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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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YESSS. I so wish this would be considered more.
There's several FOSS projects that I engage with that use discord pretty much exclusively and as such I'm locked out of the community. Like Home Assistant.
I really don't understand why they use it for FOSS projects that are all focused on privacy (home assistant for example focuses on using home automation without cloud so your data doesn't end up everywhere). And then lock you in to such a privacy-hostile service to communicate with them, when actually great alternatives are available like Matrix/Element.
You're not "locked out". You choose to exclude yourself by placing such a high value on privacy. Privacy for what here? For some near-public announcement threads and support channel chats that anyone else in the channel could screenshot or download or post online anyway? That is your choice but framing it as the project developers locking you out is strange.
For anti-surveillance
It's not the privacy of the content we're discussing, it's the horrible Discord client that keeps datamining your PC. It even inspects all the processes.
https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/43lqyb/why_is_discord_recording_our_open_programs_and/
And they don't allow third party clients. They say it can't be turned off because of their push to talk features but I never use those anyway (and they are not needed for FOSS projects, they're more gaming features).
Anyway I don't trust them and don't want to do "business" with them (and definitely not with Tencent). My point is that this mindset of "placing a high value on privacy" while admittedly quite niche, is definitely something many FOSS projects subscribe to. In particular Home Assistant which I mentioned, because a big reason for people using it is because they don't want all their home data in a big data cloud (e.g. homekit, alexa, google home etc). The whole point of home assistant is so you can use your smart home equiment without having to subcribe to commercial companies. And then they do something like this.
What they could do is provide a secondary channel or a bridge to discord which they don't bother with.
I agree that Discord isn't a good choice for FOSS projects for various reasons including privacy, but can't you just use the web client to avoid that specific issue?
I don't really want to sign up to their T&C's, but I did in the past. But their web client is really annoying, it's constantly blocking me and kicking me out and giving captcha's. Probably I have too many ad/tracking blockers :P
But again, with a real FOSS ecosystem you wouldn't have to worry about such skullduggery because there is no tracking to block.
The answer is pluralkit.