I don't care. Friction is already hosted on GitHub, a proprietary service. Mirrored on SourceForge, another proprietary service. Built on Windows, a proprietary platform using a proprietary compiler........ You get my point.

[kaixoo]

I really like the initiative but I have some reservations about Discord.

I know Discord is very popular in certain groups but it's an extremely proprietary thing that is controlled by one company. With any platform service it's just a question of when, not if, they will change the terms of service and screw you over. If you put tons of special knowledge and centralize the community there you will be entirely dependent on the good will of a bunch of business guys who want to get rich. In the long run, you will regret it.

Github is also propietary, and owned by Microsoft. Does that mean we should all switch to self-hosted instances of Gitlab?

[rodlie]

Yeah, let's not go down the freedom rabbit hole 😄

I don't care about stuff been free as in freedom. Does the thing work? cool, move on. If the thing does not work anymore or they do something stupid that affects the project, move to something else, or host it. Until that time happens I don't have time to think about stuff the may happen in theory.

At the end of the day Friction is just some git repos and a website, we don't care about the underlying infrastructure, I can drop it within an hour and be up and running on something else.

[dejayc]

I have no problems with Discord in general, but it's not a good place to keep or find information. I also don't like fragmentation, projects like this should have a unified place for community communication etc.

This is true. I also believe that not every utterance of communication needs to be memorialized. Sometimes people can have a long conversation that ends up turning into one or two small bullet points in a formal document. In this case, a more informal avenue of communication can be useful for facilitating collaboration.

[rodlie]

btw, I could probably contact https://discuss.pixls.us and get a dedicated category for Friction, they are usually very open to host new apps (related to graphics), I'm part of the Natron dev team and we have used pixls as our primary forum for years.

Other than that, I don't know. GitHub works for me as a developer, but I understand that regular users may have problems with GitHub as a "forum" or anything.

[dejayc]

GitHub works for me as a developer, but I understand that regular users may have problems with GitHub as a "forum" or anything.

Maybe this product is too new to benefit from multiple channels of communication, but projects can often benefit from having different channels for different purposes.

Forums are a very "old-school", slow way of communicating, which hopes that memorializing random conversations forever will have some value. Sites and apps like Discord favor rapid, real-time capable communication that introduces more noise in the long-term, for sure, but also facilitates faster and more interactive collaboration.

Personally, I find value in having diverse communication channels that serve different purposes:

• A site, like featureupvote.com, to allow users to propose and vote upon product ideas and roadmap
• A site, like stackoverflow.com, to allow users to submit questions and answers
• A wiki to host editorially-curated documentation for end users
• A forum to facilitate random conversations that may (but often not) add some searchable value if recorded indefinitely
• A bug-tracking or issue-raising forum for documenting point-in-time issues that need to be fixed
• A real-time communication channel like Discord or Slack, to allow collaborators to iterate through ideas quickly and without expectation of being recorded forever

I mean, to be truthful, all of the purposes above could be accomplished by a newsgroup or email list, but there's a reason that no one takes that approach.