Personally, I like the ability to get in touch with others on a topic and get help quickly. As a Discord user, however, this relates more to the areas of operating systems, gaming and AI. When it comes to network technology or IT security topics, I see it differently. Discord has a fast pace that is due to the generations that follow me. Everything always has to happen quickly. Reading half a DIN A4 page is already too long for them. In some cases, because their concentration is already diminished. It should be clear that OPNsense and other topics are not easy, even if you can find a lot of help on the Internet. It's not something that can be dealt with quickly via a yes/no chat.I would therefore be particularly interested to know why there needs to be a Discord. In your experience, what are the questions that are increasingly asked there? Which can apparently be answered there in chat? I would like to include them here in the forum. In case it turns out that they are recurring questions and are not yet dealt with here. In this respect, you could take up the need from there here. I don't want to go into threads in Discord, because we already have the forum character here. So it shouldn't be too difficult for someone from Discord who opens a thread there to open one here.
I second those arguments wholeheartedly.Also, as has been said before, I think knowledgable people will not share their attention to multiple channels, but rather concentrate to one central point of contact (which for OpnSense is obviously this forum, which has over 30000 members as compared to 500 on Discord).If they did, it would draw their attention away from where it is needed most. I also doubt that they either could or would offer faster help on discord than here - after all, it's free.To check this, I just entered the server for a few minutes and looked around for the "usual suspects" who help others here and guess what? I found none of them - and sorry, but I think that is a good thing (tm).Just my 2 cents.
It is not that I "dislike" Reddit or Discord, but rather I like a "single source of truth" instead of having to look all around on the internet.Like, if you say that certain answers to problems have been answered in Discord - fine, but probably they have been answered for the umpteeth time before here already.Josef Weizenbaum once called the internet a big dung heap. He referred to it as this because he argued: If you pose a question in a forum (the then-current variant of social channels like Reddit and Discord), what you get is assumptions, opinions, dumb comments and in the best of cases, after a few pages of back and forth, the real answer may be given, only to be followed up by posts with "I do not believe that is the real reason" or ongoing off-topic discussions. Correct answers - if any - are buried under loads of garbage.Nobody ever takes the time to clean up the threads of that sh.t in order to make the content more useful.While this is true on many other forums as well (and w/r tho the missing cleanup, here, too), what I found here is a remarkable portion of well-behaved and knowledgable people. Of course, some newbies still do not search the forum first for answers that have long been given (like currently, most threads about problems with the new widgets), but in general, the info in this forum is mostly valueable.I cannot say that for many other tech forums, much less for most social platforms, including Facebook, Telegram, Reddit and: Discord - and as I said, I have dug around in the OpnSense Discord.I do not want to keep anybody from using it, however I will not take part for the reasons given.
The concern is over splitting resources. How many places can one person look for assistance with an issue. Suppose something big get uncovered in Discord and fixed, but that info never gets back to official channels, so they never officially fix the issue?