I have good news for you:
https://www.polygon.com/24074441/gigantic-game-relaunch-rampage-edition-steam-release-date
Mercurial has comparable features (though maybe not obvious to someone accustomed to git) without the usability problems that still plague git nearly two decades later. Hg's interface was made with humans in mind. Git's was made to cut you.
(And it has cut so very many people that it's consistently among the most popular topics in Q&A forums, and has even inspired comics.)
Thankfully, git's early cross-platform shortcomings were eventually fixed, so that's at least some progress. I hope its UI and docs eventually get some love, too.
The interface is the best I know of, a lot like pre-Microsoft github. Especially important to me is that It doesn't intercept my browser's built-in shortcuts like github now does, or require javascript or bury things under submenus like gitlab does.
The promise of federation is appealing, too.
I plan to use it for new public projects, and might even move my old ones over.
My guess: The kids who used Discord for gaming grew up, and just went with the familiar thing when starting new communities and projects.
Also, Discord did heavy marketing early on, until it carved out a network effect. So here we are.
On the bright side:
Aggressive garbage collection and automatic thread locking are optional settings in most web forum software I've seen.
Lemmy shares some of the important parts of Usenet, and could develop into something that comes close.
A web forum is far better in most cases. If you can't manage to run your own, there are plenty of lemmy servers that will do it for you. Even an email list (with searchable archives) would be better than Discord.
If you have collaborative documents that outgrow the forum format, use a wiki.
If real-time chat is needed, irc or matrix.
A project hosting its community on Discord is a project that won't get my contributions.
disallow list of known bad email providers.
Imagine giving someone your phone number, and having them say you have to get a different one because they don't like some of the digits in it.
I have seen this nonsense more times than I care to remember. Please don't build systems this way.
If you're trying to do bot detection or the like, use a different approach. Blacklisting email addresses based on domain or any other pattern does a poor job of it and creates an awful user experience.
(And if it prevents people from using spam-fighting tools like forwarding services, then it's directly user-hostile, and makes the world a worse place.)
@ono
@lemmy.ca