- cross-posted to:
- opensource@programming.dev
- foss@beehaw.org
- opensource@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- opensource@programming.dev
- 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
Richard M. Stallman vibes.
Why does nobody ever recommend GitLab
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.
Depends what you use it for, there’s some great servers for a lot of things. I don’t really care about platforms and basically use them all. Certain people really hate Discord but the alternatives don’t have many interesting things on them, and the people who use them aren’t a very diverse group.
I created a discord server for an open source project of mine, but grew to dislike it. It got spammed multiple times, people are off topic and talking about their lives in channels that aren’t for that, and so I started pushing the community toward GitHub discussions.
Discord isn’t searchable, nor archivable, nor public, but GitHub is (I’m aware of another conflict with Microsoft for some people, but to me this is the easiest solution to get contributors and have an easy CI setup).
I haven’t had much success yet, but I’m slowly shutting down all links to the discord and will let it die (for outside contributors at least). I might keep it to stay in touch with a few developers, to refine issues and prepare migrations that aren’t ready to be turned into public discussions/ issues / pull requests.
Matrix is free and works much better and you can run your own server
Matrix doesn’t have pluralkit
Still has a lot of the same underlying issues discord has. It’s not indexable being the biggest. The reality is that services like stack overflow or an issue tracker like bugzilla, or your local git services issues section or discussion section, hell even something like discourse or even mailing lists, just work better. If someone made an im service that could be indexed by search engines and the like, now we’d be talking. Opensorce design and discussion doesn’t really benefit that much from closed ecosystems and end to end encryption in most cases.
I guess though at least with matrix someone could make a service that acts as a client and indexes content from a list of channels or something…
Discord, matrix, slack and telegram are where documentation goes to die in the current state of things though.
Devs ITT biting every single argument in the article and then saying “but it’s easy” is extremely ironic
Forums are a better technology but come with hosting costs
When things seem free, you’re not the customer.
No
When profit is the motive you are not the customer, the shareholders are
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.
Discourse is a forum platform and now has a similar layout like Discord.
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.
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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.
THIS.
omg If I have to configure another Matrix mirror bot for something I wanna self host, I swear…
But I also don’t want to make zillions accounts, one for each project, just for a quick question.
You mean pretty much a single GitHub account?
Also your quick question may have already been asked and answered but difficult to find on Discord. Or if it hasn’t been asked yet, now a future person can’t discover the same question easily. So either way you’re just wasting other people’s time.
That “Discord” can be replaced with any IM platforms. Slack, Martix, Gitter, you name it. They are still hard to search. By no means I like the idea of using IM platforms as a support portal/community. I still think forums-like platforms are the best, yet I don’t want to create another account to engage with a project that I use.
Github, Lemmy and Stack Exchange enables one account for multiple projects/topics, which I quite like. Or mailing lists. That can do as well.
Thanks for the clarification and I believe I misunderstood your original comment.
To add to your list there is an often underutilized feature of GitHub for discussions too.
This article is two years old, and perhaps discord have improved their accessibility, since this user find it more accessible then matrix. Yes, it’s a single usercase, but worth mentioning nonetheless.
I think there are other arguments against Discord that haven’t been mentioned: data privacy. I know there was an instance where Discord collected user without their consent, and that is enough for me to avoid the platform.
I much rather use matrix or the horridly old IRC protocol than Discord. Or forums. Or just plain old issues!
Discord collects every message you ever send in cleartext.
You can even request your entire metadata blob to see for yourself.
So does lemmy, so does matrix if that’s what the admin wants to do.
Lemmy is public and my matrix server doesn’t.
Yeah, e2ee on activitypub platforms isn’t widely implemented yet, but it’s likely it will be.
I don’t see discord making that jump.
What are you exchanging on Discord where this is an issue?
I’d hope your doctor isn’t joining your OSS project discord to conduct appointments or anything.
“If you have nothing to hide” has never been a valid excuse to compromise on privacy.
Yeah, most of the time you don’t actually need it, but if you don’t make it the norm, one day you’ll wake up and find that the entire concept of encrypted communication was made illegal.
As the UK is actively trying to do. And the first sparks of which have been seen in the EU as well.
And that’s before even bringing up that even innocent normal conversation data can be used to profile individuals and mass-influence the democratic voting process with targeted campaigning.
“Help, your library isn’t loading the Foobar files created in Bazfoo 2024” is not something that is sensitive data.
It is not my responsibility to manage random people’s baseless paranoia as a project maintainer.
What?
You need a forum, not a fucking discord server.
I’ll simplify:
How is there is a practical privacy issue here when the purpose of the chat is public support?
There should be no expectation of privacy in a public support chat/forum to begin with.
Let’s not be unreasonable with dogmatism here.
Again. What?
Discord is a DM platform first, a public space second. And it’s way better at being the first, than the second.
Providing support on discord is stupid, it’s only semi-public and hides solutions to already solved problems beyond the reach of search engines and real public platforms.
That’s how joining a server and being able to see history works
That’s how discord does it.
Do you want to explain how to do it better?
Well, first, at least encrypt your damn DMs.
Second, allowing access to message history is perfectly doable if the invite process involves the inviter providing the decryption keys to the invitee.
You’re actually joking with the “inviter providing the decryption keys to the invitee” part right?
The whole point why people use discord is that it’s simple, this is a feature that’d only annoy the average person, and every single extra step is a disaster for user retention (look at any eshop study).
Stuff like this is completely irelevant to discord, the tiny subset of people who actually care will and should use Matrix / other solutions, because that’s the people they were made for.
Have you ever had to worry about the encryption keys in chat apps that encrypt messages? No?
That’s because the app handles it all. Why would you think I’m suggesting something complicated?
All I’m telling you, is that the technical limitation you claim exists, doesn’t.
IRC has the same problem as discord when it comes to using it for support. It can’t be searched. The same questions will get asked over and over again.
With forums and issue trackers, users can find a solution to previously solved issues with a simple web search.
Besides the privacy, Discord is also complicit in spam attacks against the Fediverse.
This article has a few primary arguments for not using Discord—
- because it is proprietary software
- because it has poor accessibility
- because control over moderation and other administrative tools is ultimately in the hands of Discord rather than the community.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Decades is far from infinite
You are not infinite either 😅
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?
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
Gonna add that while Discord is inaccessible if your hardware is crap, it’s the ONLY platform accessible to plural people
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”.
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
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.
Openstreetmap 👀 👀 👀 👀
Yes I know of and use the bridged Matrix Room. But bridges can’t mimic or replicate every function which has effect on dialogue between users on both sides.
This is why the ‘primary’ or ‘base’ server needs to be non-proprietary & open, not the other way around.
