Should The Forum Move to Discord?

@pitmutt @spectre thanks for your replies. I appreciate the discussion on the subject

First of all, what are the links to the Zcash discord and telegram servers? Are they initiated by someone at the foundation or ECG or fully community owned?

We’ve been using Commonwealth at Notional instead of using Discourse as it is more web3 native. It’s nice to have snapshot and on chain voting a part of the discussion process and there are some other features I know they are working on as well to cater to all of us (the broader crypto community). That being said, we started with Discourse and it seemed to work fine in combination with discord which is our main venue for protocol/community discussion.

I’m less familiar with the Zcash community but curious what you would see @Yaro as the main drawbacks between discourse and why discord would be better. You mention that “many conversations here would work quite well on discord”; why do you think that?

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The links are on coinmarketcap. Personally, I don’t think anyone should use telegram. It’s a scammy platform.

Discord is better because it’s a mainstream platform that’s been optimized for conversations. There is no reason for zcash to compete with social media platforms. It’s a counterproductive effort. Most people find zcash discord first because they already have accounts there. After seeing how empty it is, they leave and don’t go searching for this site.

Because Discord is optimized for having free form conversations. Some conversations here aren’t essays like this. Those conversations should be on Discord. Essays like this are best suited for Reddit, although Discord would still be better than having them here for the sole reason that it’s a mainstream platform that helps make the zcash community more easily accessible to the world

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Discord is a totally centralized mass-surveillance and censorship silo. It does not belong in open source—let alone in decentralized cryptocurrency—let alone in a privacy project.

https://drewdevault.com/2021/12/28/Dont-use-Discord-for-FOSS.html

Discord is callous towards users with accessibility needs, inaccessible to users who can’t afford the latest expensive gadgets, and hostile to open source. And Discord is infamously hostile to Tor users. (Do a Web search.) The Zcash Foundation is friendly with the Tor Project; both projects share many values and many goals. I suggest that everyone who likes Discord should attempt using it through Tor. If you take this suggestion, I hope you do not much care about your Discord account.


Changing the world works one story at a time.

What is your Discord horror story? This is mine:

The one and only time that I have ever tried to use Discord, their system auto-banned all of my new accounts upon account creation, before I could even use them. That happened even when I shamefully hid my Tor usage behind non-Tor “clean” residential IPs (which I usually refuse on principle), when I deigned to waste my limited lifetime repeatedly filling out CAPTCHAs (which I usually also refuse), and when I performed SMS “verification”.

I suspect the reason was that I disabled all their “telemetry”, i.e. intrusive device fingerprinting and surveillance. The reason could not have been my behaviour: I was always insta-banned before I could even exhibit any behaviour, or engage in any communications whatsoever.

After days of struggling with this, I contacted Discord support with a polite and appropriate request about one of those accounts. Weeks later, I finally received a reply saying that the account had been un-banned. I have not even tried logging in. Maybe someday; why should I bother, when I do not even want to use their horrid network? I care too much about my privacy to use Discord—and frankly, I care too much about my sanity.

To this day (2022-07-13), I have never posted, sent, or received even a single message on Discord.

Filed under: #PrivacyActivism

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A centralized, privacy-invasive social media silo that bans Tor users irreconcilably conflicts with the goals for which Zcash was founded.

The above-quoted arguments could be re-applied, by analogy:

I urge all readers of this thread to take this as an opportunity for reflection: What brought you to Zcash? Are your reasons for embracing Zcash compatible with a surveillance-capitalist world of centralized social media silos?


The Bitcoin Forum was founded by a pseudonymous Tor user: “Satoshi Nakamoto.”

Although I have some criticisms of it, I appreciate its ongoing strong support for Tor—and its support for no-Javascript users. The old, heavily-patched SMF is clunky, but I much prefer it to Discourse. I usually avoid Discourse forums, which require Javascript (among other issues). I despise Discourse.

In 2019, the Bitcoin Forum’s administrator made an April Fools’ joke out of KYC. :smirk_cat:

I’ve been thinking that I should probably spend some of my time there discussing Zcash in the altcoins section.

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One reason why this forum is irreplaceable IMO: Discord is not anonymity or Tor friendly. They frequently ask for ‘verification’ with a mobile number which is a significant usability barrier for people who wish to maintain strong anonymity while contributing to the community.

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Thanks for speaking out @nullius . I feel compelled to use discord because the ZF and ECC insist on it. To me this seems insensitive to a significant populations’ perception of what zcash is all about.

It’d be interesting to consider why the ZF and ECC have settled on discord as an obligatory communication system.

I find myself in the awkward position of relaying information from discord to parties that I CANNOT in good conscience recommend discord to, as they are too vulnerable.

These vulnerable a parties are effectively excluded from insight into community development processes.

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es! It would be so useful for Discord to have a method of indexing FAQs automatically. I absolutely hate trying to look through discord channel posts for answers on niche communities.

This would be more useful if it could be integrated directly into Discord, so that it was easier to identify if the server had this capability in the first place and make changes directly through the Discord clie

What are some good alternatives to the chatroom style of Discord? Not including IRC :wink:

Let’s say someone wants to create a new gathering space for ZECheads and Discord is the obvious choice, to them, for their specific needs but the issues surfaced here regarding the centralized, non-private, proprietary and censorship-laden nature of Discord are also very important.

Without discussing abandoning any online space that’s already up-and-running, I’m curious about options for communities of expansion rather than migration.

this platform is great for the kind of discussions this community has…
for me together with Twitter its cool
how can Discord make community more active? i saw so many Discords which only say “GM” “GN” or when moon kinds of messages xD

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I’m not an expert. I depend on several of the options from the circle on the left, on a daily basis.

clown

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Awesome graphic :smiley: Thanks!

What’s the little lock with three green dots under it?

I was hoping that somebody would tell me!

@Yaro the problem with discord is that clown. I suggest this thought experiment:

If you’re using those technologies to connect to people, that clown is really in your head. If you’re advocating for other people to use those technologies, you’re advocating that they also put that clown in their head.

Maybe you’ll pause for a moment… and think… why do I want people to have a clown in their head?!

Maybe it’s because the clown in your head, wants more heads.

Then the thought experiment ends, and you realize the clown is just part of an image, and I am just a gadfly.

Obviously there’s no cost to using discord, or all these people wouldn’t be using it.

Said the fly to the Venus Fly Trap: “Yummy, thanks!”

In the country where I live, one must first prove their age is ≥ 18 to the app store (Google/Apple) before downloading the Discord mobile app :scream:

I avoided discord when I heard about it too. Then my son started using it and I gave it another shot – glad I did. I get all the reasons why not to use Discord, but at the end of the day, if the next generation of kids are using it, the decision isn’t difficult. The bottom line: kids like it because its fun – something many in this industry overlook. Similar to Voldemort with love, its discarded as unimportant. Think again :hearts:

With that said, I think we should support all communication apparatuses – connect everything.

P.s. ZecHub is collecting and displaying all options available, I’m sure we missed some, create a PR to add

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No, the forum should not move to Discord. The forum participants here should become more active in Zcash’s Discord.

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hi. yes agree, we shud use all platforms to decentralize, but each one shud have its own focus/objective. forum for more important/big stuff, discord for smol talk about faster tings, twitter/other for sharing info to outside more?

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Here they are btw

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