8 ms·

It really annoys me that increasingly its required to join slack / discord / telegram channel in order to connect with developers of projects I'm interested in.

by _red 7y ago

It really annoys me that increasingly its required to join slack / discord / telegram channel in order to connect with developers of projects I'm interested in. I understand spam is a problem, but its such step backwards from just subscribing to alt.whatever. The glory days when NNTP was built-in to most email clients, so mornings were spent with a cup of coffee answering emails and keeping up with project conversations. The future of our world looks to be hyper-siloed with incessant privacy leaking and no one actually seems to mind.

Topgamer7 7y ago
I am more disturbed that these groups are not search index-able. If you want to find an issue that someone encountered in a game for example. You won't be able to search to find it.
- u801e 7y ago
  You can to some extent by searching Google groups (which would include posts to usenet). It doesn't work very well in some cases though.
  - Topgamer7 7y ago
    Oh I was referring to the new communication channels such as Slack and Discord. They are not publicly searchable whatsoever.
catalogia 7y ago
> I understand spam is a problem From what I've seen in numerous channels for software projects on freenode, spam is not a problem on IRC. A project choosing to use discord/slack/etc instead of IRC is a real disappointment.
- crb3 7y ago
  IRC lacks backscroll. Even if you park a bot in your channel to act as recording secretary, there's no low-friction means of getting at that history without going out of band. This means that spam doesn't persist... but neither does consideration and consensus.
  - catalogia 7y ago
    These are properties IRC loosely shares with traditional face-to-face discussion. I honestly don't see it as a significant problem.
  - detaro 7y ago
    There are several client options that make it low-friction if you want.
- detaro 7y ago
  It's occasionally. Freenode has a few days a year when someone is running a big spam campaign and everyone scrambles to get up defenses against it until it dies down.
  - catalogia 7y ago
    I can count on one hand the number of times I've noticed it, and I've been on freenode for the better part of two decades. Sometimes people spam, but it's such a minor problem that this cannot possibly be a rational reason for people to avoid freenode.
chaz6 7y ago
Thank goodness for gmane. I hate mailing lists with a passion when nntp does the same thing with less overhead. Plus, when you join a group, you get to see the entire history. It's hard to reply to a message you do not have. As a corollary I plan on writing a rfc to add SNI support to nntps, so you can virtualhost newsgroups for different domains (e.g. nntps://news.example.com/announce and nntps://news.corp.com/announce can be served from the same IP but refer to different groups).
sneak 7y ago
It's not just leaking. You cannot use Discord anonymously. Signing up for a new Discord account via Tor means you are prompted for a phone number, which is a single API call to a data broker away from full name, email, and home address. You cannot join anyone's discord chats without the digital equivalent of showing an ID. A lot of us mind. We're just being excluded from more and more conversations.
- beefhash 7y ago
  > You cannot join anyone's discord chats without the digital equivalent of showing an ID. This only happens via Tor and oft-abused VPN providers. "Showing ID" has two benefits: 1. It helps mitigate a lot of unsophisticated spam attacks, taking off server load and annoyance off users. 2. It helps to some extent with mitigating criminal affairs because any potential criminal that falls in the gap between "doesn't realize IP addresses may leak location information" and "knows how to use compromised hosts as proxy" can be picked off by the authorities once they're noticed. Anonymity is gone and it's not coming back. We have to adapt and we don't get a choice. At least there's some minor upsides to it.
  - sneak 7y ago
    It also helps discriminate against all participants who require or prefer their human right to privacy: https://sneak.berlin/20200220/discord-is-not-an-acceptable-choice-for-free-software-projects/ https://sneak.berlin/20200220/discord-is-not-an-acceptable-c...
  - allovernow 7y ago
    >Anonymity is gone and it's not coming back. We have to adapt and we don't get a choice. At least there's some minor upsides to it. The choice starts with us, the developers building this antisocial software. The industry is in desperate need of a collective attitude adjustment before we pass the event horizon of the quickly approaching tech dystopia.
  - sneak 7y ago
    Excluding those who do not identify has a whole host of downsides, which far outweigh the benefits in times of crisis. Anonymity is not gone. You’ve just rejected it, and that’s fine. Many of us still live in ways where our private lives remain private.
pmoriarty 7y ago
"It really annoys me that increasingly its required to join slack / discord / telegram channel in order to connect with developers of projects I'm interested in." The Freenode IRC network is full of developers and users providing support for open source projects, and is still highly active. For example, Freenode's #ubuntu, ##c, and #vim channels have about a thousand users each, and plenty of them are developers. There are plenty of channels for smaller projects too, usually with developers of those projects hanging around and answering questions. Come join us! Sure, it's not Usenet, but it's not a proprietary walled garden like slack, discord, or telegram either. You can actually keep text logs of the channels you're in and IRC clients are pretty full featured. The only thing I miss from the proprietary competition is embedded images/video, the lack of which is sometimes actually a plus.
ghostpepper 7y ago
It's equally annoying that to sign into discord you need to disable your ad blocker and solve a series of google captchas.

by _red 7y ago

Topgamer7 7y ago

I am more disturbed that these groups are not search index-able. If you want to find an issue that someone encountered in a game for example. You won't be able to search to find it.

u801e 7y ago
You can to some extent by searching Google groups (which would include posts to usenet). It doesn't work very well in some cases though.
- Topgamer7 7y ago
  Oh I was referring to the new communication channels such as Slack and Discord. They are not publicly searchable whatsoever.

catalogia 7y ago

> I understand spam is a problem From what I've seen in numerous channels for software projects on freenode, spam is not a problem on IRC. A project choosing to use discord/slack/etc instead of IRC is a real disappointment.

crb3 7y ago
IRC lacks backscroll. Even if you park a bot in your channel to act as recording secretary, there's no low-friction means of getting at that history without going out of band. This means that spam doesn't persist... but neither does consideration and consensus.
- catalogia 7y ago
  These are properties IRC loosely shares with traditional face-to-face discussion. I honestly don't see it as a significant problem.
- detaro 7y ago
  There are several client options that make it low-friction if you want.
detaro 7y ago
It's occasionally. Freenode has a few days a year when someone is running a big spam campaign and everyone scrambles to get up defenses against it until it dies down.
- catalogia 7y ago
  I can count on one hand the number of times I've noticed it, and I've been on freenode for the better part of two decades. Sometimes people spam, but it's such a minor problem that this cannot possibly be a rational reason for people to avoid freenode.

chaz6 7y ago

Thank goodness for gmane. I hate mailing lists with a passion when nntp does the same thing with less overhead. Plus, when you join a group, you get to see the entire history. It's hard to reply to a message you do not have. As a corollary I plan on writing a rfc to add SNI support to nntps, so you can virtualhost newsgroups for different domains (e.g. nntps://news.example.com/announce and nntps://news.corp.com/announce can be served from the same IP but refer to different groups).

sneak 7y ago

It's not just leaking. You cannot use Discord anonymously. Signing up for a new Discord account via Tor means you are prompted for a phone number, which is a single API call to a data broker away from full name, email, and home address. You cannot join anyone's discord chats without the digital equivalent of showing an ID. A lot of us mind. We're just being excluded from more and more conversations.

beefhash 7y ago
> You cannot join anyone's discord chats without the digital equivalent of showing an ID. This only happens via Tor and oft-abused VPN providers. "Showing ID" has two benefits: 1. It helps mitigate a lot of unsophisticated spam attacks, taking off server load and annoyance off users. 2. It helps to some extent with mitigating criminal affairs because any potential criminal that falls in the gap between "doesn't realize IP addresses may leak location information" and "knows how to use compromised hosts as proxy" can be picked off by the authorities once they're noticed. Anonymity is gone and it's not coming back. We have to adapt and we don't get a choice. At least there's some minor upsides to it.
- sneak 7y ago
  It also helps discriminate against all participants who require or prefer their human right to privacy: https://sneak.berlin/20200220/discord-is-not-an-acceptable-choice-for-free-software-projects/ https://sneak.berlin/20200220/discord-is-not-an-acceptable-c...
- allovernow 7y ago
  >Anonymity is gone and it's not coming back. We have to adapt and we don't get a choice. At least there's some minor upsides to it. The choice starts with us, the developers building this antisocial software. The industry is in desperate need of a collective attitude adjustment before we pass the event horizon of the quickly approaching tech dystopia.
- sneak 7y ago
  Excluding those who do not identify has a whole host of downsides, which far outweigh the benefits in times of crisis. Anonymity is not gone. You’ve just rejected it, and that’s fine. Many of us still live in ways where our private lives remain private.

pmoriarty 7y ago

"It really annoys me that increasingly its required to join slack / discord / telegram channel in order to connect with developers of projects I'm interested in." The Freenode IRC network is full of developers and users providing support for open source projects, and is still highly active. For example, Freenode's #ubuntu, ##c, and #vim channels have about a thousand users each, and plenty of them are developers. There are plenty of channels for smaller projects too, usually with developers of those projects hanging around and answering questions. Come join us! Sure, it's not Usenet, but it's not a proprietary walled garden like slack, discord, or telegram either. You can actually keep text logs of the channels you're in and IRC clients are pretty full featured. The only thing I miss from the proprietary competition is embedded images/video, the lack of which is sometimes actually a plus.

ghostpepper 7y ago

It's equally annoying that to sign into discord you need to disable your ad blocker and solve a series of google captchas.