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I want "noiwillnot.com" and have it be a very simple site, with a list of offenders, and a I pledge/declaration: "No, I will host or join OSS communities on cl

I want "noiwillnot.com" and have it be a very simple site, with a list of offenders, and a I pledge/declaration: "No, I will host or join OSS communities on closed proprietary platforms. Never again. No, I will not join your Discord. No, I will not participate in your subreddit. No, I will not follow your project updates on Twitter." Matrix, Discourse, and Mastodon exist are are used very successfully by a number of high profile projects. They don't force me to use proprietary, inaccessible, insecure, Electron-ridden clients. They don't force me into draconian privacy policies. They don't force me to prop up VC-funded money pits that will eventually come back around to extract anything they can. They don't treat the closed edges of their platforms as moats by which they can, ooh yeah, build a user base and then eventually hinder the experience in order to extract their deserved profits. These things matter but people are so short-sighted and forgetful that they just jump from proprietary platform (cough, password managers are another great example), and then inevitably have to jump ship again in N years. Maybe I'm the odd one, but I'd much rather invest a bit more upfront, and deal with UX growing pains, than keeping throwing my knowledge, time, overall investment into a pit that ends up burned by capitalism.

TylerE 3y ago
That sounds incredibly toxic. Where do you get off on telling volunteers how to allocate their precious limited resources?
- nerdponx 3y ago
  They're not telling anyone to do anything, they're declaring that they won't join that community.
- predictabl3 3y ago
  The other reply is correct. It's about raising awareness that these choices have consequences and motivating others to raise their voice about the importance of open platforms for building open communities and open software. Also, I think hosting an OSS community in non-accessible, proprietary user-hostile platforms is more toxic than... pointing out the originating toxicity.
  - amscanne 3y ago
    Maybe it’s just me… I like open platforms but I don’t see how they are important in the creation of open software. If it were, then why did GitHub accelerate collaboration and network effects for open source so much? Sometimes “free as in beer” is okay, and can serve a greater good. Sometimes demanding ideological purity can be counterproductive.
    - predictabl3 3y ago
      Well, for one I don't appreciate having to login to discord every single time Firefox restarts but Discord doesn't care to investigate my bugs reports. I don't appreciate that Discord bans accounts using third party clients. I don't appreciate that Discord refuses to invest in the Linux client remotely near enough (do they support Wayland yet? Screensharing across web and electron in Linux? Maybe, but it took them a year or more. And I don't appreciate an open source community holding important project knowledge in a place that can't be Googled.. And GitHub is a great example. I'm tearing my hair out with obvious, obvious feature gaps that have been present for 2+ years, bugs that don't get any replies let alone fixes. And on top of it, GitHub has caused material harm to projects by COMPLETELEY REMOVING access to issues and PRs that later-banned users have commented in. There are entire, important issues and context completely gone now. And I'm actively working on an alternative to GitHub actions and am looking at moving off GitHub literally this week.
      - scrollaway 3y ago
        You make it sound like the OSS alternative to GitHub is something that offers the exact featureset you want, and includes the exact features that you are missing. Given the chronic underfunding of OSS projects, this is an absurd take. Whether something is OSS or not doesn’t mean it will have more or less bugs, and it doesn’t mean it will have the set of features you do or do not want. What it concretely means is that the development of said project can be more aligned with its primary community. But it doesn’t really mean anything for its users. GitHub is insanely good and has been a massive boon for OSS. Anyone denying this is out of their mind and I will not take them seriously.
throwaway81523 3y ago
> Matrix, Discourse, and Mastodon ... inaccessible, insecure, Electron-ridden clients. Aren't those more of the same? They contribute nothing that IRC and Usenet didn't have decades earlier. And I thought Discourse was an archetypal Electron app. I avoided it when I can, but I've had to use it a few times and hate it. Plenty of old fashioned forum software is much more usable. Added: and oh, the opt out site is hosted on github! It says so right on the privacy page. Avoid proprietary whatever, by hosting with Microsoft.... smooth move, lol.
- Aaron2222 3y ago
  Discourse is web forum software (not to be confused with Discord).
  - throwaway81523 3y ago
    Yes but Discourse uses Electron, I thought. Maybe I'm wrong and it's some other gamified bloatware instead, but it works out about the same way. No I don't want badges for posting. That's a Facebook thing, or similar. Edit: I see, I confused Electron with EmberJS, another bloaty JS framework. Discourse uses Ember, not Electron. Sorry about that, my bad.
    - predictabl3 3y ago
      No, I think you're confused - not only does it not make sense for a web-app to itself use Electron, Discourse does not publish an Electron host, and I really can't imagine anyone using it if they did. Badges are easy to ignore, I'd argue they're a helluva lot less noisy than the Discord UX. In exchange, I get an OSS forum software, I can interact via email, and valuable OSS information is discoverable via Google. None of which applies to Discord, Twitter, etc.
      - throwaway81523 3y ago
        I don't use Discord or Twitter which afaik are walled gardens run by single centralized hosts. What I'm saying about Discourse (it looks like it is based on Ember, which I had confused with Electron) is that it is just another web BBS as far as I can see. Lots of other ones are out there and Discourse doesn't offer obvious advantages over ones with less bloat, or for that matter, over NNTP.
blooalien 3y ago
$12 a year at Google Domains for that address. [1] Grab it quick before someone else does. [1]: https://domains.google.com/registrar/search?searchTerm=noiwillnot.com https://domains.google.com/registrar/search?searchTerm=noiwi...
- csunbird 3y ago
  aaand it is gone
  - blooalien 3y ago
    Let's hope the guy that wanted it ran off and grabbed it. :(
charcircuit 3y ago
Matrix and Discorse are funded by venture capital. Also just because a component of a platform is open source, it doesn't mean the entire thing is and being a proprietary platform isn't harmful itself. It is rather the power that instance owners have and that is a problem even if the instance runs 100% open source software.
- lrvick 3y ago
  If someone does not even know how to collaborate or communicate using open source software I cannot take them seriously running an open source project.
6031769 3y ago
I wonder who is using Discourse successfully and how they measure that success. If your project is awesome but your forum is appalling, you will still get some users who put up with the appalling forum in order to collaborate on the awesome project. Discourse only "supports" 4 browsers. If you use any other browser you get the frankly ridiculous "upgrade your browser" message. Faking the user-agent shows that the software works just as well (or badly) on other browsers so this is just shoddy behaviour. Discourse is slow, unwieldy and degrades to almost unusable with JS switched off. It's pretty much the worst forum software I have used. It is not an application to hold up as a shining beacon of what OSS can achieve, unfortunately.

TylerE 3y ago

That sounds incredibly toxic. Where do you get off on telling volunteers how to allocate their precious limited resources?

nerdponx 3y ago
They're not telling anyone to do anything, they're declaring that they won't join that community.
predictabl3 3y ago
The other reply is correct. It's about raising awareness that these choices have consequences and motivating others to raise their voice about the importance of open platforms for building open communities and open software. Also, I think hosting an OSS community in non-accessible, proprietary user-hostile platforms is more toxic than... pointing out the originating toxicity.
- amscanne 3y ago
  Maybe it’s just me… I like open platforms but I don’t see how they are important in the creation of open software. If it were, then why did GitHub accelerate collaboration and network effects for open source so much? Sometimes “free as in beer” is okay, and can serve a greater good. Sometimes demanding ideological purity can be counterproductive.
  - predictabl3 3y ago
    Well, for one I don't appreciate having to login to discord every single time Firefox restarts but Discord doesn't care to investigate my bugs reports. I don't appreciate that Discord bans accounts using third party clients. I don't appreciate that Discord refuses to invest in the Linux client remotely near enough (do they support Wayland yet? Screensharing across web and electron in Linux? Maybe, but it took them a year or more. And I don't appreciate an open source community holding important project knowledge in a place that can't be Googled.. And GitHub is a great example. I'm tearing my hair out with obvious, obvious feature gaps that have been present for 2+ years, bugs that don't get any replies let alone fixes. And on top of it, GitHub has caused material harm to projects by COMPLETELEY REMOVING access to issues and PRs that later-banned users have commented in. There are entire, important issues and context completely gone now. And I'm actively working on an alternative to GitHub actions and am looking at moving off GitHub literally this week.
    - scrollaway 3y ago
      You make it sound like the OSS alternative to GitHub is something that offers the exact featureset you want, and includes the exact features that you are missing. Given the chronic underfunding of OSS projects, this is an absurd take. Whether something is OSS or not doesn’t mean it will have more or less bugs, and it doesn’t mean it will have the set of features you do or do not want. What it concretely means is that the development of said project can be more aligned with its primary community. But it doesn’t really mean anything for its users. GitHub is insanely good and has been a massive boon for OSS. Anyone denying this is out of their mind and I will not take them seriously.

throwaway81523 3y ago

> Matrix, Discourse, and Mastodon ... inaccessible, insecure, Electron-ridden clients. Aren't those more of the same? They contribute nothing that IRC and Usenet didn't have decades earlier. And I thought Discourse was an archetypal Electron app. I avoided it when I can, but I've had to use it a few times and hate it. Plenty of old fashioned forum software is much more usable. Added: and oh, the opt out site is hosted on github! It says so right on the privacy page. Avoid proprietary whatever, by hosting with Microsoft.... smooth move, lol.

Aaron2222 3y ago
Discourse is web forum software (not to be confused with Discord).
- throwaway81523 3y ago
  Yes but Discourse uses Electron, I thought. Maybe I'm wrong and it's some other gamified bloatware instead, but it works out about the same way. No I don't want badges for posting. That's a Facebook thing, or similar. Edit: I see, I confused Electron with EmberJS, another bloaty JS framework. Discourse uses Ember, not Electron. Sorry about that, my bad.
  - predictabl3 3y ago
    No, I think you're confused - not only does it not make sense for a web-app to itself use Electron, Discourse does not publish an Electron host, and I really can't imagine anyone using it if they did. Badges are easy to ignore, I'd argue they're a helluva lot less noisy than the Discord UX. In exchange, I get an OSS forum software, I can interact via email, and valuable OSS information is discoverable via Google. None of which applies to Discord, Twitter, etc.
    - throwaway81523 3y ago
      I don't use Discord or Twitter which afaik are walled gardens run by single centralized hosts. What I'm saying about Discourse (it looks like it is based on Ember, which I had confused with Electron) is that it is just another web BBS as far as I can see. Lots of other ones are out there and Discourse doesn't offer obvious advantages over ones with less bloat, or for that matter, over NNTP.

blooalien 3y ago

$12 a year at Google Domains for that address. [1] Grab it quick before someone else does. [1]: https://domains.google.com/registrar/search?searchTerm=noiwillnot.com https://domains.google.com/registrar/search?searchTerm=noiwi...

csunbird 3y ago
aaand it is gone
- blooalien 3y ago
  Let's hope the guy that wanted it ran off and grabbed it. :(

charcircuit 3y ago

Matrix and Discorse are funded by venture capital. Also just because a component of a platform is open source, it doesn't mean the entire thing is and being a proprietary platform isn't harmful itself. It is rather the power that instance owners have and that is a problem even if the instance runs 100% open source software.

lrvick 3y ago
If someone does not even know how to collaborate or communicate using open source software I cannot take them seriously running an open source project.

6031769 3y ago

I wonder who is using Discourse successfully and how they measure that success. If your project is awesome but your forum is appalling, you will still get some users who put up with the appalling forum in order to collaborate on the awesome project. Discourse only "supports" 4 browsers. If you use any other browser you get the frankly ridiculous "upgrade your browser" message. Faking the user-agent shows that the software works just as well (or badly) on other browsers so this is just shoddy behaviour. Discourse is slow, unwieldy and degrades to almost unusable with JS switched off. It's pretty much the worst forum software I have used. It is not an application to hold up as a shining beacon of what OSS can achieve, unfortunately.