Please don't use Discord for FOSS projects
Please don't use Discord for FOSS projects
406 comments
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The biggest problem with Discord is that its an information black hole. Its not properly searchable and not indexed by search engines.
Discord is fine for casual chat, but horrible when used for forum-type discussions and even worse when used for documentation.
You see the same problems being discussed and solved again and again, but you cant just "link" someone the solution like you could with a forum thread cause its spread out over 3-10 chat messages that are interleaved in-between other topics being discussed in the same room
Anything of long-term value for the project (forum-type discussions, documentation etc) should not recide in Discord
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There's going to be a lot of shocked Pikachus when the inevitable enshittification hits, and suddenly they charge to host all the documentation and wiki pages. All that barely maintained stuff will just vanish overnight.
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At this point, charging for the service is the only thing left to do to make it more shit...
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You would think that people would learn not to put all their eggs into one corporate basket after Facebook fucked everyone over...
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Chat in general is so flawed when talking about multiple topics at once. At least when people dont use matrix threads, spaces and rooms correctly.
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I have all the issues with Discord that you mention, but struggle to find a better alternative. Do you have any recommendations?
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Any non-trivial support enquiries should be directed to log a bug report/formal support request regardless of the community platform you're using. Discord isn't any worse than IRC in this regard and we've been offering support via the latter forever.
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I think a happy medium for this is to rely on GitHub issues for support, and then people can discuss each issue on GitHub or Discord
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Both are proprietary, closed source from US-based, for-profit entites. Same problem arises.
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A solution would be to save the chat log as a text file. An LLM might be able to turn it into FAQ format with little oversight. Of course, someone would still have to volunteer the work.
Obviously, Discord doesn't want that sort of thing since it lessens their hold on a community and the people in it. They could decide to cause trouble.
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That just sounds like something a discord bot could do
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my main problem is issue cannot be searched on search engine
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Chat and forum are different things and serve different purposes. Even matrix doesn't solve the search problem. Use a forum for this.
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Irc was never searchable, but that was never an issue before.
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The issue is that we used to have both irc and forums. Discord has taken on the role of both in 1. Unfortunately, that means that it also needs the remote search capabilities of a forum to not screw over the community, long term.
It's amazing the number of times a 3+ year old discussion on either a forum, or Reddit has bailed me out of a hole. Everything like that on discord is cut off, unless you know it exists.
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Popular IRC channels usually have an searchable web archive. But yes, chat is not a good solution for stuff that needs to be documented.
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i don't understand discord's popularity at all. it's so annoying to use
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It started getting popular years ago and that's when me an my friends switched to it too (back when I didn't know shit about privacy). You gotta keep in mind the alternatives back then were Skype, which was meant for 1 to 1 calls, had shit audio quality and issues all the time and TeamSpeak, which was complicated because you needed a server (we were kids, we only knew what a server was from Minecraft) and had a text chat that was only a small part of the bottom of the window that was full of connected and disconnected messages, so I actually didn't even know you could write in that. TeamSpeak's interface also isn't exactly good-looking or very intuitive. Then came Discord, you could create a server for you and your friends for free, you saw who of your friends was online and playing what, you could see when someone was in a voice channel and could just join, you had multiple text chats where you could easily send a link or memes while playing and you could easily share your screen with the others. It was a major improvement over the other two. I know that it sucks from a privacy standpoint but there's good reasons why people started using it.
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COVID got people used to video/audio communication, then the other platforms enshitified while discord remained as shit as they always were.
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Because that's where people are?
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How familiar are you with IRC?
I was told by someone that IRC is kind of what discord is built on. Maybe the answer is someone in that relation, if what i was told is accurate or not
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I second this!
It's especially disappointing to see FOSS people on Fediverse promoting it.
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People love discord. When Microsoft tried to buy it, people freaked out. They turned down the multi billion dollar offer. IMO, I don't believe the paid portion of the app is worth the money because it's mostly cosmetic bullshit. They don't give me a good reason to give them money
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I also think discord nitro is kind of B.S . The only reason I still use discord is because my friends use it.
I wish there were similar features in Matrix clients like Element. Just the voice channels feature will be enough for me.
Revolt chat is a good alternative. It lacks in features but its pretty good for an FOSS project. I tried to convince my friends to use it but they crawled back to discord after 2 days.
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it's mostly cosmetic bullshit. They don't give me a good reason to give them money
Don't give them ideas please
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It's incredible, yes, even more considering that Discord has been complicit on spam attacks on the Fediverse.
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Can't wait for the day Discord backstabs everyone and people decide to get the fuck away from it. I seriously can't stand having to search past troubleshooting messages, it's a fucking mess, almost unusable. Whoever uses Discord as a Forum seriously needs a full force punch in the mouth.
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Discord can and sometimes does monitor your chats.
Source: CEO himself said that, in a hearing
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Also a large portion is owned by Tencent with whom Discord is allowed to share all the data they want according to their ToS.
https://github.com/privy-cafe/discordspyware/blob/master/README.md
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?
Good to know, I guess?
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Well that's no better than searching IRC logs, which are something folks have absolutely done in the past. I still haven't figured out why folks like discord so much though.
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People like it cause when it first came out, it was considerably better than other popular voice chat software available for PC games at the time, like TeamSpeak and Ventrillo. But most importantly: it was free, unlike those other two. So people flocked to it and it blew up big, leading us to where we are today.
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Can’t wait for the day Discord backstabs everyone and people decide to get the fuck away from it.
I can’t wait either, then maybe all the communities that disappeared into discord that I feel unable to actually feel like I am a genuine member of and connect with anymore because I am not part of the conversations on discord will go somewhere where I can be a part of them again.
sigh
FUCK DISCORD
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Discord already backstabbed everyone with the usernames
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As someone deeply involved in Foss for many years and with multiple large Foss services running on my back, these constant requests for purity from outsiders will go nowhere until volunteers people step up to do the hard work of setting up and maintaining the infrastructure and management of such Foss solutions in the place of the core developers
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? What's the difference between setting up a free forum (they're everywhere) versus setting up Discord channels? It's the exact same process.
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Just do a matrix space
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Took way too long to find a response from someone that actually does the work.
Most of this discussion is just the neuro spicy and olds angry that everyone doesn't do it the "right" way.
I bet there are billions of hours wasted by people trying to make the perfect way to document and discuss stuff, while the answer is "it's hard, tedious, and pretty manual work to create and manage good documentation".
But nobody wants to do it because it has and always will suck.
I'm amused to know that I can look through old irc chats talking about how forums are the death of foss projects. Or mail lists complaining that everyone is using IRC wrong..
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I'm on board with this, but I may be biased because I also don't like using Discord for anything else. Every time someone sends me a Discord invite I feel a little defeated, because it is usually after I have agreed to participate in something.
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I feel that way about Teams/Sharepoint/Office. I'm happy to serve on a board or committe, until I find out they're using Teams or Sharepoint. Microsoft's SSO is a fucking mess. Put in your email to get a one-time code, get that code and enter it, then it logs you in and asks for an email address to be added to the account. Add the same email address you just got the code via, and it tells you it can't use that email address. But if I don't use that email address, it won't let me into the Sharepoint docs.
It's just a fucking nightmare. I fucked around with one committee trying to get the accounts deleted and done the Microsoft TM way and finally gave up and bowed out of that group.
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It's an upgrade over Skype, but a downgrade over forums and irc. I setup a discord for some tech troubled friends because I didn't think they could handle anything else and even that was trying for some of them.
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Discord is only good for coordinating game events and helping to facilitate gaming community engagement. I'm so sick of everyone pushing it as the central hub of everything social and the idea of entire projects centered around Discord is absolutely ludicrous.
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Why should different chat programs be used for different purposes?
The whole idea is to... chat.
I guess you're the kind of guy who has multiple phones when 1 would work perfectly well.
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I miss regular old web forums, mailing lists and that sort of thing. Discord / Slack / etc have zero discoverability. The ability to google your question is gone, and knowledge is ephemeral, when a chat is the central source of community.
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I've been finding this out at work recently. Got lazy and started doing most of my conversations via teams instead of email and now having to find shit from like a year ago is practically impossible. Even some conversations I know contained what I'm looking for just have random gaps where posts have disappeared.
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Teams are just shit like that. Although my company has migrated to 365 for our work apps, the team's main communication is still Slack. With Slack I'm still able to find old messages easily and be able to link it in relevant context.
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A few weeks ago the community manager of the Helldivers Discord got upset and deleted the whole thing. Years of discussions and knowledge (and memes) gone.
Naturally you can't even bring up the idea that a Discord community takes on a life past its "owner" once it reaches a certain size or level of activity. "Your container, your rules" say the defenders unironically, while not acknowledging that you neither own the "server" nor make all the rules.
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Thank you!!! I feel the same way and I felt like I was losing my marbles.
Discord is just way too ephemeral and the answers you get depend on who is logged on at the time. I don’t expect an immediate answer but I also don't wanna wade through 14 conversations either.
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Can someone point to the reasons why such talented people use discord for their projects?
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Because it's a decent all in one platform and they don't want to deal with the alternatives.
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same goes for those that create self hostable, privacy oriented services and bake in dropbox and/or google drive support... like WUT.
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Because most selfhosters are too lazy or inexperienced to break away from cloud services. Docker is great but it has also enables a "just run this docker" mentality that mirrors the Windows "just run this exe."
edit: I think that the opportunity to learn how a project works, how to debug problems and how to integrate a project into their own setup is obscured.
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It has pluralkit
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Because if I didn't use Discord then I would be the only one in the community. Discord has a massive userbase especially with gamers. You give them a Discord link and there's a decent chance you'll see them join and post a message. Give them any other link and they'll never make an account, they probably won't even click the link to see it.
I provide links for Discord, Lemmy, Kbin, Mastodon, Steam group, and GitHub. I see lots of people come in on Discord, but 0 on the others except for myself lol.
Only the few actual contributors use the GitHub, don't think I've ever seen a non-programmer submit a bug report on my GitHub or use the discussions or leave any comments on releases or anything.
I'm also on Moddb and NexusMods, got a few comments on Moddb, none on Nexusmods yet.
I also have Twitch and YouTube of course, I get small numbers of people commenting on those.
Nobody has even asked for any other type of community, Discord is just want they want. If I just wanted to talk to myself then I wouldn't bother creating a community/forum at all.
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Essentially, Discord is convenient for them.
TBH forums really are for the technical people, at least for the use cases I'm imagining. What incentive could we give that they join forums too?
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True. Sadly the article is over 2 years old and not much has changed since.
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Because most opensource enthusiasts cry foul on the internet, want everything open-source, free and privacy centric but never contribute anything of value.
Did the author start a matrix instance yet? No?
Yes, not much has changed.
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The author is the creator of sourcehut, literally a platform for collaborative open-source projects. I think he’s done a lot more useful than set up a new Matrix instance.
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I get that people want a "simple way to chat" and Discord does that well, I guess. I mean, everyone's talking about the forum aspect but what's the alternative for chat? Mumble?
Just, please, don't hide documentation in the Discord. A neocities page costs literally $0. Please. Think of the poor SEO consultants!
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Yeah I'm indifferent to discord as a platform. It'll eventually be enshitified and people will move on.
The bummer is that it's enabling people to be poor at documentation in a whole new way.
That said, if Discord went away tomorrow most software projects would still have garbage documentation, because most software projects are ephemeral at BEST.
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I find that some Matrix clients make it easy to build and interact with a community. Even Element has a lot of Discord's core features, it just lacks the streaming and some of the gaming-related stuff. Otherwise, Matrix rooms are sufficient for building an "easy to chat" community.
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I love Immich and Sharkey but both use Discord. Sharkey even used Matrix in the beginning but eventually switched to Discord. I think their reasoning was that they were often attacked by trolls etc. and that Matrix didn't had good options for moderation etc.
And while I love Matrix I fully agree. Yes there are moderation bots like Draupnir and they're good but you will need to self host them and register a user for them and and and. It's not as easy as with Discord or even Telegram bots. Also there are many Discord bots providing very fun elements like levels, reputations, roles etc. which simply do not exist or aren't even possible in Matrix as it currently is.
On top of that we have the decentralization "problem" for end users who aren't technical. They simply don't care much about privacy and they don't care if Discord stores every single message and picture in clear text forever on their servers. It's easier to create a Discord account on a centralized platform than understanding Matrix understanding which server to choose, understanding which client to choose and understanding how encryption, key management etc. works. Yes decentralization is important and great but for the average user it's still something that they do not really know which "overcomplicates" it for them.
And another point is that Matrix spaces are simply not the same as Discord servers. Channels are not as easy to manage because they are rooms on their own in Matrix and a space is not a server but rather a way to organize multiple rooms. Not every client supports spaces yet. Clients implement them differently. Then there's Element and Element X on phones confusing people new to Matrix etc. In Discord several channels can be grouped in another category. In Matrix you'd use Subspaces for that giving you the same issue as with normal spaces.
And most clients don't implement simple things on mobile like...sending multiple images at once. From the perspective of an end user that fact annoys the heck out of anyone wanting to send several pictures.
So yeah I think it's a mixture out of those things.
Matrix especially needs better bot support with bots that could be used by everyone as it is with Discord instead of being only usable by server admins or the bots creators as it is with many Matrix bots. And it does need a better solution for spaces with rooms or another thing in the specs that replicates how Discord servers work so that it's a "space" with actual "subchannels" without every space technically being it's own room dangling around in limbo and just being "sorted" into the space.
And it needs better moderation tools.
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Matrix sucks, that's why most people won't use it. I'm already giving my software away for free and providing free support for it, why would I want to take up even more of my free time running and maintaining a Matrix server as well?
Sure, I could use an already available Matrix server but I already have a Discord account, all my friends and contributors do as well and the entire thing is easy to set up and use, plus I'm already running the Discord client too.
On top of this, the argument about searchability is irrelevant. Projects have been giving support via IRC forever which has all the same problems. The best thing to do for any non-trivial support inquiries is to direct the user to lodge a support ticket and always has been.
Matrix just isn't a compelling option, even if it had feature parity with Discord and was easier to use, it doesn't have any real inertia anyway.
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From the article.
Free software matters — that’s why you’re writing it, after all. Using Discord partitions your community on either side of a walled garden, with one side that’s willing to use the proprietary Discord client, and one side that isn’t. It sets up users who are passionate about free software — i.e. your most passionate contributors or potential contributors — as second-class citizens.
Maybe you'll take up more of your time answering lazy user's questions than speaking with those that are helpful with solving issues.
Your argument about time is more in favor of Matrix, and even more so in favor of just using your code hosting's issue tracker.
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Matrix has great bots (moderation and otherwise). You just need to make your own matrix server or join one that has this stuff enabled. Developers arent „users“ they’re tech and they should absolutely be able to configure mod bots and such.
I get that matrix isnt as easy as discord and it never will be/should be. Corpo Media is an ad machine to make money. Thats why they‘re so streamlined. You can join matrix.org today and discuss with thousands of folks in many communities.
Feel like making your own? Then do it. It’s becoming easier day by day to host your own.
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Ideally "users" wouldn't only be IT guys but also an average person. Some of my friends use Matrix to message me. They certainly are no developers or have technical IT knowledge. They certainly don't know how to set up a bot. With discord you just add a bot to your server (equivalent to a Matrix Space) and there you go. That's user friendly. Matrix bots work yes. But they are by far not user friendly.
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I don't mind Discord being a centralized platform for open source project discussion, if and only if the only roles it serves specifically play to its one strength, which is real time discussion. Asking for live support (from the dev if they are there, or the community if they are not) and doing live bug triage are the two big use cases.
Should contact for these things be real time? Maybe, maybe not. Async discussion like you get on forums or via email can do the job. But if you value real-time chat, Discord does it well.
Everything else? Do it elsewhere. Do not make Discord your only bug tracker. Do not make it your only wiki. Do not make it your only source of documentation. Do not make it the only place you broadcast updates or announcements. Do not make it your only distribution platform for critical downloads. And for the love of god please do not make it the only way to contact you. I don't care if you allow Discord to additionally do these things using integrations, that's fine, just stop trying to contort Discord into your only way of doing these.
Is Discord the only capable option for real time chat? No. But it has several things going in its favor, namely how one can reasonably expect a good sum of their target user base is already using it independently for other purposes, in addition to its numerous QoL features.
It can also better integrate into the dev's personal routine if they already use it independently. Like, do I have an email address? Yeah. Do I read my email on any reasonable interval? Hell no. My email inbox is little more than a dustbin for registration confirmations and online order receipts. I've had email for decades and I think I can count the number of non-work, non-business conversations I've held over it in that whole span of time on one hand. Meanwhile, I'm terminally online on Discord. So if I'm gonna be a small independent FOSS project developer, am I gonna want to interface with everyone over email? No. I'll still make it an option, because being only contactable on Discord is cringe, but it will not be fast. Discord will be my preferred channel.
Should I put more effort into being contactable on other platforms, because it's the right thing to do? Meh. I have no duty of stewardship to be available on platforms available to anyone in particular. I maintain this hypothetical project for free, on my own time, of my own volition, and I provide it to you entirely warranty-free. I have the courtesy to make all static resources available in sensible public places, and I provide email as a slow, async way to reach me. But if you want to converse with me directly in real time, you can come to me where I'm hanging out.
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Using discord as your only store/distribution point for information is obnoxious.
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How would you even use discord for that stuff? It sounds way harder than just using the proper tools.
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You'd certainly think so. But never underestimate a user's ability to jury-rig a piece of software into doing something it wasn't designed to do, ignoring any and all obviously better solutions as they do so.
I don't think I've ever actually seen documentation published on Discord and nowhere else. But I do very often see no documentation whatsoever except a "just ask around on the Discord" link serving the role.
Discord probably isn't used as a robust ticketing system either; usually if anything it's a bot that will push all tickets to an actual GitWhatever issue, which is fine. But again, what I do see often is projects with no ticketing system whatsoever, and a Discord link to just dump your problems at. If the issue tracker on the repo isn't outright disabled, it's a ghost town of open issues falling on deaf ears.
Announcements can be pretty bad. Devs can get into a habit of thinking the only people who care about periodic updates are already in the Discord server, so they don't update READMEs, wikis, or docs on the repo as often as they should, allowing them to go out of date.
Fwiw I've also seen several projects that have Discord servers with none of these problems, because they handle all those other parts properly.
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Devs ITT biting every single argument in the article and then saying "but it's easy" is extremely ironic
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from the article:
In short, using Discord for your free software/open source (FOSS) software project is a very bad idea. Free software matters — that’s why you’re writing it, after all. Using Discord partitions your community on either side of a walled garden, with one side that’s willing to use the proprietary Discord client, and one side that isn’t. It sets up users who are passionate about free software — i.e. your most passionate contributors or potential contributors — as second-class citizens.
Interesting to do a “s/Discord/Github/” replace on the above. Same situation yet hardly anyone gives a shit.
So yes, Drew DeVault is right. But he overestimates people’s commitment to free world digital rights principles and consistency thereof.
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not at all the same situation. Git itself is not proprietary so all the projects can survive without GitHub if the need arises. Additionally, you don’t need an account to view the repository or its discussions. There is of course a walled garden for participation and it is an issue, however it doesn’t compare to discord, which is much, much worse.
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I don't care about the wall around the garden as much as I care that the wall was made by a deranged clown with no UI design experience.
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There is of course a walled garden for participation and it is an issue
And if you insist on using Microsoft GitHub, this contribution concern can be mitigated by offering an alternative mirror or a mailing list/email address to send patches. One way to help prevent lock-in would be to use MS GitHub’s repository settings & straight-up disable non-portable features like “Discussions”, “Sponsors” & maybe even the “Issues” tracker favoring a third-party option or the issue tracker of the mirror along with disabling “Actions” choosing a third-party CI option or the CI that comes with the mirror (or require checks ran locally before pushing).
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Git itself is not proprietary so all the projects can survive without GitHub if the need arises. Ad
You’re neglecting the exclusion that’s inherent in Github when the need to bounce does NOT arise.
Also worth adding that during the war in Gaza some of us boycott Israel. Which implies boycotting Microsoft.
Additionally, you don’t need an account to view the repository or its discussions.
Advocating read-only access is comparable to endorsing only freedom 1 and 2, not freedom 0 or 4. Which is precisely what I’m talking about: FOSS projects that discard digital rights and partake in digital exclusion for some convenience frills.
There is of course a walled garden for participation and it is an issue, however it doesn’t compare to discord, which is much, much worse.
Bug trackers have more of a monopoly on bug reports than discord has on discussions. There are countless decentralized discussions about free software all over the place -- threadiverse, probably facebook, ad hoc phpbb forums, IRC, usenet, mastodon, mailing lists, conferences like FOSDEM … and rightfully so. Discussions don’t need the centralization that bug trackers do. General discussions also do not have the degree of importance to QA that bug tracking does.
Case in point, when bugs are reported outside of Github, they don’t get noticed by developers and triaged.
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Same situation yet hardly anyone gives a shit.
I give a shit. Open source contributions shouldn’t require proprietary services if open alternatives (even if it requires more than a single service) suffice. In the case of Git forges, the alternatives are great--& the more you buy into the Microsoft GitHub-specific features the harder it will be to migrate which will lead to lock-in.
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doesn’t help that modern tools like lazy.nvim, etc make alternative hosting a barrier to entry. and a GitHub mirror is a tedious half measure.
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If you're desperate for a discord-like experience (because lets face it, irc and mailing lists arent very flashy anymore!) you can try:
- rocket chat - General purpose chat platform, very similar discord
- mattermost - developer-centric platform, similar to slack
- Matrix - open protocol, has a bunch of desktop clients
Yes you wont have voice/vodeo chat for these but IMO that's rarely useful anyway. And if you DO need it then you can use stuff like teamspeak or zoom******yes i know the issues with these options but for devs you dont really ever need to use meetings for very long and sometimes using a shitty free service with all you need is better than self hosting your own. Maybe Nextcloud talk can work?Some good arguments made for FOSS voice/meeting apps, and why VC and meetings are more important to the FOSS workflow than I thought :)
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Jitsi Meet for zoom replacement
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Jitsi is amazing. Even during 2020 it always has worked way better than Zoom for me, and I haven't even tried hosting it myself.
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How about Revolt? It's open source and it's pretty much a Discord clone.
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Stop recommending closed-source, paid solutions. It makes you look like a shill.
Matrix is the only suitable replacement for discord, as it is the only federated replacement.
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irc and xmpp federate..xmpp is highly extensible.
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Matrix was built by Israeli intelligence & consumes so many resources that it’s not feasible to self-host on most budgets. As such it’s highly centralized & the community is still largely being ran by Matrix.org as the keeper of the implementation server, the most popular client, the specification, the largest server- which syncs back the metadata.
Mattermost is by-design centralized but it’s self-hostable & AGPL so I’m not sure where the closed-source accusation is coming from. At least it’s less wasteful than trying to be decentralized & if you wanted lightweight decentralization, you would reach for XMPP.
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Forums are a better technology but come with hosting costs
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The dumb part about that, though, is that it's considerably easy to spin up a forum with a free forum host and you get significantly more control and customization than what Discord gives.
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Discourse is a forum platform and now has a similar layout like Discord.
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When things seem free, you're not the customer.
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No
When profit is the motive you are not the customer, the shareholders are
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I think you misspelled "Please use the appropriate tool for a specific job"
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Which certainly isn't Discord
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Depends what job, keeping a community ? Why not. Gaming with friends ? Yeah. Keeping track of a project ? There sure are many - even - free tools to manage that
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I have never used Discord and never will. No project has ever been able to change my stance on it.
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On the other end I have a lot of first-hand experience of Discord's abuses and that's precisely why I have my stance on it.
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This article has a few primary arguments for not using Discord—
- because it is proprietary software
- because it has poor accessibility
- because control over moderation and other administrative tools is ultimately in the hands of Discord rather than the community.
I know this opinion is going to be unpopular but here I go anyway.
Other than the accessibility argument, I find these arguments quite weak. Yes, Discord is proprietary software, but the reason it's used is because a lot of people are familiar with it and many people already have Discord accounts.
Although I'm a firm supporter of free software, I also believe that it's more important to use the right software for the job than to idealistically use inferior software just because it happens to be open-source. And yes, I regard most of the alternatives to Discord listed in the article to be inferior solely because they are unfamiliar to users. Sometimes, the superior choice happens to be proprietary and I don't think there's anything wrong with that. That's the way it is sometimes; you can't win every fight, as much as you'd like to.
If your goal is to foster a community of regular users and make it easy for normal users to interact with contributors, there is no choice that will hamper that goal more than using an obscure alternative software that nobody's heard of.
With respect to chat logs and administration tools... for the most part, nobody cares. Discord's tools are sufficient for most groups and few people consider the drawbacks to outweigh the other benefits.
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The strongest argument for me is that discord is commercial, borne of venture capital spent on operating at a loss for years to gain users. It is therefore bound for a turn towards profit and enshittification, sooner, rather than later.
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Although I’m a firm supporter of free software
Unless I'm misreading this, your argument seems to be that software freedom is irrelevant in the face of technical superiority or popularity. That's exactly the opposite of "firm support" in my view.
I'll offer a counterpoint to the "best tool for the job" thing: before git existed, Linux development relied on a proprietary VCS called Bitkeeper. Licenses for Bitkeeper were "graciously" donated for gratis by the Bitkeeper developer. Andrew Tridgell, who was not party to the Bitkeeper EULA, telneted to a Bitkeeper server and typed "help". The Bitkeeper developer, in retaliation, revoked the Linux developers' gratis license to use the proprietary "best tool for the job." This was what forced Linus to develop git, which became the most widely used VCS in the free software world. (read: Thank You, Larry McVoy by Richard Stallman)
Proprietary tools can seem to be useful in the moment but developing a dependency on them, and encouraging their use, is dangerous. Discord might seem like "the best tool for the job" until it enshittifies, just like its predecessors did, and just like its successors inevitably will. We've seen it happen often enough.
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True, but managing expectations is needed tho, mainly about exit strategy:
If a community needs to leave, the content on Discord must be considered "not important", "not transferable" and "not archive worthy".
If Discord changes freemium, limits users or otherwise applies enshittification just leave your stuff and start over.
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It would be easier to leave if you started by using a platform that made that seamless. Freenode gets bought & communities say to point your bouncers/clients to Libera.chat or OFTC. If you were on XMPP on a decentralized account, your account stays, but now there’s a new MUC to join. With Discord, if Discord goes down, so does the client & the whole server… folks need to relearn a bunch of stuff & it’s not a clean break.
This is also inevitable as we are talking about a US-based, VC-funded service & we have the entire track record of these types of services declining. Why not start with something that’s more likely to not suck in 5 or 10 years even if it doesn’t have all the same features so long as you can still chat in realtime.
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If your logic is that a piece of software is inferior to another because it is less popular and familiar than go back to reddit
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Gonna add that while Discord is inaccessible if your hardware is crap, it's the ONLY platform accessible to plural people
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Although I’m a firm supporter of free software,
Lies, according to the rest of your very own post.
it’s more important to use the right software for the job than to
Discord literally doesn't allow me to google (or DDG, or searx, or...) for solutions related to your software. How is that the right tool to use?
And yes, I regard most of the alternatives to Discord listed in the article to be inferior solely because they are unfamiliar to users.
Fallacy of popularity. If something is """inferior""" simply because people have not been trained on them already, then by your definition Windows is superior to everything else. Remember: big corpo trains you to depend on them since childhood in schools, which all use Office.
That’s the way it is sometimes; you can’t win every fight,
Not with that attitude. That is, the one of a loser.
If your goal is to foster a community of regular users and make it easy for normal users to interact with contributors, there is no choice that will hamper that goal more than using an obscure alternative software that nobody’s heard of.
That would be true f people were literally doing that. But no, the stack of software that includes stuff like IRC, goode olde web forums, Stack Overflow-like webpages or friggin' email has existed since the '80s and can be not by any reasonable metric be called "obscure" or "alternative" or "nobody's heard of".
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Remember: big corpo trains you to depend on them since childhood in schools, which all use Office.
lmao I remember getting schooled by a math teacher when I tried to use libreoffice calc instead of excel on an assignment back in highschool
detail: all the school computers ran linux. fuck whoever didn't have a pc with windows at home
she brought her windows laptop and attached it to the projector and expected everyone to have the assignment files in a format excel could read
problem is, at least going 12 years back, not all calc functions and/or param names translate directly to excel ones
so when she opened the file, which I made sure was one excel could read, there was a bunch of gibberish on some cells
when I told her it worked as intended on libreoffice, she said something along the lines of: you don't go to church using the same clothes that you use when going to a nightclub
anyway, at least the school was trying not to depend on windows
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With due respect, you do not have the authority to dictate what it means for me to support free software. Nor anyone else.
When it comes to community-building and social networking, the popularity metric is absolutely an important consideration. If you are choosing where to start the official community for your software project, and you choose an obscure service, people will make unofficial communities in the more popular services, and you end up with all the supposed drawbacks anyway. Normal non-technical users who are looking to join a community won't prefer an official community on a service they've never used before to an unofficial community on a popular service. That's why people make unofficial user subreddits and community Discord servers. Those unofficial communities could and in many cases will outgrow the official community. This has happened many times before and will happen many times again. Then, new users, even if they see both, will see an unofficial community on, say, Reddit with many more users than the official one, and when this happens, developers either start participating in the unofficial community posting announcements and whatnot there, and if that happens, there becomes little reason to join the official community.
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you shouldn't use discord at all .... I think nowadays it's the only app that uses plain text for all messages avoid discord
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I use discord when playing video games with my daughter. It's improved our experience immensely.
Audio chat, webcam and screen sharing are a great combination.
Can you recommend an alternative?
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I'm not a fan of online games therefore can't suggest you an alternative but I'm sure something better exists
chatting and making video with your daughter trough discord it's the same like having any discord employee watching you (see privacy policy ) if you are confortable with that it's fine . I'm supposing you are on lemmy to avoid reddit right ? do the same for discord.
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It's getting a bit annoying honestly how people are telling other developers how to run their projects. And often these people don't even contribute anything
I personally hate discord, but I do use slack. Using discord or slack however doesn't make your code any less open source
If people want this, they can set up something for my projects, and convince users to go. If it's successful I'd join too. Otherwise, it's really just focusing on things that dont actually matter much. I've personally been part of a project which died because we focused too much on infrastructure
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We shouldn't be mixing FOSS projects with proprietary communication platforms. There are a lot of FOSS enthusiasts who want their setup to be entirely free and open, including Discord into the mix basically goes against the whole philosophy.
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Great, well those FOSS enthusiasts can contribute something to the project if they want to dictate how it is run, or/and they can set it up and moderate it.
Again, projects need to be super careful not to get caught up in overheads than actually producing results. One of my projects we spent so much time jerking around with choosing source code systems and such, that we didn't really produce anything. You start nitpicking features, servers, long term reliability, etc, instead of just picking what you're familiar with which might be closed source but super popular.
I we go extreme, a hardcore FOSS user could even argue developers shouldn't use VS Code and argue they should use another tool. Well, if you're more productive with VS Code and produce more/better code though, use that, because its the results that matter.
The fact is, most projects get 0 donations and people do them as a hobby. If people seriously want this, they can contribute donations to projects to get them to switch
Also, this link is basically a Sourcehut advert..
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And often these people don't even contribute anything
Because you are not giving a portion of your audience an open, privacy-respecting way to contribute.
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I don't use Discord actually..
In fact, my most popular project made Slashdot front page 20 years ago, and I was actually using IRC. No help.. Just submitted issues or suggestions. The only donations I got were from people I knew. And donations aren't common for most projects honestly until they get much bigger, or they are operating an online service
There is nothing stopping people setting up communication channels and such on IRC and such though if they don't want to use the others
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But I also don't want to make zillions accounts, one for each project, just for a quick question.
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You mean pretty much a single GitHub account?
Also your quick question may have already been asked and answered but difficult to find on Discord. Or if it hasn't been asked yet, now a future person can't discover the same question easily. So either way you're just wasting other people's time.
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That "Discord" can be replaced with any IM platforms. Slack, Martix, Gitter, you name it. They are still hard to search. By no means I like the idea of using IM platforms as a support portal/community. I still think forums-like platforms are the best, yet I don't want to create another account to engage with a project that I use.
Github, Lemmy and Stack Exchange enables one account for multiple projects/topics, which I quite like. Or mailing lists. That can do as well.
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THIS.
omg If I have to configure another Matrix mirror bot for something I wanna self host, I swear...
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Openstreetmap 👀 👀 👀 👀
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Don't talk to discord users, they have cooties.
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I don't talk to them. They're always dead when I'm awake anyway.
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This article is two years old, and perhaps discord have improved their accessibility, since this user find it more accessible then matrix. Yes, it's a single usercase, but worth mentioning nonetheless.
I think there are other arguments against Discord that haven't been mentioned: data privacy. I know there was an instance where Discord collected user without their consent, and that is enough for me to avoid the platform.
I much rather use matrix or the horridly old IRC protocol than Discord. Or forums. Or just plain old issues!
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IRC has the same problem as discord when it comes to using it for support. It can't be searched. The same questions will get asked over and over again.
With forums and issue trackers, users can find a solution to previously solved issues with a simple web search.
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Besides the privacy, Discord is also complicit in spam attacks against the Fediverse.
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I have an existing community of thousands of users on discord, attempts to migrate to other platforms have failed. What would you suggest?
The community was inherited and existed when I became maintainer.
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Set up a Matrix bridge and promote it too. You can't force a community but you can inform and give choice.
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For you, I suggest sticking to Discord. I am of the mind that your effort should be focused on your community instead of enforcing a FOSS philosophy upon a group that may not have any interest in doing so.
If you are creating a new community, this is a different conversation, of course.
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To me, I
Matrix for synchronous chat Threadiverse/Fediverse community for announcements and discussion Discourse for forums (smaller possible channels) OpenSource based Software forges like Forgejo (codeberg.org) or gitlab (gitlab.com) for issue tracking, code repo, Dev artfacts, and CI/CD.
The exciting things for these lay in the future though: ForgeFed to federate between forges like codeberg, gitlab, and independent instances of those software, plus federate to whole fediveriverse!
With the fediverse plugin for discourse
the commune app's to take matrix chats and growing them into full posts on fediverse is super exciting to me too
All of these helping to meet people where they are at in Free internet instead of the techno feudal states. There should be work to bridge to those people too, but I hope we can the Free internet better more.
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Matrix is free and works much better and you can run your own server
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Still has a lot of the same underlying issues discord has. It's not indexable being the biggest. The reality is that services like stack overflow or an issue tracker like bugzilla, or your local git services issues section or discussion section, hell even something like discourse or even mailing lists, just work better. If someone made an im service that could be indexed by search engines and the like, now we'd be talking. Opensorce design and discussion doesn't really benefit that much from closed ecosystems and end to end encryption in most cases.
I guess though at least with matrix someone could make a service that acts as a client and indexes content from a list of channels or something...
Discord, matrix, slack and telegram are where documentation goes to die in the current state of things though.
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This is what i don't get. The "chat" idea is the central problem. Make a damn forum or bug tracker. Maybe I'm just too old but real time chat seems entirely unnecessary and counterproductive for a software project.
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Matrix doesn't have pluralkit
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I created a discord server for an open source project of mine, but grew to dislike it. It got spammed multiple times, people are off topic and talking about their lives in channels that aren't for that, and so I started pushing the community toward GitHub discussions.
Discord isn't searchable, nor archivable, nor public, but GitHub is (I'm aware of another conflict with Microsoft for some people, but to me this is the easiest solution to get contributors and have an easy CI setup).
I haven't had much success yet, but I'm slowly shutting down all links to the discord and will let it die (for outside contributors at least). I might keep it to stay in touch with a few developers, to refine issues and prepare migrations that aren't ready to be turned into public discussions/ issues / pull requests.
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Discord is a disease.
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It's pretty strange to see an accessibility argument against Discord when Discord is the only platform that's accessible to plural people. Like, the arguments against Discord are good, but it's ignoring the tradeoff that other platforms lack the crucial accessibility feature that only discord has.
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Why does nobody ever recommend GitLab
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It can be an improvement on Microsoft’s offering in some ways, but it’s also problematic in other ways. The open-core is without a doubt better than being fully proprietary like Microsoft GitHub, but it’s also not fully open. GitLab is based in the US & is publicly-traded meaning it has to comply with US sanctions (which can ban some of your contributors) as well as needing to prioritize value to shareholders--not users. The architecture is also a bit of a mess being built on slow Rails servers & sluggish React clients (+ requires JS) meaning the user experience is not snappy. I also hear (as I’ve never self-hosted) that migrations, scaling, & maintenance isn’t a fun experience with the service. There also might be too many features in the service you aren’t using but now have to support.
If using Git as your VCS, one may want to take a look into cgit, Forgejo, Gitea, or SourceHut as alternative before committing to GitLab. You may also consider alternatives to Git too!
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Or just don't use Discord.
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The same applies to Android OS development. All of it. Android requires a very powerful 1000 USD desktop or laptop computer with 20 gigs of ram and 200 gigs of SSD hard drive space just to compile. This is unacceptable.
Meanwhile, mainline phone linux, like dreemurrs archlinux or postmarketos, can be developed using the same phone it runs on!!!!!!!! All you need is a 20 USD bluetooth keyboard. It is fully awesome. Imagine a world where anybody with just a smartphone and a bluetooth keyboard could be an OS developer!
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Android dev here. It does not require 20 gigs of RAM.
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Yeah I don’t understand this comment lol
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It did last time I tried compiling AOSP. At least on the default settings. After I told the build system not to try building in parallel, I got that number down to 8 gigs. Still way too high. There's no way anybody could develop AOSP on a phone.
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Can we just bring bitchx back?
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Discord is a wicked place, let us not go there
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Use discourse instead? It's really the best in my opinion.
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Look at what just happened to Yuzu - Years of community just deleted because of a few lawyers.
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I haven't read the legal outcome, but wouldn't this have happened anyways if the forums were in other places? The github got removed as well
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basic news is: Yuzu and citra agreed to shut down with immediate effect incl. discords.
At least with an open platform youd have a chance to backup discussions or rehost. You'd probably still be dead in the water but it would beat the info being wiped.
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Depends what you use it for, there's some great servers for a lot of things. I don't really care about platforms and basically use them all. Certain people really hate Discord but the alternatives don't have many interesting things on them, and the people who use them aren't a very diverse group. Checking all the right FOSS and feature boxes is nice but it's not what actually makes a platform good to use.
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How to make a discord account? I get so many captchas and would have to enter a phone number but all the free ones online don't work.
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Step one: don't be a spam bot that fails the captcha
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USE REVOLT INSTEAD
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Fmhy used revolt as primary and even they had to fall back to discord
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Richard M. Stallman vibes.
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Agreed. I love it!
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The philosophy, not the man tho
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Ahhh, yet another "Discord bad" post. Let's see what alternatives they propose. After all, just telling me I made the wrong choice isn't productive right?
There are great FOSS alternatives to Discord or Slack. SourceHut has been investing in IRC by building more accessible services like chat.sr.ht. Other great options include Matrix and Zulip. Please consider these services before you reach for their proprietary competitors.
Hahaha hahaha. Good fucking joke.
There's a reason Discord is a million times more usable than all of those, and it's not just network effect.
...
I'm well aware discord is going to enshittify itself eventually. It's inevitable. However quite frankly as long as that hasn't happened yet, it will remain by far the best option. I am not going to knee-cap my project by using a Discord "alternative" that barely works.
The day Discord dies will be a massive loss for the internet. That hasn't happened yet. But it will. And it's not going to be a loss just because of all the communities locked in on it. It's going to be a loss because it's the best damn community chat software and there's no replacement.
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The day Discord dies will be a massive loss for the internet.
What loss will that be? Discord's value is the same as MSN Messenger - the history on Discord is already unusable for resolving issues, so when it's gone people will just move to the next real-time communication platform that fills the same gap. It's not a forum that people can search and find answers on years after discussions have happened and solutions have been posted.
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See my other comments. There is still no suitable alternative to Discord that is as good at it for making communities people can easily access. The loss is not solely in the messages that get locked away (sure that sucks too). It's the loss of the communities that can't exist on platforms like Matrix or IRC.
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as long as that hasn't happened yet
Hasn't happened yet? Have you seen the new mobile app? What usability?
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There are a lot of people out there who uphold privacy and security as their own personal tenets. Many ToS or privacy policies do not meet their standard and thus, many tech workers or tech savvy hate things like discord. To each their own. Try to understand why and look beyond the "discord bad" to learn more.
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I am fully aware why people go "Discord bad". But weak arguments like "you miss out on all the contributors that have too bad of a PC to run Discord" do not outweigh the fact that Discord is a million times better for building a community. You're suggesting to make the experience worse for 90% of people interested in a project to appease the <1%.
I wish it didn't have to be this way, but it is.
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i agree with you that irc is not a good alternative, but [Matrix] is
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I've evaluated Matrix multiple times, even tried to set up a homeserver once, and I can confidently say it's an unusable mess compared to Discord.
If I wanted to set up a community like on Discord the experience would be worse than Discord 8-7 years ago. Is there a nice, GUI based system for managing permissions, administration and members in a group across 50 channels yet? No? Alright.
Also every time I try to set up Element on another device it takes like 5 attempts to get it to stop spouting errors about E2E stuff, and then still fails to decrypt messages.
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I've used Zulip a couple times and thought it had some neat features and worked well enough. What's so bad about it that justifies a reaction like that?
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When the OP article was posted in 2021, Zulip didn't even have public access as an option. This basically would make it a non-starter for what the article author suggests it for, as that's worse (having to make an account everywhere) than Discord, Matrix or IRC.
To be honest I don't have too much experience with Zulip or Rocket or all of these other new platforms, but my current default assumption is that they will always be designed foremost for organizations rather than the "I am in 20 communities I am somewhat active in[1]" like Discord. Matrix always seems like the better choice here... but it's got its own issues.
I also don't put much regard into the author's word here because unironically suggesting IRC in 2021 means they're off their rocker.
[1] I know you can only join like 100 servers without nitro ok.
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Leave us alone OMG i understand you are purists but be realistic as well, you need to go where people are to advertise your project and reach. We can use discord for our projects without it meaning we aren’t for your general privacy.
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Sorry but you can't be serious. Do you really think that putting documentation, bug reports, FAQ, etc. on a Discord server is not a problem? If you want a place to discuss that is like Discord, use Element or some other FLOSS alternative because it just simply is more sustainable and better as it shows respect towards the user base.
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I am talking about reach and promotion, please read what i am writing. If i made an app for 14 year old yes, i would create my platform where they exist (discord and reddit) - if its a fully FOSS project for a mature audience, i’d go there to promote but not for exclusive use in platform. Reach at first is incredibly tough, the time you place doing all that is valuable as well.
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to advertise your project and reach
so does every open-source project have to follow the venture capitalist road? People who are into open-source are pretty comfortable outside of discord, so it only depends who you want to meet. If you aim at the mainstream masses, and you want to grow as much as possible and as fast as possible (why? planning a business exit?) then sure, discord has more of those. But in that case why open-source anyway? It's anti-thetical.
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Nah gonna keep using discord since it’s the best. No amount of daily discord bad threads will stop me.
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so brave
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Need a standing ovation or something?
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406 comments