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Ladybird looks amazing. Just as I was losing faith that building a browser from scratch today was an almost impossible task that only a big company could pull o

by jraph 3y ago

Ladybird looks amazing. Just as I was losing faith that building a browser from scratch today was an almost impossible task that only a big company could pull off, they proved otherwise. I compiled it and added packages to install on openSUSE for this in the readme... which was easy because you don't need much to build this browser! And it builds in a few minutes. I wish Discord was not mandatory to interact with the community (because I strongly believe in [1]). I will not use Discord so interacting with the community might be complicated if I ever want to work on it. Anyway, may Ladybird thrive. [1] https://drewdevault.com/2022/03/29/free-software-free-infrastructure.html https://drewdevault.com/2022/03/29/free-software-free-infras...

tester756 3y ago
>Just as I lost faith that building a browser from scratch today was an almost impossible task that only a big company could pull off, they proved otherwise. I feel like just intersection of people who know how web / webbrowser works and know how to write compilers is relatively low like both of those independently are rare
userbinator 3y ago
I compiled it and added packages to install on openSUSE for this in the readme... which was easy because you don't need much to build this browser! And it builds in a few minutes. Did you also make this post from it? I wish Discord was not mandatory to interact with the community Agreed. My preference is IRC or even mailing lists.
- jraph 3y ago
  > Did you also make this post from it? Nope! Apparently it does not like the textarea used to reply to a comment on HN.
troad 3y ago
Very strong agree re Discord. Quite apart from Drew's ideological reasons to oppose Discord, with which I quite agree, I also tend to find that (a) busy group chats are not a great way to coordinate software development, and (b) the kinds of communities Discord is structurally designed to foster really don't tend to be communities I wish to be part of. I am a big fan of kling and his work on Ladybird though, and I wish the project the absolute best.
- durandal1 3y ago
  Andreas seems like a guy that is more interesting in building stuff than ceremony/principles around how to build stuff. Which is probably why he has founded a highly productive community.
simonw 3y ago
I resisted starting a Discord for my open source projects for years. With hindsight that was a mistake. I finally created one a year ago and it had a huge impact on the velocity of the project - I now have active engagement with users and a growing pool of contributors and collaborators, all thanks to that group. I think often it's important to prioritize reducing friction to getting involved over (very rational) reservations about the platforms themselves.
- andybak 3y ago
  How do you feel about the fact that all your institutional knowledge is now not visible outside of Discord, not indexed and barely searchable? How do you feel about the fact that the long-term survival of this knowledge is at the whim of a company that is mostly focused on the gaming community and has no vested interest in preservation over longer time periods? When was the last time you found an answer to a question from an ancient newsgroup or mailing list that's archived on the open web? It happens to me fairly regularly. (for context, I help maintain a Discord for an open source project and I feel like I'm betraying the web as an ideal - and constanty wish we had chosen differently) EDIT - I didn't look to see who I was replying to. Simon -not you of all people! I'm less concerned about your specific community than I am about the example you're setting and the the fact you're lending your voice to support a worrying trend that affects the long-term health of open source.
  - SecretDreams 3y ago
    > How do you feel about the fact that all your institutional knowledge is now not visible outside of Discord, not indexed and barely searchable? No different than an office workspace no?
    - andybak 3y ago
      Discord is a replacement for IRC, forums and mailing lists - not for hanging out in meat-space.
      - 3y ago
dougall 3y ago
Is there a reason you call out Discord and not GitHub?
- toastal 3y ago
  Absolutely fair to call out both on similar grounds on openness and privacy being proprietary (publicly-traded megacorp vs. VC funded). One difference would be at least GitHub results can be found with a search engine and without authentication (though you cannot use the search for “Code” without an account).
- jraph 3y ago
  The reason is that I'm trying to keep my messages effective. If I complain against everything at the same time, I risk being ignored. I don't like the closed nature of GitHub neither. I hope the free software world move away at some point. The open source world can't seem to avoid locking itself in those closed tools, I would really like if we stopped doing this. I chose Discord because I see it as a bigger issue than GitHub, with which one can interact with standard tools like emails and git, and basic stuff work without JS. So one can both refuse to run non-free code and interact with GitHub. Still not ideal and concerning. Try to go back to the early 2000s and tell someone that the open source world is going to trust MS to host all their stuff. You would probably have difficulties to be taken seriously. (Although it is to be noted that back then many people used SourceForge which was also proprietary)
eropple 3y ago
> I wish Discord was not mandatory to interact with the community (because I strongly believe in [1]). While I understand this preference and am sympathetic to it, I hope this means that you're doing the (heavy, thankless) work to make IRC or mailing lists more reasonably usable for a modern audience on modern devices. Email's problem is mostly just that email has been rendered almost useless by bad affordances across the board and the general disregard for signal-to-noise, but IRC manages to even be worse. I have a phone in my pocket; I expect continuous connection and history. No, I'm not going to start a bouncer. No, I'm not going to pay somebody else to do it. And no, I'm not going to start a history-archive bot so I can see what I missed. People moved because these tools are inadequate. Maybe somebody wants to make those tools better, but I don't see it happening at the scales necessary to make these more than but-for complaints.
- chubot 3y ago
  Zulip has a better and faster interface than Discord IMO, and it's published under the Apache 2 license, making it free software: https://github.com/zulip/zulip https://github.com/zulip/zulip I've been using it at https://oilshell.zulipchat.com/ https://oilshell.zulipchat.com/ for over 5 years now, it's great
  - eropple 3y ago
    As I mentioned in a sibling, I quite like Zulip. But its problem is pretty simply that people have limited attention span, willingness to change, and most people in the tech space already have Slack on the brain and Discord is probably at least passingly familiar. Asking people to put up with a third thing--a third set of ways to do things, a third app on the taskbar or on the phone--is asking a lot of people in the current hellscape. (It's a lot like how most groups just quietly let that one person who only uses Telegram and won't use Signal/WhatsApp/the group preference du jour...drift away.) That's not Zulip's fault, but also kind of disqualifying unless you consider that filter a feature. And if that's a feature to you, your desire for a community is probably nontrivially smaller and stubbier than that of folks who are using Discord in the first place.

by jraph 3y ago

tester756 3y ago

>Just as I lost faith that building a browser from scratch today was an almost impossible task that only a big company could pull off, they proved otherwise. I feel like just intersection of people who know how web / webbrowser works and know how to write compilers is relatively low like both of those independently are rare

userbinator 3y ago

I compiled it and added packages to install on openSUSE for this in the readme... which was easy because you don't need much to build this browser! And it builds in a few minutes. Did you also make this post from it? I wish Discord was not mandatory to interact with the community Agreed. My preference is IRC or even mailing lists.

jraph 3y ago
> Did you also make this post from it? Nope! Apparently it does not like the textarea used to reply to a comment on HN.

troad 3y ago

Very strong agree re Discord. Quite apart from Drew's ideological reasons to oppose Discord, with which I quite agree, I also tend to find that (a) busy group chats are not a great way to coordinate software development, and (b) the kinds of communities Discord is structurally designed to foster really don't tend to be communities I wish to be part of. I am a big fan of kling and his work on Ladybird though, and I wish the project the absolute best.

durandal1 3y ago
Andreas seems like a guy that is more interesting in building stuff than ceremony/principles around how to build stuff. Which is probably why he has founded a highly productive community.

simonw 3y ago

I resisted starting a Discord for my open source projects for years. With hindsight that was a mistake. I finally created one a year ago and it had a huge impact on the velocity of the project - I now have active engagement with users and a growing pool of contributors and collaborators, all thanks to that group. I think often it's important to prioritize reducing friction to getting involved over (very rational) reservations about the platforms themselves.

andybak 3y ago
How do you feel about the fact that all your institutional knowledge is now not visible outside of Discord, not indexed and barely searchable? How do you feel about the fact that the long-term survival of this knowledge is at the whim of a company that is mostly focused on the gaming community and has no vested interest in preservation over longer time periods? When was the last time you found an answer to a question from an ancient newsgroup or mailing list that's archived on the open web? It happens to me fairly regularly. (for context, I help maintain a Discord for an open source project and I feel like I'm betraying the web as an ideal - and constanty wish we had chosen differently) EDIT - I didn't look to see who I was replying to. Simon -not you of all people! I'm less concerned about your specific community than I am about the example you're setting and the the fact you're lending your voice to support a worrying trend that affects the long-term health of open source.
- SecretDreams 3y ago
  > How do you feel about the fact that all your institutional knowledge is now not visible outside of Discord, not indexed and barely searchable? No different than an office workspace no?
  - andybak 3y ago
    Discord is a replacement for IRC, forums and mailing lists - not for hanging out in meat-space.
    - 3y ago

dougall 3y ago

Is there a reason you call out Discord and not GitHub?

toastal 3y ago
Absolutely fair to call out both on similar grounds on openness and privacy being proprietary (publicly-traded megacorp vs. VC funded). One difference would be at least GitHub results can be found with a search engine and without authentication (though you cannot use the search for “Code” without an account).
jraph 3y ago
The reason is that I'm trying to keep my messages effective. If I complain against everything at the same time, I risk being ignored. I don't like the closed nature of GitHub neither. I hope the free software world move away at some point. The open source world can't seem to avoid locking itself in those closed tools, I would really like if we stopped doing this. I chose Discord because I see it as a bigger issue than GitHub, with which one can interact with standard tools like emails and git, and basic stuff work without JS. So one can both refuse to run non-free code and interact with GitHub. Still not ideal and concerning. Try to go back to the early 2000s and tell someone that the open source world is going to trust MS to host all their stuff. You would probably have difficulties to be taken seriously. (Although it is to be noted that back then many people used SourceForge which was also proprietary)

eropple 3y ago

> I wish Discord was not mandatory to interact with the community (because I strongly believe in [1]). While I understand this preference and am sympathetic to it, I hope this means that you're doing the (heavy, thankless) work to make IRC or mailing lists more reasonably usable for a modern audience on modern devices. Email's problem is mostly just that email has been rendered almost useless by bad affordances across the board and the general disregard for signal-to-noise, but IRC manages to even be worse. I have a phone in my pocket; I expect continuous connection and history. No, I'm not going to start a bouncer. No, I'm not going to pay somebody else to do it. And no, I'm not going to start a history-archive bot so I can see what I missed. People moved because these tools are inadequate. Maybe somebody wants to make those tools better, but I don't see it happening at the scales necessary to make these more than but-for complaints.

chubot 3y ago
Zulip has a better and faster interface than Discord IMO, and it's published under the Apache 2 license, making it free software: https://github.com/zulip/zulip https://github.com/zulip/zulip I've been using it at https://oilshell.zulipchat.com/ https://oilshell.zulipchat.com/ for over 5 years now, it's great
- eropple 3y ago
  As I mentioned in a sibling, I quite like Zulip. But its problem is pretty simply that people have limited attention span, willingness to change, and most people in the tech space already have Slack on the brain and Discord is probably at least passingly familiar. Asking people to put up with a third thing--a third set of ways to do things, a third app on the taskbar or on the phone--is asking a lot of people in the current hellscape. (It's a lot like how most groups just quietly let that one person who only uses Telegram and won't use Signal/WhatsApp/the group preference du jour...drift away.) That's not Zulip's fault, but also kind of disqualifying unless you consider that filter a feature. And if that's a feature to you, your desire for a community is probably nontrivially smaller and stubbier than that of folks who are using Discord in the first place.