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People choose platforms because of their functionality, not because of their code licensing status - see the case of Scala, linked in a different sibling commen

People choose platforms because of their functionality, not because of their code licensing status - see the case of Scala, linked in a different sibling comment. Matrix and Zulip, even after years of chasing, still sadly haven't caught up to Discord functionality- and UX-wise; until that happens, people won't have a good reason to budge. Regarding IRC, Drew is kind of famous with his ascetism, claiming that the impossibility to share GIFs, videos, files, use threads, have internal chat history, are all features rather than limitations[1]. The thing is, people don't care about it, they'll simply vote with their own legs. Mail and mailgroups face a similar UX challenge. Not everyone is willing to endure the pain of learning and using mailgroups and IRC just because they're FOSS. [1] https://drewdevault.com/2019/07/01/Absence-of-features-in-IRC.html https://drewdevault.com/2019/07/01/Absence-of-features-in-IR...

cinntaile 5y ago
He's probably right they are features, features most people prefer over IRCs barebones experience. Not being able to catch up on what was said while you're offline is another one of IRCs features, sadly even less people seem to prefer that.
- smichel17 5y ago
  Here's the catch. I'm someone who likes the idea of IRC being impermanent, available only if I was online at the time. However, I also want people to be able to @mention me so that I can see it later, even if I was offline, overriding the default. AND, when that happens, I also want to be able to read the context before the message and probably some conversation after. In other words, I want "@smichel17 ^" to be a thing. I don't see any way to combine those features. I can approximate this experience in Discord and its ilk by having all history about l available; muting conversations, except for notifications; and relying on willpower not to read the backlog unless I was mentioned. So that's what I do. Maybe the closest thing would be Snapchat, where messages can be "saved" by any of the participants so the whole group can read them later. There's no way to approximate this experience in IRC. So although I still use IRC, it's mostly over a matrix bridge; matrix becomes my bouncer.
  - bmn__ 5y ago
    > There's no way to approximate this experience in IRC. Yes, there is. <bmn__> !tell smichel17 crowdmatch me, see HN frontpage <reminder`bot> 1 message stored. will deliver when smichel17 rejoins or unaways. ⋮ * smichel17 is no longer marked as being away, gone 04:30:55 <reminder`bot> smichel17, bmn__ wants you to know: "crowdmatch me, see HN frontpage" (2021-12-28 13:12)
    - smichel17 5y ago
      I've done that, too. It misses the context bit. As I said in the post you replied to, > In other words, I want "@smichel17 ^" to be a thing.
  - rollo 5y ago
    Most networks support leaving memos to registered users when they're offline. So IRC does have that functionality.
    - Karunamon 5y ago
      It sounds like you're referring to MemoServ. This requires both parties to have an account on the server, and a separate private message to a dedicated bot. What was being described was more like saving a highlight; with much less friction. On Discord, I can @someone even if they're a nickname-only user with no account.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
    You could run a quassel server somewhere. If you're already running a server somewhere for something else, adding quassel to the mix is pretty easy. Then use quassel as your IRC client. I've been doing this with IRC for about 3-4 years now, and it means that I'm "always online" as far as IRC is concerned (except for server maintainance stuff). To a reasonably approximation, I never miss anything.
    - smichel17 5y ago
      I feel like this and most of its sibling comments are missing the context of the thread: I agree with the viewpoint that "not always online" is a feature. The problem is the lack of "some things available when returning from offline". From this perspective, the "always online" approach just makes IRC like Discord et al, where you receive everything and have to choose what to read when you get back. Snapchat is the closest, with its "messages disappear after 24h by default, but can be saved by members of the group".
lnxg33k1 5y ago
I think most of the points about IRC are solvable with the biggest pro of them all being that it's fast, omnipresent and low bandwidth, if you need to have history and other things, and can afford to have a raspberry always-on, then install a quassel server and keep it there, I have a dedicated server running my email and media server where I also put a `ghcr.io/linuxserver/quassel-core` docker container, and it doesn't consume anything
- ivegotnoaccount 5y ago
  I think you forgot "and never ever have internet or electricity issues" to your list. The big advantage of Slack/Discord is that once a message was sent, everyone will receive it. Maybe in some time if the user is not always up but it will be received. Not to forget, not everyone interested in this or that FOSS project is tech-savvy enough to setup what you said.
  - lnxg33k1 5y ago
    Yeah I'm not sure if those are problems that happens often enough to be mentioned, I guess that depends on a user's perspective but you're right, I have a UPS at home, so I solve that easily, for internet I've had a lot of problems in the past, but now I have a FTTH so that never happens, I guess if you have frequent issues with electricity and internet you have bigger issues other than saving IRC channel history :D, but I guess those are solvable with UPS, 4G modem backup connection and there are also some websites that save IRC channels history
    - masklinn 5y ago
      > Yeah I'm not sure if those are problems that happens often enough to be mentioned, I guess that depends on a user's perspective It is, but the the average user's perspective is not that they'll set up an IRC bouncer (which odds are high they don't even know exists) so they can have message permanence and cross-device sharing. Instead they'll say that IRC has no history / offline support (which is, technically, true) and will use discord because it does.
matheusmoreira 5y ago
> Mail and mailgroups face a similar UX challenge. Not everyone is willing to endure the pain of learning and using mailgroups and IRC just because they're FOSS. Yeah, it's really hard to use. I can't seem to find definitive documentation about mailing lists anywhere. I've found documentation for the software itself but actual use seems to be some kind of arcane knowledge. Last time I tried to participate in one I ended up emailing someone directly by mistake.
- welterde 5y ago
  That depends on the used email client. At least in thunderbird it's as easy as hitting the "reply list" button (as it automatically detects the email was sent via a email list).
noobermin 5y ago
Internal chat history? I mean you literally can have history with your client if you choose. Discord famously is avoiding that very feature... You can also share files through urls...
- luckylion 5y ago
  > I mean you literally can have history with your client if you choose. Unless you were not connected when the message was sent. > You can also share files through urls... You could also share them by mailing a usb drive. Both are a lot more annoying than just copy pasting them into a chat.
  - noobermin 5y ago
    Have a bot connected to the channel that records the conversations to a text file and you have history. The bot can run anywhere if you don't want it to run on your own computer of course. Also, for pings to you if you want notifs bouncers exist, Also, people need to be a little more precise regarding sharing files. OP just said "share file" they didn't say host files or whatever. Often times the file I want to share isn't hosted or can be embedded (in the past I had to pass around multi-GB binary dumps and you can't embed that in slack and I definitely think you can't do that in discord).
    - dmitriid 5y ago
      > Have a bot connected to the channel that records the conversations to a text file and you have history. The bot can run anywhere if you don't want it to run on your own computer of course. Also, for pings to you if you want notifs bouncers exist Or, you know, just use a product that has all that built-in freeing you to do other things
- MarcellusDrum 5y ago
  Sharing files via URL while possible, is: 1) Impractical. You have to upload files to third party services that usually require an account. So you have to leave the chat, upload the file, and then get back to paste the link. 2) Bad integration. Some sites work better on mobile than others. Some barely work on slow internet connections. Some required logins, or show ads. And you have to leave the client just to see a GIF.
cycomanic 5y ago
What are the functionalities for a FOSS project that matrix/zulip miss over discord, or over a mailing list for that matter? I'm seriously wondering, because I've not found anything that I would miss. > Mail and mailgroups face a similar UX challenge. Not everyone is willing to endure the pain of learning and using mailgroups and IRC just because they're FOSS. I'm seriously not sure if you are being sarcastic. Learning mailinglists is an obstacle compared to learning discord??
- NeutralForest 5y ago
  Sure, the UX is guiding you and it's also more in line with what people already know, each channel is a bit like a FB messenger conversation after all. You also get instant feedback since you can see your message on the screen, unlike a mail where it sometimes seems that it's thrown into the void. I think it's not as much a statement about ease of use but rather about comfort and playing into UX tropes everyone is used to now.
  - cycomanic 5y ago
    But both Zulip and Matrix work pretty much the same. So it's different to mailinglists (which I still regard as superior compared to chat programs, because of discoverability/searchability), but I don't see the superiority of Discord over Zulip/Matrix/Rocket ... At least not in context of FOSS programs.
    - NeutralForest 5y ago
      This I don't know tbh, it might just be a network effect: everyone is used to Discord so everybody keeps using it. Personally, I like forums for the same reason you like mailing lists.
      - cycomanic 5y ago
        Agree with regards to forums. I think hyperkitty [1] is probably the best of both worlds, i.e. a forum-like webinterface to mailinglists. Not sure why this is not used more often. [1] https://gitlab.com/mailman/hyperkitty https://gitlab.com/mailman/hyperkitty
xorcist 5y ago
Sort of, but it's not the whole story. It's not uncommon to hear claims that Matrix or Jabber doesn't cut it becasue they don't offer shared history, or E2EE, or something else that's obviously not true. Those people are unlikely to change their system even when they learn that those features are available elsewhere. People are creatures of habit, and mass products are built with either heavy marketing or piggybacked on other systems' popularity. It's hard to break into a market, but if it's any consolation it's equally hard for non-free products.
- dmitriid 5y ago
  > that Matrix or Jabber doesn't cut it becasue they don't offer shared history, or E2EE, or something else that's obviously not true. It's obviously true because when you stat looking at, say, Jabber, it turns out that it only offers that for a single mobile client on Android that should connect to properly configured server with all the relevant XEPs enabled. So yes. For practical purposes Jabber doesn't cut it. No idea about Matrix.
  - Conan_Kudo 5y ago
    On the Matrix side, it's a mandatory part of the protocol for a server, but not clients. Only some clients support negotiating E2EE right now, though the situation is improving quickly.
  - feanaro 5y ago
    Shared history is Matrix's whole schtick. E2EE is supported in most popular clients.
- noobermin 5y ago
  The "creatures of habit" thing is definitely not true if people are literally closing their irc channels and joining discord.
  - smolder 5y ago
    So, not figuratively closing them?
robryk 5y ago
A piece of functionality that's missing/broken by design in Discord is data export. Discord client can show me all the conversations I've taken part in. When I request a copy of all data Discord "has on me" I get only the messages I've sent (which is borderline useless), and I am only allowed to do that once a month, with a days-long waiting period.
- YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo 5y ago
  It's because you don't have any right to other peoples data under GDPR. That's a feature to help stop doxxing.
  - nix23 5y ago
    Yeah thanks...now i have to delete all my received emails.
    - YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo 5y ago
      Why would you? That's data you own.
      - nix23 5y ago
        So mail from others are mine but not chats?
        YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo 5y ago
        Not on Discord and we are still debating about a feature that was never implemented and Ops misunderstanding of GDPR and it's compliance.
        nix23 5y ago
        >Not on Discord Ah ok that makes sense....not
  - 5y ago
dongping 5y ago
Matrix might be playing the catch-up game, Zulip is IMO better feature-wise for group collaboration because of its threading model, especially for large communities (like Rust). Unless one wants to stick with synchronous voice chatting, I failed to see any reason to use Discord apart from its popularity.
- BoysenberryPi 5y ago
  Because you are already using it for other things.
rglullis 5y ago
- phoe-krk 5y ago
  > The 3% of Linux desktop users would disagree. If we consider this statistic to be meaningful in this case, then 97% of people don't care. That's enough to be able to generalize. > What I really fail to understand is why people don't hedge. They are collectively willing to pay millions of dollars every year in perpetuity for a product, but never realize they can help fund an open alternative for a much lower cost, and that once the product does what they want, they won't lose access to it? Discord is not a paid application. I've never paid them a cent in my years of using it.
- AlecSchueler 5y ago
  Huh? To be fair I primarily use Linux because it's the most ergonomic operating experience and tends to get out of my way, where I feel like I'm always fighting against the UX of Windows or OSX. The licensing situation is a lovely bonus but I don't think it's reasonable to suggest it's the foremost reason most users install Linux
  - rglullis 5y ago
    How much would you pay if Ubuntu (or your favorite Linux distro) was proprietary?
    - Macha 5y ago
      In a vacuum? $0 - there's other Linux distros and the BSDs and being proprietary would impact some of the reasons why it's so usable. In a world where open source didn't exist? Well I paid €129 for Windows 10 Pro recently, if there was no open source *nix I guess I'd pay that for one.
- Normal_gaussian 5y ago
  > The 3% of Linux desktop users would disagree. Please avoid putting words in my mouth, particularly when you are blatently wrong.
rapnie 5y ago
Well, I don't know Discord that well, but on Matrix there's a ton of FOSS and other communities to join from many different decentralized servers. After a long period of slow progress, Matrix seems to me like it is taking flight now. It bridges to IRC and with Github and new integrations become available all the time. And the UX, to me at least, is quite pleasant (maybe initially you have to get used to some stuff). Matrix it is for me, my default choice of chat app.
- pizza234 5y ago
  I've joined Matrix a couple of weeks ago, and the UX has been extremely confusing from the very first moment - logging in, private messaging, joining groups... everything is considerably more complex that a standard chat application (like Discord or Slack). In my opinion, there's no way Matrix can be a valid alternative, until it's as usable as the competitors.
  - up6w6 5y ago
    Are you using Element? I find the web version good enough to be used, but I admit the mobile client is still a mess (they plan to improve it in 2022 though).
    - pizza234 5y ago
      I've used two of the webapps, however, the problem is in the workflow. On login, I was asked to validate from two devices. This is novel in this type of apps (at least, the mainstream ones), and it took me a while to figure it out. Part of the confusion was also the fact that notifications about validations started to pile up, and I wasn't sure about I was doing. I still don't know how I got the validation key (or however it's called) in this workflow. Another novel concept is that, as far as I've understood, sessions are associated to keys, so, I suppose, if I lose a key, all the (encrypted) communications are gone. This would be acceptable, but the warning is very pushy; it's not clear to a new user if it's very strongly advised to enable encryption or not (will the other people trust me without?). Communicating with other people is also confusing - I had two channels open with another user, and didn't know if any of it was valid. Joining groups was confusing as well. I had a name (which was also strange; I still don't know if it's normal for the names to be "strange"), and again, couldn't figure out if I joined it or not (until I joined via other means). This may be all necessary for a safe design, but definitely, it's a huge barrier to entry for somebody who expects a Slack-like experience.
noobermin 5y ago
This top post misses the main point of Drew's post. He doesn't focus too much on the license more than the fact that it would fracture your community into two disjoint sets, with one of those sets containing disabled folks, poor folks, privacy conscious users, amongst others. One thing Drew didn't say (but should have!) is that with FOSS you can actually change the software to help meet the needs of these people while for discord you're at their mercy.
- thorawy88 5y ago
  If the business or project are unrelated to a different tool, they’re not giving a damn about fixing FOSS. You all get the idea of division of labor, right? We went into software development, not everyone else did. Consider Discord has video and voice. You go ahead and patch that into IRC.
- phalangion 5y ago
  If it were so simple to change FOSS to meet needs and make it easier to use, we’d have a FOSS Slack and Discord competitor that does it. But we don’t, because it’s not that easy. Matrix isn’t it. If it was, we wouldn’t be having this discussion.
  - feanaro 5y ago
    > Matrix isn’t it. Why isn't it? > If it was, we wouldn’t be having this discussion. Are you suggesting things don't take time and luck (i.e. initial conditions) don't play a role, especially with phenomena such as market consolidation?
    - Arathorn 5y ago
      Matrix is currently behind Discord (from my pov as proj lead for Matrix) because: * We didn’t prioritise UX polish sooner. * We burnt huge amounts of time on E2EE (which turns out to be really hard in a decentralised world). * Building out decentralised comms in general requires about 10x more effort than centralised comms. * Managing an open spec process and governance model burns huge amounts of time too. * We built the flagship Element apps in triplicate on web/iOS/Android with no code reuse, in order to dogfood and provide native SDKs, burning >3x more time. * We’ve also invested a lot of time in beyond-chat work, to try to inspire folks to use Matrix as a generic comms fabric. Frankly, if we had been aiming purely to be a like-for-like FOSS Discord replacement, we would have done a lot of things very differently. Hopefully we can shift that balance as the UX of apps matures on top of Matrix, and we focus exclusively on usability. The current situation is pretty depressing. You can see more about how we’re trying to fix it in https://matrix.org/blog/2021/12/22/the-mega-matrix-holiday-special-2021 https://matrix.org/blog/2021/12/22/the-mega-matrix-holiday-s...
foxfluff 5y ago
> People choose platforms because of their functionality I think most people choose platforms because of their popularity. Everyone uses foo, let's just use foo.
- pleeb 5y ago
  This is why my community moved over to Discord; our IRC channels were dead, even the forums are slow. When switching over to Discord, we had a great deal of new users and a lot of older users who have since switched to Discord jumped back on.
- jasode 5y ago
  >I think most people choose platforms because of their popularity. Everyone uses foo, let's just use foo. The "popularity" reason does not explain the cause & effect timeline. Discord was started 2015. But Matrix, XMPP/Jabber, IRC were older than that and thus by definition back in 2015, they were already more popular and well known. Thus, the original first reason can't be popularity -- because there was a point when Discord was not popular and it was still chosen over Matrix & IRC. The reason is that it's easier for project maintainers to create new Discord servers + channels. E.g. : https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/204849977-How-do-I-create-a-server- https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/204849977-How-... Put a different way... What caused Discord to become more popular than Matrix? The obvious answer is that a few clicks on a web page is easier than installing and configuring a Matrix server. Is there really a better explanation than "ease of use"? EDIT reply to: >Discord was first popular with gamers because it offered _good voice chat_; and this popularity drew in other communities. I emphasized "good voice chat" because in that sentence, it's the more explanatory reason than just "popular". So the other and older alternatives like IRC did not have good voice chat. And this drives decisions of gamers that prioritize a desirable feature such as seamless VoIP over the need to use an open protocol (IRC) that's not owned by a corporation. In other words, whenever the proposed reason for product dominance is "popularity" or "network effects", we always want to dissect that further and look for the reason that caused the rising popularity. If we don't, we just end up with infinite recursive reasoning such as "it's popular because of its popularity" -- which is not a satisfactory nor helpful analysis.
lmilcin 5y ago
> People choose platforms because of their functionality, not because of their code licensing status Some people, valuable open source contributors in particular, choose to use software exactly based on its licensing status. I don't mind paying for software but I do mind running binary blob that I have no idea what it does. I also mind being unable to fix an irritating issue which, with open source, I at least have a potential to be able to fix myself.
spodek 5y ago
> People choose platforms because of their functionality, not because of their code licensing status I choose software based on the freedom behind their licenses and always will. I value my relationships with others over mere technical differences. I hope you at least learn something of our existence, besides that without people who think and act this way, there'd be no Wikipedia, Linux, Wordpress, or alternative to Windows.
- calvin_ 5y ago
  people chose those things due to superiority, not any dogmatic reason. i.e. wordpress was there and does what you expect it to. (besides, linux displaces windows on the server, but not on the desktop for reasons.) imagine an alternate universe where wikipedia was a ghost town devoid of information, but hey, it's open!
goodpoint 5y ago
> People choose platforms because of their functionality, not because of their code licensing status Licensing status is part of "functionality". If 3rd parties cannot deploy their own instance and federate/mirror contents the whole community is in lock-in. Closed source walled gardens are not eternal. The change policies, start charging money or shut down. This endlessly fragments the user community. This bad functionality.
tomasklaen 5y ago
oh, you don't know what you're talking about! let me tell you why IRC is vastly superior... * tomasklaen has quit IRC (*.net *.split)
- progval 5y ago
  This isn't a problem intrinsic to IRC; Ergo solved it: https://github.com/ergochat/ergo/blob/master/docs/USERGUIDE.md#always-on https://github.com/ergochat/ergo/blob/master/docs/USERGUIDE....
agumonkey 5y ago
I find myself happy in asceticism too. I've seen a few discords about different topics and crowds and I found no better organizational improvement, or even communication. It's no study, just a feel (don't hit me) but you'd expect a vague tangible sensation, but I saw the same exact medium level convos you'd find elsewhere. I've been more enthralled by dusty mailing list threads. Oh and to illustrate my point, good old c2 wiki had infinitely more value than discord ever had, even though it provided near nothing beside text edits.

cinntaile 5y ago

He's probably right they are features, features most people prefer over IRCs barebones experience. Not being able to catch up on what was said while you're offline is another one of IRCs features, sadly even less people seem to prefer that.

smichel17 5y ago
Here's the catch. I'm someone who likes the idea of IRC being impermanent, available only if I was online at the time. However, I also want people to be able to @mention me so that I can see it later, even if I was offline, overriding the default. AND, when that happens, I also want to be able to read the context before the message and probably some conversation after. In other words, I want "@smichel17 ^" to be a thing. I don't see any way to combine those features. I can approximate this experience in Discord and its ilk by having all history about l available; muting conversations, except for notifications; and relying on willpower not to read the backlog unless I was mentioned. So that's what I do. Maybe the closest thing would be Snapchat, where messages can be "saved" by any of the participants so the whole group can read them later. There's no way to approximate this experience in IRC. So although I still use IRC, it's mostly over a matrix bridge; matrix becomes my bouncer.
- bmn__ 5y ago
  > There's no way to approximate this experience in IRC. Yes, there is. <bmn__> !tell smichel17 crowdmatch me, see HN frontpage <reminder`bot> 1 message stored. will deliver when smichel17 rejoins or unaways. ⋮ * smichel17 is no longer marked as being away, gone 04:30:55 <reminder`bot> smichel17, bmn__ wants you to know: "crowdmatch me, see HN frontpage" (2021-12-28 13:12)
  - smichel17 5y ago
    I've done that, too. It misses the context bit. As I said in the post you replied to, > In other words, I want "@smichel17 ^" to be a thing.
- rollo 5y ago
  Most networks support leaving memos to registered users when they're offline. So IRC does have that functionality.
  - Karunamon 5y ago
    It sounds like you're referring to MemoServ. This requires both parties to have an account on the server, and a separate private message to a dedicated bot. What was being described was more like saving a highlight; with much less friction. On Discord, I can @someone even if they're a nickname-only user with no account.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  You could run a quassel server somewhere. If you're already running a server somewhere for something else, adding quassel to the mix is pretty easy. Then use quassel as your IRC client. I've been doing this with IRC for about 3-4 years now, and it means that I'm "always online" as far as IRC is concerned (except for server maintainance stuff). To a reasonably approximation, I never miss anything.
  - smichel17 5y ago
    I feel like this and most of its sibling comments are missing the context of the thread: I agree with the viewpoint that "not always online" is a feature. The problem is the lack of "some things available when returning from offline". From this perspective, the "always online" approach just makes IRC like Discord et al, where you receive everything and have to choose what to read when you get back. Snapchat is the closest, with its "messages disappear after 24h by default, but can be saved by members of the group".

lnxg33k1 5y ago

I think most of the points about IRC are solvable with the biggest pro of them all being that it's fast, omnipresent and low bandwidth, if you need to have history and other things, and can afford to have a raspberry always-on, then install a quassel server and keep it there, I have a dedicated server running my email and media server where I also put a `ghcr.io/linuxserver/quassel-core` docker container, and it doesn't consume anything

ivegotnoaccount 5y ago
I think you forgot "and never ever have internet or electricity issues" to your list. The big advantage of Slack/Discord is that once a message was sent, everyone will receive it. Maybe in some time if the user is not always up but it will be received. Not to forget, not everyone interested in this or that FOSS project is tech-savvy enough to setup what you said.
- lnxg33k1 5y ago
  Yeah I'm not sure if those are problems that happens often enough to be mentioned, I guess that depends on a user's perspective but you're right, I have a UPS at home, so I solve that easily, for internet I've had a lot of problems in the past, but now I have a FTTH so that never happens, I guess if you have frequent issues with electricity and internet you have bigger issues other than saving IRC channel history :D, but I guess those are solvable with UPS, 4G modem backup connection and there are also some websites that save IRC channels history
  - masklinn 5y ago
    > Yeah I'm not sure if those are problems that happens often enough to be mentioned, I guess that depends on a user's perspective It is, but the the average user's perspective is not that they'll set up an IRC bouncer (which odds are high they don't even know exists) so they can have message permanence and cross-device sharing. Instead they'll say that IRC has no history / offline support (which is, technically, true) and will use discord because it does.

matheusmoreira 5y ago

> Mail and mailgroups face a similar UX challenge. Not everyone is willing to endure the pain of learning and using mailgroups and IRC just because they're FOSS. Yeah, it's really hard to use. I can't seem to find definitive documentation about mailing lists anywhere. I've found documentation for the software itself but actual use seems to be some kind of arcane knowledge. Last time I tried to participate in one I ended up emailing someone directly by mistake.

welterde 5y ago
That depends on the used email client. At least in thunderbird it's as easy as hitting the "reply list" button (as it automatically detects the email was sent via a email list).

noobermin 5y ago

Internal chat history? I mean you literally can have history with your client if you choose. Discord famously is avoiding that very feature... You can also share files through urls...

luckylion 5y ago
> I mean you literally can have history with your client if you choose. Unless you were not connected when the message was sent. > You can also share files through urls... You could also share them by mailing a usb drive. Both are a lot more annoying than just copy pasting them into a chat.
- noobermin 5y ago
  Have a bot connected to the channel that records the conversations to a text file and you have history. The bot can run anywhere if you don't want it to run on your own computer of course. Also, for pings to you if you want notifs bouncers exist, Also, people need to be a little more precise regarding sharing files. OP just said "share file" they didn't say host files or whatever. Often times the file I want to share isn't hosted or can be embedded (in the past I had to pass around multi-GB binary dumps and you can't embed that in slack and I definitely think you can't do that in discord).
  - dmitriid 5y ago
    > Have a bot connected to the channel that records the conversations to a text file and you have history. The bot can run anywhere if you don't want it to run on your own computer of course. Also, for pings to you if you want notifs bouncers exist Or, you know, just use a product that has all that built-in freeing you to do other things
MarcellusDrum 5y ago
Sharing files via URL while possible, is: 1) Impractical. You have to upload files to third party services that usually require an account. So you have to leave the chat, upload the file, and then get back to paste the link. 2) Bad integration. Some sites work better on mobile than others. Some barely work on slow internet connections. Some required logins, or show ads. And you have to leave the client just to see a GIF.

cycomanic 5y ago

What are the functionalities for a FOSS project that matrix/zulip miss over discord, or over a mailing list for that matter? I'm seriously wondering, because I've not found anything that I would miss. > Mail and mailgroups face a similar UX challenge. Not everyone is willing to endure the pain of learning and using mailgroups and IRC just because they're FOSS. I'm seriously not sure if you are being sarcastic. Learning mailinglists is an obstacle compared to learning discord??

NeutralForest 5y ago
Sure, the UX is guiding you and it's also more in line with what people already know, each channel is a bit like a FB messenger conversation after all. You also get instant feedback since you can see your message on the screen, unlike a mail where it sometimes seems that it's thrown into the void. I think it's not as much a statement about ease of use but rather about comfort and playing into UX tropes everyone is used to now.
- cycomanic 5y ago
  But both Zulip and Matrix work pretty much the same. So it's different to mailinglists (which I still regard as superior compared to chat programs, because of discoverability/searchability), but I don't see the superiority of Discord over Zulip/Matrix/Rocket ... At least not in context of FOSS programs.
  - NeutralForest 5y ago
    This I don't know tbh, it might just be a network effect: everyone is used to Discord so everybody keeps using it. Personally, I like forums for the same reason you like mailing lists.
    - cycomanic 5y ago
      Agree with regards to forums. I think hyperkitty [1] is probably the best of both worlds, i.e. a forum-like webinterface to mailinglists. Not sure why this is not used more often. [1] https://gitlab.com/mailman/hyperkitty https://gitlab.com/mailman/hyperkitty

xorcist 5y ago

Sort of, but it's not the whole story. It's not uncommon to hear claims that Matrix or Jabber doesn't cut it becasue they don't offer shared history, or E2EE, or something else that's obviously not true. Those people are unlikely to change their system even when they learn that those features are available elsewhere. People are creatures of habit, and mass products are built with either heavy marketing or piggybacked on other systems' popularity. It's hard to break into a market, but if it's any consolation it's equally hard for non-free products.

dmitriid 5y ago
> that Matrix or Jabber doesn't cut it becasue they don't offer shared history, or E2EE, or something else that's obviously not true. It's obviously true because when you stat looking at, say, Jabber, it turns out that it only offers that for a single mobile client on Android that should connect to properly configured server with all the relevant XEPs enabled. So yes. For practical purposes Jabber doesn't cut it. No idea about Matrix.
- Conan_Kudo 5y ago
  On the Matrix side, it's a mandatory part of the protocol for a server, but not clients. Only some clients support negotiating E2EE right now, though the situation is improving quickly.
- feanaro 5y ago
  Shared history is Matrix's whole schtick. E2EE is supported in most popular clients.
noobermin 5y ago
The "creatures of habit" thing is definitely not true if people are literally closing their irc channels and joining discord.
- smolder 5y ago
  So, not figuratively closing them?

robryk 5y ago

A piece of functionality that's missing/broken by design in Discord is data export. Discord client can show me all the conversations I've taken part in. When I request a copy of all data Discord "has on me" I get only the messages I've sent (which is borderline useless), and I am only allowed to do that once a month, with a days-long waiting period.

YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo 5y ago
It's because you don't have any right to other peoples data under GDPR. That's a feature to help stop doxxing.
- nix23 5y ago
  Yeah thanks...now i have to delete all my received emails.
  - YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo 5y ago
    Why would you? That's data you own.
    - nix23 5y ago
      So mail from others are mine but not chats?
      - YXNjaGVyZWdlbgo 5y ago
        Not on Discord and we are still debating about a feature that was never implemented and Ops misunderstanding of GDPR and it's compliance.
        nix23 5y ago
        >Not on Discord Ah ok that makes sense....not
- 5y ago

dongping 5y ago

Matrix might be playing the catch-up game, Zulip is IMO better feature-wise for group collaboration because of its threading model, especially for large communities (like Rust). Unless one wants to stick with synchronous voice chatting, I failed to see any reason to use Discord apart from its popularity.

BoysenberryPi 5y ago
Because you are already using it for other things.

rglullis 5y ago

phoe-krk 5y ago
> The 3% of Linux desktop users would disagree. If we consider this statistic to be meaningful in this case, then 97% of people don't care. That's enough to be able to generalize. > What I really fail to understand is why people don't hedge. They are collectively willing to pay millions of dollars every year in perpetuity for a product, but never realize they can help fund an open alternative for a much lower cost, and that once the product does what they want, they won't lose access to it? Discord is not a paid application. I've never paid them a cent in my years of using it.
AlecSchueler 5y ago
Huh? To be fair I primarily use Linux because it's the most ergonomic operating experience and tends to get out of my way, where I feel like I'm always fighting against the UX of Windows or OSX. The licensing situation is a lovely bonus but I don't think it's reasonable to suggest it's the foremost reason most users install Linux
- rglullis 5y ago
  How much would you pay if Ubuntu (or your favorite Linux distro) was proprietary?
  - Macha 5y ago
    In a vacuum? $0 - there's other Linux distros and the BSDs and being proprietary would impact some of the reasons why it's so usable. In a world where open source didn't exist? Well I paid €129 for Windows 10 Pro recently, if there was no open source *nix I guess I'd pay that for one.
Normal_gaussian 5y ago
> The 3% of Linux desktop users would disagree. Please avoid putting words in my mouth, particularly when you are blatently wrong.

rapnie 5y ago

Well, I don't know Discord that well, but on Matrix there's a ton of FOSS and other communities to join from many different decentralized servers. After a long period of slow progress, Matrix seems to me like it is taking flight now. It bridges to IRC and with Github and new integrations become available all the time. And the UX, to me at least, is quite pleasant (maybe initially you have to get used to some stuff). Matrix it is for me, my default choice of chat app.

pizza234 5y ago
I've joined Matrix a couple of weeks ago, and the UX has been extremely confusing from the very first moment - logging in, private messaging, joining groups... everything is considerably more complex that a standard chat application (like Discord or Slack). In my opinion, there's no way Matrix can be a valid alternative, until it's as usable as the competitors.
- up6w6 5y ago
  Are you using Element? I find the web version good enough to be used, but I admit the mobile client is still a mess (they plan to improve it in 2022 though).
  - pizza234 5y ago
    I've used two of the webapps, however, the problem is in the workflow. On login, I was asked to validate from two devices. This is novel in this type of apps (at least, the mainstream ones), and it took me a while to figure it out. Part of the confusion was also the fact that notifications about validations started to pile up, and I wasn't sure about I was doing. I still don't know how I got the validation key (or however it's called) in this workflow. Another novel concept is that, as far as I've understood, sessions are associated to keys, so, I suppose, if I lose a key, all the (encrypted) communications are gone. This would be acceptable, but the warning is very pushy; it's not clear to a new user if it's very strongly advised to enable encryption or not (will the other people trust me without?). Communicating with other people is also confusing - I had two channels open with another user, and didn't know if any of it was valid. Joining groups was confusing as well. I had a name (which was also strange; I still don't know if it's normal for the names to be "strange"), and again, couldn't figure out if I joined it or not (until I joined via other means). This may be all necessary for a safe design, but definitely, it's a huge barrier to entry for somebody who expects a Slack-like experience.

noobermin 5y ago

This top post misses the main point of Drew's post. He doesn't focus too much on the license more than the fact that it would fracture your community into two disjoint sets, with one of those sets containing disabled folks, poor folks, privacy conscious users, amongst others. One thing Drew didn't say (but should have!) is that with FOSS you can actually change the software to help meet the needs of these people while for discord you're at their mercy.

thorawy88 5y ago
If the business or project are unrelated to a different tool, they’re not giving a damn about fixing FOSS. You all get the idea of division of labor, right? We went into software development, not everyone else did. Consider Discord has video and voice. You go ahead and patch that into IRC.
phalangion 5y ago
If it were so simple to change FOSS to meet needs and make it easier to use, we’d have a FOSS Slack and Discord competitor that does it. But we don’t, because it’s not that easy. Matrix isn’t it. If it was, we wouldn’t be having this discussion.
- feanaro 5y ago
  > Matrix isn’t it. Why isn't it? > If it was, we wouldn’t be having this discussion. Are you suggesting things don't take time and luck (i.e. initial conditions) don't play a role, especially with phenomena such as market consolidation?
  - Arathorn 5y ago
    Matrix is currently behind Discord (from my pov as proj lead for Matrix) because: * We didn’t prioritise UX polish sooner. * We burnt huge amounts of time on E2EE (which turns out to be really hard in a decentralised world). * Building out decentralised comms in general requires about 10x more effort than centralised comms. * Managing an open spec process and governance model burns huge amounts of time too. * We built the flagship Element apps in triplicate on web/iOS/Android with no code reuse, in order to dogfood and provide native SDKs, burning >3x more time. * We’ve also invested a lot of time in beyond-chat work, to try to inspire folks to use Matrix as a generic comms fabric. Frankly, if we had been aiming purely to be a like-for-like FOSS Discord replacement, we would have done a lot of things very differently. Hopefully we can shift that balance as the UX of apps matures on top of Matrix, and we focus exclusively on usability. The current situation is pretty depressing. You can see more about how we’re trying to fix it in https://matrix.org/blog/2021/12/22/the-mega-matrix-holiday-special-2021 https://matrix.org/blog/2021/12/22/the-mega-matrix-holiday-s...

foxfluff 5y ago

> People choose platforms because of their functionality I think most people choose platforms because of their popularity. Everyone uses foo, let's just use foo.

pleeb 5y ago
This is why my community moved over to Discord; our IRC channels were dead, even the forums are slow. When switching over to Discord, we had a great deal of new users and a lot of older users who have since switched to Discord jumped back on.
jasode 5y ago
>I think most people choose platforms because of their popularity. Everyone uses foo, let's just use foo. The "popularity" reason does not explain the cause & effect timeline. Discord was started 2015. But Matrix, XMPP/Jabber, IRC were older than that and thus by definition back in 2015, they were already more popular and well known. Thus, the original first reason can't be popularity -- because there was a point when Discord was not popular and it was still chosen over Matrix & IRC. The reason is that it's easier for project maintainers to create new Discord servers + channels. E.g. : https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/204849977-How-do-I-create-a-server- https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/204849977-How-... Put a different way... What caused Discord to become more popular than Matrix? The obvious answer is that a few clicks on a web page is easier than installing and configuring a Matrix server. Is there really a better explanation than "ease of use"? EDIT reply to: >Discord was first popular with gamers because it offered _good voice chat_; and this popularity drew in other communities. I emphasized "good voice chat" because in that sentence, it's the more explanatory reason than just "popular". So the other and older alternatives like IRC did not have good voice chat. And this drives decisions of gamers that prioritize a desirable feature such as seamless VoIP over the need to use an open protocol (IRC) that's not owned by a corporation. In other words, whenever the proposed reason for product dominance is "popularity" or "network effects", we always want to dissect that further and look for the reason that caused the rising popularity. If we don't, we just end up with infinite recursive reasoning such as "it's popular because of its popularity" -- which is not a satisfactory nor helpful analysis.

lmilcin 5y ago

> People choose platforms because of their functionality, not because of their code licensing status Some people, valuable open source contributors in particular, choose to use software exactly based on its licensing status. I don't mind paying for software but I do mind running binary blob that I have no idea what it does. I also mind being unable to fix an irritating issue which, with open source, I at least have a potential to be able to fix myself.

spodek 5y ago

> People choose platforms because of their functionality, not because of their code licensing status I choose software based on the freedom behind their licenses and always will. I value my relationships with others over mere technical differences. I hope you at least learn something of our existence, besides that without people who think and act this way, there'd be no Wikipedia, Linux, Wordpress, or alternative to Windows.

calvin_ 5y ago
people chose those things due to superiority, not any dogmatic reason. i.e. wordpress was there and does what you expect it to. (besides, linux displaces windows on the server, but not on the desktop for reasons.) imagine an alternate universe where wikipedia was a ghost town devoid of information, but hey, it's open!

goodpoint 5y ago

> People choose platforms because of their functionality, not because of their code licensing status Licensing status is part of "functionality". If 3rd parties cannot deploy their own instance and federate/mirror contents the whole community is in lock-in. Closed source walled gardens are not eternal. The change policies, start charging money or shut down. This endlessly fragments the user community. This bad functionality.

tomasklaen 5y ago

oh, you don't know what you're talking about! let me tell you why IRC is vastly superior... * tomasklaen has quit IRC (*.net *.split)

progval 5y ago
This isn't a problem intrinsic to IRC; Ergo solved it: https://github.com/ergochat/ergo/blob/master/docs/USERGUIDE.md#always-on https://github.com/ergochat/ergo/blob/master/docs/USERGUIDE....

agumonkey 5y ago

I find myself happy in asceticism too. I've seen a few discords about different topics and crowds and I found no better organizational improvement, or even communication. It's no study, just a feel (don't hit me) but you'd expect a vague tangible sensation, but I saw the same exact medium level convos you'd find elsewhere. I've been more enthralled by dusty mailing list threads. Oh and to illustrate my point, good old c2 wiki had infinitely more value than discord ever had, even though it provided near nothing beside text edits.