Stop Using Discord

Re:Stop Using Discord by 542458 on Friday May 31, 2024 @08:20AM (#40534138)

I don’t get the love for discourse. I’m not one of those “every webpage should work without JS” purists, but Discourse seems intent to reinvent basic web features with JS and has some performance issues and as a consequence of both often (maybe when hitting something not in cache?) takes ages to load during which time you get nothing but a poorly-styled loading throbber, you can’t even read the content as it loads in. Even official instances are incredibly slow at times. One topic on https://meta.discourse.org/ just took over 30 seconds to load for me. Discourse just feels somewhat overengineered.

Also anything that’s $50 a month doesn’t compete at the low end (which is where most OSS discussion hosting would exist) with Discord, which is free.

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Re:Stop Using Discord by 4ggr0 on Friday May 31, 2024 @08:35AM (#40534323)

I wonder if there's anything wrong on your end. Clicked on your link, searched for a topic with lots of replies and the content loaded instantly. Then I proceeded to spam-click on topics and still everything loaded instantly...

MacBook M3 Pro with Firefox.

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Re:Stop Using Discord by 542458 on Friday May 31, 2024 @08:47AM (#40534451)

I think it’s a server side cache thing. I was loading a specific old topic on that instance and it took very long to load, but once loaded in the first time refreshes were decently fast (even in private windows). I’ve observed the same behaviour on the Figma forums, which are also discourse.

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Re:Stop Using Discord by eviks on Friday May 31, 2024 @08:45AM (#40534434)

Measure the initial load time, subsequent loads are indeed faster

And to test many replies you actually have to see them since they're not loaded on page load, only when you get to the bottom of that page, so just opening the top doesn't test anything re. lots of replies

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Re:Stop Using Discord by wavyknife on Friday May 31, 2024 @09:02AM (#40534633)

> which is where most OSS discussion hosting would exist

You can host it yourself for much less than $50/mo, some people run small instances on a raspberry pi (I work for Discourse)

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Re:Stop Using Discord by bmacho on Friday May 31, 2024 @09:06AM (#40534666)

Discourse works without javascript. AFAIK it even has email support as well (I don't know how that works).

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Re:Stop Using Discord by 542458 on Friday May 31, 2024 @09:19AM (#40534772)

It barely works without JS. Essentially everything other than basic text display is broken, including search, pagination, sorting, etc. that said, I am surprised it works at all given the aforementioned loading throbber before you can see a page.

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Re:Stop Using Discord by bmacho on Saturday June 01, 2024 @03:31AM (#40543671)

I stand corrected, their demo page is broken without javascript, for example you can't login and post.

Pagination works fine tho, for their demo page at least. An example long thread, [1] has a clickable link to [1]?page=2 at the bottom of the page.

But you can't post. If you log in (using javascript) it refuses to show you anything without javascript later, and you can't post a new message.

It's clearly not their priority, and I am not sure why.

[1] https://try.discourse.org/t/is-the-second-amendment-still-re...

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