Please don't use Discord for FOSS projects
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Please don't use Discord for FOSS projects
https://drewdevault.com/2021/12/28/Dont-use-Discord-for-FOSS.html
https://drewdevault.com/2021/12/28/Dont-use-Discord-for-FOSS.html
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
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.
At this point, charging for the service is the only thing left to do to make it more shit...
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.
I have all the issues with Discord that you mention, but struggle to find a better alternative. Do you have any recommendations?
Forums. Phpbb, Mybb, hell even discourse is better than discord. If you're specifically dealing with a coding project, most git repositories offer an issues page and wiki you can use.
And if you want something realtime, IRC & XMPP are low-resource chat options—with the latter being federated & can offer encryption for private rooms.
There’s still been a time & place for realtime communications where the history preservation doesn’t quite matter… it can be some general recon of a problem to know what to even ask so as to not clog up the signal-noise for SEO or even if it’s mostly off-topic banter to relate to community members.
I'm thinking of a rapid alert on a problem in the project using IRC/XMPP/Matrix and then the project managers posting it in a forum about problems in the project.
I could see a bot that could escalate a post with a 🐛 reaction from a maintainer & post an issue. I do feel sometimes tho it is nice to get chat to help the one in need shape the question in a way that folks can help as often they may not know what they are looking for or the root cause. The issues tho is that often those in chat & the asker don’t like the context switch of going to the forum later rather than just answering it here & now--even tho this comes at a detriment to the community as the answer slips into the void.
Forums used to be a lot more common before Reddit kind of ate most public forums.
I guess that the Threadiverse is a substitute, but I dunno how long a given server will stay up.
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.
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
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.
Chat and forum are different things and serve different purposes. Even matrix doesn't solve the search problem. Use a forum for this.
yeah that is why discord should not be used for problem-solving or archival purpose. Hell, even mastodon,reddit and lemmy can be indexed properly on search engine.
Mastodon and Lemmy could be indexed relatively easily, but as all social media it raises the problem of consent on broader decimation of content that's intended for a specific audience.
The biggest problem with traditional forums is the fact that participation requires yet another account. This is the most significant thing that discord has going for it, nearly everybody already has a discord account. Federated forums mostly solve this issue tho
is the fact that participation requires yet another account.
You can literally connect most active forum engines to eg.: OpenID, XMPP, email or any/most kinds of online identifiers. Worst case scenario you can literally enable "sign in with Google".
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.
Popular IRC channels usually have an searchable web archive. But yes, chat is not a good solution for stuff that needs to be documented.
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.
It was my replacement of Skype, which was leaning hard into its enshittification around that time.
But it can always get worse. When they run out of money, some of the stuff that used to be free will begin to cost you something.
Same as any of the modern enshittified services. It used to be really good. Once they got a large userbase it was time to extract value from the users. The users never have the self-respect to leave, so there they stay.
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
I second this!
It's especially disappointing to see FOSS people on Fediverse promoting it.
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
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.
They don't give me a good reason to give them money
The constant harassment was enough to get me to pay for it. But guess what? After I paid for it, the harassment continued, trying to get me to give them even more money for products I don't even understand. And that's just not something I tolerate.
That + the inevitable data-mining + refusal to provide any sort of deletion tools = no more Discord for me. I use Revolt now when I need that sort of thing.
it's mostly cosmetic bullshit. They don't give me a good reason to give them money
Don't give them ideas please
It's incredible, yes, even more considering that Discord has been complicit on spam attacks on the Fediverse.
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.
Discord can and sometimes does monitor your chats.
Source: CEO himself said that, in a hearing
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
Discord can
Well that's pretty obvious.
and sometimes does monitor your chats.
Probably, although why would they? More likely they'll just data mine everything an sell it on for AI learning program to nom nom on.
why would they?
People use it for things like planning terrorism, child enticement, and sharing CSAM. Discord probably wants to ban those people, and maybe aid in their prosecution.
Of course if you're sharing something that's actually private, Discord is a poor choice. So is email or DMs on Lemmy where the server admin could read the content.
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.
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.
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
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.
a free forum
"Oh great, I'll have to create another fucking account" - me, already having some 300 accounts in my key-vault...
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make unless you're saying no one has to create a Discord account, or have to download an app, or have to find an invite to locate the server. My keys are auto-generated and auto-saved, simple 20 second process. Forums are also a lot easier to sign up for than Discord, if you're worried about making another account I don't know what to tell ya because every service requires it.
You set up a discord account once. When you want to join a project discord all you have to do is click the invite link and hit „accept“. Bam. Done. No need to join a forum. No need to keep track of another website and check if you got a personal message from someone or something. The benefit is that it is all one location.
I'd much rather have email for forums (Linux kernel style) than discord. I'll even take IRC
It’s undoubtedly nice during that step of the process, but afterwards you’re on a platform that may not be well suited to the purpose. It’d be better just to make the new account on an actual forum. Granted, I use Bitwarden now, so I don’t sweat making new accounts anymore.
This makes me wonder if there is a centralized system for forums. We have stackexchange already, but that’s really designed to be a question and answer site.
Discourse, NodeBB and Flarum are all currently working on ActivityPub federation support. The first two have some basic support already available.
Edit: I read "decentralized". The "centralized" system for forums is obviously Reddit.
This makes me wonder if there is a centralized system for forums.
Is this not what Lemmy is, to a certain extent?
I'm probably way out of the loop but from the perspective of devs getting to contribute, don't stuff like Discourse ship with "login with your Github account" already? Or Google, or Facebook, or...
Also, please, it's 1 click nowadays to make your browser remember your logins for you, if it comes down to laziness
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.
Running and managing a server takes a non-zero amount of work and is a commitment…if you’re actually serious about it.
That’s work wasted on sysadmining and not going into project development.
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.
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.
please list all your personal foss projects and discussion forums you've set up for them please. I would like to join them all.
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.
If you can’t grasp it, that’s on you. It’s also why purity moralizing isn’t useful
oh ok, thanks for the clarification.
If people are not stepping up to do the community management and infrastructure work, I will go with the past of least resistance.
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.
NixOS uses it, and it has the biggest repo out of any distro, so I'd consider it a significant community
Servers & clients use too many resources. Because of this, most have centralized around Matrix.org which kind defeats the purpose.
Servers & clients use too many resources.
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)
I've used matrix and spaces before. Nowhere close as convenient as a discord server. In fact I even had a matrix to discord bridge so I can get the best of both worlds until I had to hide all my matrix channels because of uncontrolled spam
Meanwhile the OCaml IRC chat gets spam from Discord Crypto bots due to bridging with that proprietary platform.
Open source projects improve over time. Corporations improve being able to make money over time, eventually leading to enshittification.
I know which one I'll support
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..
I mean yeah I technically can't offer the hosting without the authorization of my boss, but, ceteris paribus, how much are you offering?
We're on the same page then, as someone who says to go around involved in "multiple large Foss services" (no evidence to that) but that demands to be given freeloading on infrastructure by everyone else because otherwise Discord, well, is not really worth responding seriously to either.
Lol I don't go around linking my credentials before I reply. Those who know, know. Those who don't, check my profile, before insulting me,. And those who are useless to Foss , leave replies like yours.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes, discord is for chatting, that's correct. It's not a tech support platform, nor is it a documentation repo, yet people commonly try to use it as such.
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.
Can someone point to the reasons why such talented people use discord for their projects?
I merely suggested an alternative to forums because everyone said signing up was inconvenient
You don't need to sign up for forums for them to be searched through.
The point is that Discord is an information black hole. It's all contained within the server, unindexed, private, hidden, and entirely gone if the server gets deleted.
You would need to sign up to be able to participate, which seems to be the pain point from the beginning. That was the reason why I suggested email threads akin to what Linus and Co use for Kernel development, since those can be searched no problem, whilst almost everyone has email IDs
I don't think participation is the problem. If you think about it, you wouldn't want just anyone to post something on a platform without first engaging in said platform. That can only have a neutral or negative effect. People asking stupid questions or people cursing out users. The act of signup ensures that the would-be poster has to signup first and rationalize their post during that process.
Therefor, the problem must be something else, it is the information gateoff (amongst other things) that makes Discord and similar apps unfavorable for community management and information distribution.
Because it's a decent all in one platform and they don't want to deal with the alternatives.
The integrations and plugins, established workflows, support systems ticketing it's all turnkey. I hate the platform and I wish people wouldn't use it but I understand the draw.
There are bots that tie in and store tickets several of my software vendors use them. When you have a problem you drop into a certain channel and make a request it issues you a ticket with a link creates a new channel that's just a conversation between you and support. At first it seems clergy but after you use it a couple of times it's reasonably slick
A lot of people have discord, a lot less people have slack.
Slack is also starting to charge for those workflows. My slack bill at work is gone up 50% past what it was. And I'm now getting monthly warnings from using my integrations. They would like me to put a credit card into handle more jira tickets.
You also need to pay to just have message history preserved on slack. Discord that information is there for free for as long as the server/discord exists.
I'm not saying people should use discord, but people are using it because it's free to use.
same goes for those that create self hostable, privacy oriented services and bake in dropbox and/or google drive support... like WUT.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
How would you even use discord for that stuff? It sounds way harder than just using the proper tools.
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.
you can come to me where I'm hanging out.
This is the crux of the issue. Where you hang out is your choice.
Is the platform full of security and privacy flaws? Yes.
Will content on the platform be actively mined for training data for neural networks? Yes.
Are you obligated to use anything else to discuss your provided content that's free of charge? Absolutely not.
The maintainer is going to use whatever platform they want.
Those who want support will use whatever platform the maintainer is available in.
If you're an end user needing support but refuse to use the mechanism provided, you're welcome to read the code yourself.
Yes, but its important that there is information available to maintainers about the pros/cons of mechanisms available, so that they are able to make informed choices about the platforms that they use and influence others to use. Hence the article.
Indeed, it is my choice. And as of now, even in light of all of this article's information, I have chosen Discord. For now.
Deal breaking flaws to others are not necessarily deal breaking flaws to me. If their differences in principles prevent them from reaching me on my preferred platform, tough noogies for them.
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.
The elephant in the room is IRC. Which continues to work fine and hosts huge FOSS communities. Self hosting it is even better as you can use a more modern version like ergo.chat than the large networks sadly utilize.
You made me look again at IRC V3, seems like they support threads and emoji reactions. I might give it a try
IRCv3 has a lot of features & is good, but if you need encrypted chat and/or want to support decentralization XMPP MUCs can fit the bill similar being just a bit less lightweight.
I use IRC in Matrix, and have used IRC since the 90s, but IRC lacks many modern features, even simple things like configurable push notifications and universal encryption, perhaps ergo is better? But then again, the reason I chose Lemmy was distribution, so...
Heh, push notifications and universal encryption are about the opposite of simple and fail to work on Matrix most of the time. Most of the actually simple and useful features for a public chat are supported by Ergo though.
What issues have you had? Using Element worked out of the box for me on both. Even spun up my own server with a docker compose and it worked fine there, too.
Large public rooms have constant issues with encryption, and since you can't turn it off once enabled (yeah 🤦♂️) most public rooms are not e2ee. Besides the fact that e2ee doesn't really make sense in public rooms as anyone can join.
Push notifications in Matrix clients only work with the help of Google's or Apple's centralized infrastructure. This is of course only partially the fault of Matrix, but XMPP for example can do it without pretty well.
But IRC doesn't really support E2EE in 1:1 chats right? Because that's something very important for me. I don't want to use an app only for public channels I ideally would like to use it for everything. Including messaging the people I know.
There are some ways to make it work with OTR, but realistically speaking no.
Personally I get around that by using XMPP and connecting to IRC via the excellent Biboumi gateway. Thus I get the best of both, as XMPP is working really well for e2ee 1:1 chats.
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.
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.
The article is wrong, you disrespect your users by forcing them to use a platform that they otherwise wouldn't just to engage with you. Github isn't free either, but the majority of us use it for free software too.
installing a matrix client and creating a matrix account is exactly as complicated as installing discord app and creating an account there.
It could install itself and I still wouldn't use it. Nobody I care about is on there and inertia is important too. This has been true since the dawn of real-time communications platforms and isn't going to change either.
@Kushia 🤷♂️ I have the opposite situation, nobody I care about is on discord. So discord sucks? See the thing is if one matrix guy wants to talk to one discord guy, one of them needs to install a new app. And I think the world would be better if we all had more free/libre apps and less walled gardens, so I will strongly resist installing discord. Just yet another proprietary walled garden waiting for the rug-pull. Why? Just convince the other guy to use Matrix and over time our world will improve
@Kushia Of course I am. Now I would appreciate if you didn't come to the open-source community telling everyone how bad they are and that they are never gonna make it. That's a pretty shit move man. Cheers.
I never said it's never going to make it, I said I care about what works for the majority with the least amount of friction.
If you took that as a personal attack that's on you.
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.
There is a big difference between "is unable to maintain bots due to lack of skills" and "is unable to maintain bots due to lack of time and motivation".
There is a big difference between maintain and download a docker-compose.yml and typing docker compose up -d
What about security updates? What about monitoring? What about the underlying infrastructure? What about even picking what software to use and configuring it?
I haven't heard of docker compose up guess-what-i-want-and-just-do-it yet, but I guess there is some LLM that can hallucinate one for you.
Obviously, having discord gobble up your data is more comfortable in any case. Still, its not that hard, especially for a tool as popular as matrix. I‘m not saying its no work, I‘m saying its not much.
Don't fret, it's people with your mindset that will survive the impending AI tech employment apocalypse.
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.
We‘re talking about wildly different things here.
Please dont use these ignorant arguments, its obvious that matrix is the better choice if someone can afford the time to get to know it or just joins a server.
Devs ITT biting every single argument in the article and then saying "but it's easy" is extremely ironic
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.
If you're desperate for a discord-like experience (because lets face it, irc and mailing lists arent very flashy anymore!) you can try:
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 :)
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.
This article has a few primary arguments for not using Discord—
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.
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.
The flip-side of that argument is that "librefosschat" alternative might also be dead next year when it runs out of money :/
At least commercial vc enshitiffied stuff tends to get ridden into the ground, so there is a long offramp.
Not really. Something you can self-host, like irc, xmpp or matrix, has an infinite offramp.
Very true, but self-hosting isn't free either, so there are maintenance/moderation/etc costs that take away time from the project. Small projects often just cant justify selfhosting.
But if your service is hosted by a third party, you really do want to be sure they will be around in the near future. And its not just chat that this applies to, git hosting, web hosting, ci/cd etc.
You don't need to selfhost most of those. There's IRC and webpage providers everywhere (you can literally walk into a cpanel hosting and click the button that says "make me a Wordpress", for example). After all, I'm sure your product has an email account, yet you are not selfhosting your e-mail, do you? And you release your software via what, Github? Flatpak? Lemme see, are you selfhosting those too?
You've come full circle. Of course there are hosting providers everywhere, but there are no guarentees that they will still exist in the future. And if your not selfhosting, then you have to pay someone to host it for you, whereas Discord and Github are free.
And a small subsection of the "dont use discord" crowd are equally against using Github for many of the same reasons.
To be clear, I am completely okay with Discord, Github etc for foss projects.
So long as you don’t buy into a platform’s proprietary features, you should be able to easily migrate if the basis is on a open technology. For instance, if you are using Git as your VCS, you can rehost it elsewhere easily. If your chat is on IRC and Freenode goes down, it wasn’t difficult to move to another platform as communities did. If you buy into Discord, you’re SoL for porting data out or having an easy way to transition to I different room/server since you have to migrate to a different protocol. If you start relying on Microsoft GitHub’s Issues, Action, Sponsors, etc. then you will also feel equally as locked in even if the fundamental system, Git is trivial to migrate.
Idk about infinite, if they stop getting updates they will eventually get phased out and if you can't download the application it's also dead. All that aside the sun is going to go super nova eventually.
Also a lot of people don't want to self host. I doubt you self host your own Lemmy instance for instance.
IRC works since decades, same for XMPP. I think that is a pretty strong indication that it will continue to work just fine.
And not everyone needs to self host, like one in a thousand is more than sufficient for a community to have their own self-hosted chat system.
I host my own matrix instance.
I wouldn't mind hosting my own lemmy instance either, but as it's a public platform anyway I don't have the same qualms about using an instance hosted by someone else. So I opted not to take on any more work on that.
Not everyone needs to self host, you might get away with knowing someone who does. And no, I wouldn't accept a nextcloud account hosted by just anyone, but my siblings and parents happily utilize ones provided by me.
And back when teamspeak, mumble, ventrilo, minecraft servers, cs servers, etc. all had to be "self-hosted" there were plenty of service providers who would do all the technical work for the layman, in exchange for direct payment. Making all those services quite accessible to anyone.
That was so much better than how today we "pay" by getting datamined.
I agree with you here but I wouldn't want to pay for a host for some FOSS project and I wouldn't host that on my own IP either.
Why not? How do you expect to realize a fair and good internet, controlled by its users instead of corporations driven by motives far removed from what is in the interest of users, or even humanity as a species?
You still don't have to, I'll do it. But someone has to. Would you donate to your own instance?
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.
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.
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.
Agree, wholeheartedly and reasons I want to avoid Discord et al. I do communicate my expectations rather cynically in case a community is starting and does have a choice in the beginning.
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
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".
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.
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