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Please don't use Discord for FOSS projects
(drewdevault.com)
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this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2024
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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
? What's the difference between setting up a free forum (they're everywhere) versus setting up Discord channels? It's the exact same process.
Ease, convenience, existing userbase, familiarity, choose a few
I guess we have different perspectives. Ease, convenience = forums, existing userbase? = Do you prefer Reddit for this reason?, familiarity = forums lol, search-ability = forums, privacy = forums, etc etc.
The discussion seems very muddled and opinionated ITT because I'm not even sure if you're talking about a Discord Server or a forum/communication platform on a dedicated server. You might be able to slap together a Discord server faster, but the organizational power and not putting that extra work on users for Discord participation makes forum's superior. Part of the project development is sysadmin. If it's not, why take it FOSS at all? Discord is designed to take up your time, those pretty bots and "perks" keep you viewing. What could've been a well thought out message on a board with a reply now becomes 20+ texts which you're stuck communicating on. Rinse and repeat every day, on a forum you simply link the previous conversation and you're done.
I think it's a neutral wash atm, Discord may be packaged better to be mainstream but it's bloat all around with lots of negatives. Anyone saying Discord is better is just preference at this point, lots of counterintuitive comments like we need "real-time" communication but also anything else takes up project development, like Discord is some kind of time saver.
Libera.chat & OFTC exist for this purpose to do chat for open source without needing to set up a service.
please list all your personal foss projects and discussion forums you've set up for them please. I would like to join them all.
Discord supports threaded topic based formats as well.
The reality is that for a lot of interactions, a live chat feels better than a forum post. You can very easily do both on discord, though.
It's not perfect, but the alternatives that aren't a whole project by themselves building a tool don't have feature parity, or the user base.
Forums are not the same as real-time. And yes for most of the people using discord, forums wouldn't cover the same niche.
I think you might just be blinded by Discord for some reason. I'm not sure what "niche" you're referring to with Discord that can't be provided with forums (unless you're worried about cosmetics I guess?). There are forums with real-time communications like chat, notifications, direct-messaging. I'm not trying to argue, getting your perspective is always helpful and might show something I'm missing, but your responses seem vague and not really a counter-point.
My perspective is of a FOSS developer with multiple communities of thousands. If you can't grasp it, that's on you. It's also why purity moralizing isn't useful. I have only so much mental bandwidth to spend on organizing and self-hosting. If people are not stepping up to do the community management and infrastructure work, I will go with the past of least resistance.
oh ok, thanks for the clarification.
That's basically it in a nut shell, path of least resistance. Doesn't refute any claims made in the article or arguments presented here. Just a shame another company has a stranglehold on a whole category of services that have to be used to participate in society ... while developing FOSS.
Nothing to refute. I never said otherwise. Discord is just more convenient for people already overworked.
Yes, it is a shame. I hope you're doing something practical about it instead of moralizing towards FOSS devs.
Building communities and stuff that bring value to users is what really matters at the end of the day. Too many folks in the FOSS world like to stand on soap boxes.
My time is valuable, if I can have someone else run a service, then that's time I can spend doing things I enjoy. Self host when it makes sense, either from a cost perspective or a data privacy perspective. Everything is a balance.
Nothing will ever be as convenient as letting someone else handle your infrastructure headaches. You don't win by complaining, you win by providing a better user value.
It's why Steam beats Torrents and Torrents are coming back over streaming. My time is precious man.
Exactly this.
Thank you for your work
💙
I don't want real time. Does me no good in my time zone.
That's what lemmy is for.
Discourse has somewhat decent chat built in these days.
Great, use Matrix
I've used matrix. I am still using matrix. Just not for anything with a significant community
NixOS uses it, and it has the biggest repo out of any distro, so I'd consider it a significant community
Great. Which means NixOS has enough volunteers to handle that part. I don't.
Servers & clients use too many resources. Because of this, most have centralized around Matrix.org which kind defeats the purpose.
Didn't XMPP solve that in, like, 1999?
(Really, what is with devs and nu-protocols these days? Back in my days you could run a webhost on a potato)
The did, but Matrix is coming to reinvent that while but by wasting resources trying to duplicate the state of everything at massive storage costs & without the extensibility because JSON.
There's a Mozilla home server as well, so federation is working.
That server is under the Matrix.org fleet. It’s like saying Edge isn’t Chrome.
The server itself doesn't matter, you can migrate it to AWS or your own physical server if you oenn the domain
The server does matter when it comes to who is collecting all of the metadata, data, attachments. …And having that all that data centralized around a single entity is a problem.
In this case that would be Mozilla, not the host
Matrix.org hosts Mozilla’s Matrix server. Further, the way all data is synced to all servers means if someone with a Matrix.org ID joins your room (which is most users), all data is synced to the home server. Almost all of the data is in Matrix.org’s possession & with the servers being as expensive as they are to run, more orgs shutdown when popular causing users to flock to the mother instance.
Hosting the server doesn't mean you get to access the data. My server is hosted on Oracle, but that doesn't mean they can access it