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> 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

> 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.
  - chubot 3y ago
    FWIW I worked in software for 14 years, and never used Slack or Discord, so I wouldn't be so quick to generalize "Everybody else is doing it" is a weak argument "Everyone else" isn't building a browser from scratch -- it's more important what those people are doing and using
    - eropple 3y ago
      Loners Georg are outliers and, if you are caring about and optimizing for attention and growth, should not be counted. For every one person who's never used those, I can throw a rock and bounce it off a dozen who have.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]

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.
- chubot 3y ago
  FWIW I worked in software for 14 years, and never used Slack or Discord, so I wouldn't be so quick to generalize "Everybody else is doing it" is a weak argument "Everyone else" isn't building a browser from scratch -- it's more important what those people are doing and using
  - eropple 3y ago
    Loners Georg are outliers and, if you are caring about and optimizing for attention and growth, should not be counted. For every one person who's never used those, I can throw a rock and bounce it off a dozen who have.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]