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.
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.
There’s nothing wrong with them, Matrix hasn’t been bad the few times I’ve jumped in either. I think Matrix is worth evaluating at least.
But as far as intended-for-multiuser-chat apps go, my laptop and phone have Slack and Discord installed and both get significant use. I don’t see the value in adding yet another app to alt-tab into or have clutter my Startup items. I’d be willing to bet that’s a common sentiment.
Prosody can double as your UnifiedPush server an any Conversations app can be configured to be a low-bandwidth UnifiedPush client. This would XMPP can fill as role of chat as well as unGoogled notifications. If you use something like JMP you could have a secondary or primary phone number. With some gateways you could puppet some proprietary chats. Seems you can get a lot of value out of that chat app.
It is great that folks make these options available but this is far more work than I’m (and many others are) willing to expend on any kind of chat, especially for minimal daily benefit.
My chat services are iMessage, Signal, Telegram, and Whatsapp. This, with Slack and Discord, gets me into contact with >99.999% of people with no maintenance effort required.
I used to enjoy setting this stuff up when I was younger but now I want to focus time elsewhere.
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.
There’s nothing wrong with them, Matrix hasn’t been bad the few times I’ve jumped in either. I think Matrix is worth evaluating at least.
But as far as intended-for-multiuser-chat apps go, my laptop and phone have Slack and Discord installed and both get significant use. I don’t see the value in adding yet another app to alt-tab into or have clutter my Startup items. I’d be willing to bet that’s a common sentiment.
Prosody can double as your UnifiedPush server an any Conversations app can be configured to be a low-bandwidth UnifiedPush client. This would XMPP can fill as role of chat as well as unGoogled notifications. If you use something like JMP you could have a secondary or primary phone number. With some gateways you could puppet some proprietary chats. Seems you can get a lot of value out of that chat app.
It is great that folks make these options available but this is far more work than I’m (and many others are) willing to expend on any kind of chat, especially for minimal daily benefit.
My chat services are iMessage, Signal, Telegram, and Whatsapp. This, with Slack and Discord, gets me into contact with >99.999% of people with no maintenance effort required.
I used to enjoy setting this stuff up when I was younger but now I want to focus time elsewhere.