- cross-posted to:
- foss@beehaw.org
- opensource@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- foss@beehaw.org
- opensource@lemmy.ml
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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
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
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.
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
what was your popular project then?
Not going to say lol. But it got mentioned in a magazine too… It wasn’t massive… But, got a lot of attention for a short period… But honestly, gave it up because I got sick defending it against haters. That being said, the same idea got adopted by a few distros soon after. So it’s actually good that I did (as it would have ultimately been a waste of time)
Go ahead and deploy and maintain “an open, privacy-respecting way to contribute” and I’m sure plenty of FOSS devs will be happy to migrate
Exactly. You should consider it too… at a bare minimum have a bridge. If you are a small project that doesn’t have the funds Libera.chat & OFTC exist to be used for this exact purpose.
That’s my point. You can’t ask core devs to do always more work to fit your purity.
It’s not more work–it’s often what should have been chosen in the first place as it meets the minimum requirements for the task, is ‘free’ to use, & isn’t wasteful on resources (both their servers & users’ clients). For those not in a the free/ethical software space this may be untrue, but in the space it’s hypocritical to say your software believes in those values but our communication platforms have a different set of rules. It’s also not just just “purity” but accessibility as Discord has ToS not everyone can agree to & has to comply with US sanctions on who is allowed to use the service that something self or independently-hosted don’t have to deal with. It feels more of the reverse in that you are suggesting communities be poisoned by proprietary platforms.
It is absolutely more work. Like undeniably so. I’ve used both matrix and discord. Matrix is absolutely more work. Especially since there’s even less people to help you run it. Irc is even more. Again unless people volunteer to do it, I don’t have the time.
A ton of people, myself included, bounced from IRC a decade+ ago.
Libera.chat/OTFC only have 30k online users each, according to netsplit.de (wow! still going) right now. That’s a minuscule fraction of Discord’s userbase estimates.
Getting a comparable experience requires setting up a BNC (effort) or using IRCCloud (proprietary; also a new account for a service for exactly 1 thing).
Most of Discord’s user base doesn’t make software. IRC is just suggested as the bare minimum (v3 having more features, but not widely adopted). There are still other avenues like XMPP that offer roughly equivalent features, or if you like blowing consuming a lot of resources on user machine & risking centralization, Matrix.org is hosting free servers for chat & are slowly rolling out important features like open governance. Either of these options should in theory allow a user to create just one account & join any community with said account.
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.
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…
Maybe you should ditch your android phone for a pine phone while you’re at it.
Why when you can use GrapheneOS. FOSS, privacy respecting Android…
But you can’t do that, the whole phone has to be open source Right down to the chipset! How are you going to know if it’s respecting your privacy the hardware is a black box it doesn’t matter if you have to create custom solutions to get your banking app working on it. That’s kinda the standard your holding these open source devs to.
It’s not enough you spend your free time writing code with basically no compensation you have to maintain a server, pay for hosting, make sure security patches go through, troubleshooting when it goes down, write custom software to automate support tickets, and deal with people potentially trying to ddos your instance, etc.
Most users find mobile banking works out of the box on GrapheneOS.
I’m not disputing the last stuff is not fun. Matrix works quite well and you can set up a bridge with discord. Using spaces correctly cuts down spam easier also. The problem remains, even if you set them up, my experience is 92% of users come in through Discord. I’d love that to change, but it’s just a fact of the matter.
Yeah, I don’t have foss painted on my chest but I like the idea. It’ll become more mainstream once people figure out a system to get devs paid and reduce the drawbacks of someone cloning a project, injecting ads, and providing it as a free alternative. If all those things and the issue of paying people to provide professional support for companies using it get solved. I can see a bright future for foss.
EDIT: I’ve also heard graphene is is pretty good, I like my android auto though.
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.
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.
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.
Step one: don’t be a spam bot that fails the captcha
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!
Use discourse instead? It’s really the best in my opinion.
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.
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.
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.
- A „user“ is not the person making a server (discord or matrix for that matter)
- A developer (which are the people making FOSS projects, which were the topic) is absolutely a tech person
- A matrix bot can just be invited to your space
- Hosting your own bot is downloading a script, changing some values and starting it
- Matrix is a couple years old and written by hobbyists, discord is a for profit product with dark patterns to suck people into paying for basic features
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.
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
Don’t fret, it’s people with your mindset that will survive the impending AI tech employment apocalypse.
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-ityet, 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.
Matrix isn’t the only alternative, there’s also rocketchat
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.
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.
You made me look again at IRC V3, seems like they support threads and emoji reactions. I might give it a try
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.
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.
push notifications also work degoogled on element and fluffychat, what do you mean?
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.
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
The you’re free to use it, that’s the great thing about choice.
@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.
Discord is a wicked place, let us not go there
Look at what just happened to Yuzu - Years of community just deleted because of a few lawyers.
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.
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!
Don’t talk to discord users, they have cooties.
I think you misspelled “Please use the appropriate tool for a specific job”
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
Sure, I literally do this for my work. How much are you offering me?
You’re not even worth responding seriously to.
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 mean yeah I technically can’t offer the hosting without the authorization of my boss, but, ceteris paribus, how much are you offering?
I wouldn’t even take you if you paid me.
? 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.
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.
Discourse has somewhat decent chat built in these days.
I don’t want real time. Does me no good in my time zone.
That’s what lemmy is for.
Great, use Matrix
Servers & clients use too many resources. Because of this, most have centralized around Matrix.org which kind defeats the purpose.
There’s a Mozilla home server as well, so federation is working.
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. 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
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.
please list all your personal foss projects and discussion forums you’ve set up for them please. I would like to join them all.
Open source isn’t a religion. I put code out there because I made something useful and believe others will find it useful. I will answer questions if it takes little to no effort to do so.
I do not put code out there for the purpose of running infrastructure for end-users. This is an unreasonable waste of time. I do enough of that at work.
Libera.chat & OFTC exist for this purpose to do chat for open source without needing to set up a service.
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 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 lazinessI’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.
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.
This makes me wonder if there is a centralized system for forums.
Is this not what Lemmy is, to a certain extent?
Lemmy is not a Forum…
I’d much rather have email for forums (Linux kernel style) than discord. I’ll even take IRC
Should we tell him that he doesn’t need more than 1 discord account?
Just do a matrix space
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.
Ok. And?
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…
