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Please don't use Discord for FOSS projects
(drewdevault.com)
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this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2024
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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. Otherwise, it's really just focusing on things that dont actually matter much. I've personally been part of a project which died because we focused too much on infrastructure
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.
Because you are not giving a portion of your audience an open, privacy-respecting way to contribute.
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.
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.
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.
And my coms are limited to XMPP, e-mail, IRC, Matrix, Signal …& Mattermost for work & this cover the people I talk to (tho proprietary LINE would help in my case, but they ruined my trust after remove LINE Lite so I quit). Network effects are strong, but you can offer alternative methods to folks… & given that mine doubles as my unGoogled notifications, I have zero issue keeping my low-bandwidth XMPP connection even if the majority of my contacts aren’t using it (which is a protocol with a user base largely of older folks like you & I that focus on backwards compatibility so maintenance isn’t a burden).
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.
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)