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If your intent is to dump some code on the internet, by all means - and more power to you. If your intent is to have your code reach the maximum amount of peop

If your intent is to dump some code on the internet, by all means - and more power to you. If your intent is to have your code reach the maximum amount of people to benefit them, and you want your project to benefit from networks effects.. then GitHub and Discord, the two proprietary platforms used by the largest portion of people for modern OSS project development, are basically a non-choice. Every other option results in far less people discovering and interacting with your project, by orders of magnitude. In a project I run, we forced everyone into Matrix as much as possible and refused to operate a Discord for over a year. Once we relented, and decided 'we would run both' - over 95% of people in under a month stopped participating in the Matrix channels and instead went to Discord. The number of people in the community grew orders of magnitude larger, in a shorter time period, as well - even with us pushing it less on our docs/etc. It sucks. Wish it wasn't true - but that's where people are.

YoshiRulz 3y ago
Did you consider bridging Discord channel(s) into Matrix?
- slimsag 3y ago
  Yes. But the bridge looked fairly difficult to run and configure properly, requiring a yarn/npm dev environment (which I don't want installed on my machine) At the time (still?) it seemed impossible to bridge Discord channels (which are viewed very much as 'create as you please') to Matrix rooms without painfully doing it one-by-one via a config file and managing/creating both on each side (Matrix really seems stuck on the idea of preferring its 'one room' model and has not really embraced channels in the Discord sense.) Discord had also just gotten forums with no way to bridge them. Additionally, our Matrix rooms were seeing a good amount of spam that Discord was not, which would then get relayed to Discord via the bridge and would require moderating in both sides. Finally, our strongest Matrix advocates firmly disliked the idea of a bridge because it meant their Matrix messages would go to the proprietary Discord company. In the end, we let them run side-by-side for a little while then the Matrix quickly died.
  - herewulf 3y ago
    > requiring a yarn/npm dev environment (which I don't want installed on my machine) I don't like / trust that stuff either but it's often necessary and easy enough to run in a container (e.g.: Docker/Podman, LXC, Guix Shell) or VM (e.g.: Vagrant, QEMU/libvirt). I actually run most of my software dev stuff that way these days because all these tools are routinely pulling hundreds of deps from the internet that are doing who knows what in their build systems.
  - TulliusCicero 3y ago
    > Finally, our strongest Matrix advocates firmly disliked the idea of a bridge because it meant their Matrix messages would go to the proprietary Discord company. > In the end, we let them run side-by-side for a little while then the Matrix quickly died. The Stallman mentality is a plague.
  - _dmn7 3y ago
    You can use this Ansible playbook. It worked well for me for bridging Discord and Telegram, among other things, running off a Hetzner box. https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy Personally I've never seen any significant amount of spam on Matrix.
  - infinitezest 3y ago
    In my experience Mautrix has been very easy to run and can bridge new channels automatically as they're created. I use Matrix exclusively to chat with my friends on Discord. https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-discord https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-discord
LightFog 3y ago
Isn’t ’giving up convenience in the name of freedom’ one of the core trade-offs you’re expected to make with free software? People buy into the ‘free’ bit of FOSS to varying degrees of course but it is disappointing that so many FOSS projects seem ok contributing so much to a proprietary product from one of the most anti-freedom corporations out there.
- tasuki 3y ago
  I use FOSS because it's convenient, not for some higher philosophical principle...
  - rapnie 3y ago
    If use is the only thing you do it may contribute to the Tragedy of the Commons and you undermine FOSS. If you also contribute back in some ways, even for very practical purposes, you are also serving the higher philosophical principle of FOSS.
    - LeoWattenberg 3y ago
      The tragedy of the commons requires a resource that is being depleted, which definitely isn't something that merely using FOSS would do.
      - type0 3y ago
        The effort of contributors can certainly be depleted when they see that no one cares to even submit a bug report or suggest any improvements
        kazinator 3y ago
        If you're using FOSS because it's convenient and don't have any problems, why would you suggest any improvements or report bugs?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
Buttons840 3y ago
Community over tools. Hopefully if the tools fail the communities will move to new tools. Ultimately, a huge hacker culture built on proprietary tools might lead to more freedoms, both political and technical, than a tiny hacker community built on other tools. The size and political influence of a larger community matters.
- rapnie 3y ago
  Maybe. But I wonder how much of a healthy community collapses when you are forced to make a switch from, say, Discord to some alternative tool. Building and maintaining healthy communities requires tremendous amount of effort, especially when they are large. So you should weigh the benefits of a convenient tool to the amount of effort that may go to waste if that tool no longer fits the bill.
  - Buttons840 3y ago
    Maybe, but that would be part of "community over tools". If one tool results in a smaller but better community, then sure, it's worth it. I suppose the real problem of using proprietary tools for a larger community is the marginalized people. Like, if Discord didn't allow people from a certain country. It's a tradeoff between having as large a community as possible and making sure you include everyone, even those with uncommon circumstances. That's a tradeoff that gets made in many situation I think.
advael 3y ago
As someone also running FOSS projects on discord because it's a non-choice, hard agree. Boycotting proprietary platforms is a good end-goal, but it's about as feasible to convince people not to use dominant organizing tools like discord and github as it is to get them off the mobile duopoly right now.
- _dmn7 3y ago
  I maintain a semi-popular project [1] with a support chat which is bridged between Matrix, Telegram, and Discord. The decision to bridge it to Discord was made having thought long and hard about it some time after reading this post. My stance is that it is okay to use proprietary platforms as long as it does not negatively impact the users not willing to use them, i.e. all channels must be bridged to non-Discord, so that it does not "partition the community" in any way. Discord-specific features should be avoided to not affect the usability of users on Matrix. So far it works well and I get to basically have the cake and eat it too. 1. https://github.com/FreeLanguageTools/vocabsieve https://github.com/FreeLanguageTools/vocabsieve
  - mxmlnkn 3y ago
    What are you using to bridge these three chat providers?
    - _dmn7 3y ago
      An Ansible playbook running on a relatively cheap hetzner box. In general bridges require you to self-host a homeserver. A federated homeserver will need 4GB of RAM at least and 8GB if you plan on joining large rooms. The playbook is controlled from a single config file and sets up all the bridges you need. https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy
cokeandpepsi 3y ago
I'm not surprised, matrix is not easy or enjoyable to use at all; maybe the protocol itself is sound but every implementation I've tried both server and client is seriously bad
iforgotpassword 3y ago
I get GitHub - it's proprietary, but also just git, so moving somewhere else is just a pull and push away. The same can't be said for issues/discussions/wiki, but at least it's still the web, so it is googleable, archivable, curlable, you name it. It has happened more than a dozen times that I googled a weird error from eg libssl, ended up in a random issue of a random tool I never heard of, but someone still explained the underlying issue well enough while debugging that I was able to solve my problem. This requires a browser and nothing else. None of this is true for discord. It isn't indexed by anything, even "servers" are walled gardens to each other mostly. Anything shared on discord will be lost to time in a decade or two. Nothing discovered or solved within $project's discord will possibly benefit anyone outside that project. And sure, we already had that problem with IRC, but I think the text-only nature of it helped that anything a bit more involved moved to forums or mailing lists which again both were web accessible and searchable. And even then some projects did have logbots which just dumped text files into a web server.
- ljm 3y ago
  What’s worse is that the stuff that does get indexed will usually describe your exact issue, but then you’ll see it’s closed with a message like “this issue is stale because no one answered in 20 minutes,” or “this isn’t a bug, ask it on discord”. There’s no guarantee you get an answer there or if someone snaps at you for asking the same question yet again and not knowing the exact ceremony to perform to find the previous answers. I don’t have the time or energy to arse about with real time chat and micro-communities for every single thing. The claim is that they are inclusive but I find them rather cliquey and exclusive.
  - zarathustreal 3y ago
    “Inclusive” is a modern day euphemism much like “diversity.” It just means the target audience is present.
- joshspankit 3y ago
  > Anything shared on discord will be lost to time in a decade or two Personally, as someone who has watched the evolution of IRC and other types of communication channels, I would argue that unless a thread is archived to the open web, anything shared in a realtime chat channel is lost in hours if not days.
watwut 3y ago
I dunno about GitHub now. Ever since it requires two factor authentication, it is not really suitable if you want people to be active in any way.
grey_earthling 3y ago
> Every other option results in far less people discovering and interacting with your project, by orders of magnitude. Yes, this is the problem. The article suggests: try to fix it.
astrobe_ 3y ago
> If your intent is to have your code reach the maximum amount of people to benefit them This amount of altruism is rare. More likely it's just the desire to be acknowledged by others. It's ok, but it's also worth reflecting on why you need that, as the process of freeing yourself from that can make you happier. Also quantity <> quality; Discord users often are the people who have been trapped down the slope of least friction and that are ok with "being the product".
- jwells89 3y ago
  Quantity can give a better grasp on the average user though, which is important in its own way, at least for projects with larger or more general audiences. For instance if I were the head of browser or desktop environment project I’d want to hear from as wide of an audience as I feasibly can because otherwise there’s almost certainly issues (usability, compatibility, bugs, etc) that I’m not privy to because they aren’t encountered often in small more technical samples of users.
OJFord 3y ago
I find Discord such an annoying tool for it though, it's not a principled objection for me really, I just don't think it's a good solution. I've never actually had a question answered (rarely even addressed) within some chat-like timeframe anyway, then after some days or a week or so I forget all about it or couldn't find it again scrolling up if I wanted to. People always talk about search engines not indexing it harming discovering, but another aspect of that is that you can't tell if the 'server' is completely dead until you make an account or log in and join it. Then potentially you just see a flood of people joining, maybe one or two asked a question, and there's just no other activity. But my main issue I think is just that I can't keep up with the chat for so many different 'servers' and their channels, so why does it make sense for it to be chat anyway? Something like Reddit makes much more sense to me, where there's a bit of a sense of what's current, but not to the same extent.
jdaw0 3y ago
using discord for community and docs is a dead giveaway for whether a FOSS project is actually about FOSS principle or whether it's about chasing clout
lamontcg 3y ago
All the alternatives to slack and discord seem to have some technological/philosophical axe to grind which is in opposition to "make it easy to setup and pleasant to use for the vast majority of users". If someone would just clone discord/slack and make it so people could stand up a server in minutes and manage it with near zero effort, and the UI/UX pretty much copied what users find familiar it would probably take off. Don't make it distributed, just apply enough cryptography to secure the client-server communication. Yeah, users will need to trust their admins and it won't be perfect security, most users don't need that. Make it easy to run fully public and indexed/searchable servers, make it similarly easy to run servers that weren't fully public and indexed and required logins and kept everything private, let the users decide instead of the developers. If your chat protocol cares too much about perfect forward security against hostile admins and attacks by the FBI while supporting a distributed protocol then you're likely producing something that is too complicated to use for 99% of the happy slack/discord users who don't care about that. The challenge for FOSS developers is to recognize that most people don't care about what they deeply care about and that they're not smart enough to solve the iron triangle of security. And that is when they're not self-sabotaging their product by looking at the way that e.g. slack and discord let you easily edit your comments and declaring yourself philosophically opposed to that.
- myaccountonhn 3y ago
  There is Zullip. It is quite great and has a free option for open source projects. It is quite easy to setup.
kazinator 3y ago
Okay, so there are some people who will not engage with anything that is outside of the Discord bubble. And for whatever reason, you feel you must woo these people. What if whatever you are making runs against a popular alternative? How are you going to convince the Discord people to switch from that thing to your thing? They are Discord people: they are programmed to seek whatever large numbers of other people are using, which is why you have to resort to Discord to reach them.

YoshiRulz 3y ago

Did you consider bridging Discord channel(s) into Matrix?

slimsag 3y ago
Yes. But the bridge looked fairly difficult to run and configure properly, requiring a yarn/npm dev environment (which I don't want installed on my machine) At the time (still?) it seemed impossible to bridge Discord channels (which are viewed very much as 'create as you please') to Matrix rooms without painfully doing it one-by-one via a config file and managing/creating both on each side (Matrix really seems stuck on the idea of preferring its 'one room' model and has not really embraced channels in the Discord sense.) Discord had also just gotten forums with no way to bridge them. Additionally, our Matrix rooms were seeing a good amount of spam that Discord was not, which would then get relayed to Discord via the bridge and would require moderating in both sides. Finally, our strongest Matrix advocates firmly disliked the idea of a bridge because it meant their Matrix messages would go to the proprietary Discord company. In the end, we let them run side-by-side for a little while then the Matrix quickly died.
- herewulf 3y ago
  > requiring a yarn/npm dev environment (which I don't want installed on my machine) I don't like / trust that stuff either but it's often necessary and easy enough to run in a container (e.g.: Docker/Podman, LXC, Guix Shell) or VM (e.g.: Vagrant, QEMU/libvirt). I actually run most of my software dev stuff that way these days because all these tools are routinely pulling hundreds of deps from the internet that are doing who knows what in their build systems.
- TulliusCicero 3y ago
  > Finally, our strongest Matrix advocates firmly disliked the idea of a bridge because it meant their Matrix messages would go to the proprietary Discord company. > In the end, we let them run side-by-side for a little while then the Matrix quickly died. The Stallman mentality is a plague.
- _dmn7 3y ago
  You can use this Ansible playbook. It worked well for me for bridging Discord and Telegram, among other things, running off a Hetzner box. https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy Personally I've never seen any significant amount of spam on Matrix.
- infinitezest 3y ago
  In my experience Mautrix has been very easy to run and can bridge new channels automatically as they're created. I use Matrix exclusively to chat with my friends on Discord. https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-discord https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-discord

LightFog 3y ago

Isn’t ’giving up convenience in the name of freedom’ one of the core trade-offs you’re expected to make with free software? People buy into the ‘free’ bit of FOSS to varying degrees of course but it is disappointing that so many FOSS projects seem ok contributing so much to a proprietary product from one of the most anti-freedom corporations out there.

tasuki 3y ago
I use FOSS because it's convenient, not for some higher philosophical principle...
- rapnie 3y ago
  If use is the only thing you do it may contribute to the Tragedy of the Commons and you undermine FOSS. If you also contribute back in some ways, even for very practical purposes, you are also serving the higher philosophical principle of FOSS.
  - LeoWattenberg 3y ago
    The tragedy of the commons requires a resource that is being depleted, which definitely isn't something that merely using FOSS would do.
    - type0 3y ago
      The effort of contributors can certainly be depleted when they see that no one cares to even submit a bug report or suggest any improvements
      - kazinator 3y ago
        If you're using FOSS because it's convenient and don't have any problems, why would you suggest any improvements or report bugs?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

Buttons840 3y ago

Community over tools. Hopefully if the tools fail the communities will move to new tools. Ultimately, a huge hacker culture built on proprietary tools might lead to more freedoms, both political and technical, than a tiny hacker community built on other tools. The size and political influence of a larger community matters.

rapnie 3y ago
Maybe. But I wonder how much of a healthy community collapses when you are forced to make a switch from, say, Discord to some alternative tool. Building and maintaining healthy communities requires tremendous amount of effort, especially when they are large. So you should weigh the benefits of a convenient tool to the amount of effort that may go to waste if that tool no longer fits the bill.
- Buttons840 3y ago
  Maybe, but that would be part of "community over tools". If one tool results in a smaller but better community, then sure, it's worth it. I suppose the real problem of using proprietary tools for a larger community is the marginalized people. Like, if Discord didn't allow people from a certain country. It's a tradeoff between having as large a community as possible and making sure you include everyone, even those with uncommon circumstances. That's a tradeoff that gets made in many situation I think.

advael 3y ago

As someone also running FOSS projects on discord because it's a non-choice, hard agree. Boycotting proprietary platforms is a good end-goal, but it's about as feasible to convince people not to use dominant organizing tools like discord and github as it is to get them off the mobile duopoly right now.

_dmn7 3y ago
I maintain a semi-popular project [1] with a support chat which is bridged between Matrix, Telegram, and Discord. The decision to bridge it to Discord was made having thought long and hard about it some time after reading this post. My stance is that it is okay to use proprietary platforms as long as it does not negatively impact the users not willing to use them, i.e. all channels must be bridged to non-Discord, so that it does not "partition the community" in any way. Discord-specific features should be avoided to not affect the usability of users on Matrix. So far it works well and I get to basically have the cake and eat it too. 1. https://github.com/FreeLanguageTools/vocabsieve https://github.com/FreeLanguageTools/vocabsieve
- mxmlnkn 3y ago
  What are you using to bridge these three chat providers?
  - _dmn7 3y ago
    An Ansible playbook running on a relatively cheap hetzner box. In general bridges require you to self-host a homeserver. A federated homeserver will need 4GB of RAM at least and 8GB if you plan on joining large rooms. The playbook is controlled from a single config file and sets up all the bridges you need. https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy

cokeandpepsi 3y ago

I'm not surprised, matrix is not easy or enjoyable to use at all; maybe the protocol itself is sound but every implementation I've tried both server and client is seriously bad

iforgotpassword 3y ago

I get GitHub - it's proprietary, but also just git, so moving somewhere else is just a pull and push away. The same can't be said for issues/discussions/wiki, but at least it's still the web, so it is googleable, archivable, curlable, you name it. It has happened more than a dozen times that I googled a weird error from eg libssl, ended up in a random issue of a random tool I never heard of, but someone still explained the underlying issue well enough while debugging that I was able to solve my problem. This requires a browser and nothing else. None of this is true for discord. It isn't indexed by anything, even "servers" are walled gardens to each other mostly. Anything shared on discord will be lost to time in a decade or two. Nothing discovered or solved within $project's discord will possibly benefit anyone outside that project. And sure, we already had that problem with IRC, but I think the text-only nature of it helped that anything a bit more involved moved to forums or mailing lists which again both were web accessible and searchable. And even then some projects did have logbots which just dumped text files into a web server.

ljm 3y ago
What’s worse is that the stuff that does get indexed will usually describe your exact issue, but then you’ll see it’s closed with a message like “this issue is stale because no one answered in 20 minutes,” or “this isn’t a bug, ask it on discord”. There’s no guarantee you get an answer there or if someone snaps at you for asking the same question yet again and not knowing the exact ceremony to perform to find the previous answers. I don’t have the time or energy to arse about with real time chat and micro-communities for every single thing. The claim is that they are inclusive but I find them rather cliquey and exclusive.
- zarathustreal 3y ago
  “Inclusive” is a modern day euphemism much like “diversity.” It just means the target audience is present.
joshspankit 3y ago
> Anything shared on discord will be lost to time in a decade or two Personally, as someone who has watched the evolution of IRC and other types of communication channels, I would argue that unless a thread is archived to the open web, anything shared in a realtime chat channel is lost in hours if not days.

watwut 3y ago

I dunno about GitHub now. Ever since it requires two factor authentication, it is not really suitable if you want people to be active in any way.

grey_earthling 3y ago

> Every other option results in far less people discovering and interacting with your project, by orders of magnitude. Yes, this is the problem. The article suggests: try to fix it.

astrobe_ 3y ago

> If your intent is to have your code reach the maximum amount of people to benefit them This amount of altruism is rare. More likely it's just the desire to be acknowledged by others. It's ok, but it's also worth reflecting on why you need that, as the process of freeing yourself from that can make you happier. Also quantity <> quality; Discord users often are the people who have been trapped down the slope of least friction and that are ok with "being the product".

jwells89 3y ago
Quantity can give a better grasp on the average user though, which is important in its own way, at least for projects with larger or more general audiences. For instance if I were the head of browser or desktop environment project I’d want to hear from as wide of an audience as I feasibly can because otherwise there’s almost certainly issues (usability, compatibility, bugs, etc) that I’m not privy to because they aren’t encountered often in small more technical samples of users.

OJFord 3y ago

I find Discord such an annoying tool for it though, it's not a principled objection for me really, I just don't think it's a good solution. I've never actually had a question answered (rarely even addressed) within some chat-like timeframe anyway, then after some days or a week or so I forget all about it or couldn't find it again scrolling up if I wanted to. People always talk about search engines not indexing it harming discovering, but another aspect of that is that you can't tell if the 'server' is completely dead until you make an account or log in and join it. Then potentially you just see a flood of people joining, maybe one or two asked a question, and there's just no other activity. But my main issue I think is just that I can't keep up with the chat for so many different 'servers' and their channels, so why does it make sense for it to be chat anyway? Something like Reddit makes much more sense to me, where there's a bit of a sense of what's current, but not to the same extent.

jdaw0 3y ago

using discord for community and docs is a dead giveaway for whether a FOSS project is actually about FOSS principle or whether it's about chasing clout

lamontcg 3y ago

All the alternatives to slack and discord seem to have some technological/philosophical axe to grind which is in opposition to "make it easy to setup and pleasant to use for the vast majority of users". If someone would just clone discord/slack and make it so people could stand up a server in minutes and manage it with near zero effort, and the UI/UX pretty much copied what users find familiar it would probably take off. Don't make it distributed, just apply enough cryptography to secure the client-server communication. Yeah, users will need to trust their admins and it won't be perfect security, most users don't need that. Make it easy to run fully public and indexed/searchable servers, make it similarly easy to run servers that weren't fully public and indexed and required logins and kept everything private, let the users decide instead of the developers. If your chat protocol cares too much about perfect forward security against hostile admins and attacks by the FBI while supporting a distributed protocol then you're likely producing something that is too complicated to use for 99% of the happy slack/discord users who don't care about that. The challenge for FOSS developers is to recognize that most people don't care about what they deeply care about and that they're not smart enough to solve the iron triangle of security. And that is when they're not self-sabotaging their product by looking at the way that e.g. slack and discord let you easily edit your comments and declaring yourself philosophically opposed to that.

myaccountonhn 3y ago
There is Zullip. It is quite great and has a free option for open source projects. It is quite easy to setup.

kazinator 3y ago

Okay, so there are some people who will not engage with anything that is outside of the Discord bubble. And for whatever reason, you feel you must woo these people. What if whatever you are making runs against a popular alternative? How are you going to convince the Discord people to switch from that thing to your thing? They are Discord people: they are programmed to seek whatever large numbers of other people are using, which is why you have to resort to Discord to reach them.