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Indeed. This is something I could see myself contributing to (or attempting to, anyway), but as soon as I saw Discord+Github, I lost all interest. Github I can

by pferde 2y ago

Indeed. This is something I could see myself contributing to (or attempting to, anyway), but as soon as I saw Discord+Github, I lost all interest. Github I can understand to some extent, it's a convenient temporary staying place until they can afford, community-wise, to move to something truly open, but Discord? In this day and age?

dandellion 2y ago
Agreed, Discord is a terrible platform and I wish people stopped using it. I expect in the next five years or so it'll undergo a very rapid enshitification and people will start using other things after that, but by then we'll have a decade of lost content.
- komadori 2y ago
  Ditto. Discord is fantastic platform to use and I'm a member of so many interesting communities across a range of subjects, but it does seem so very precarious to rely on the company to keep it going as it is.
paulcole 2y ago
> but Discord? In this day and age? What’s your recommended alternative?
- guappa 2y ago
  discuss?
- freedomben 2y ago
  Matrix is a wonderful alternative
  - account42 2y ago
    Better but a the real alternative is what we had before: publicly visible forums, mailing lists with an archive, etc. I'm not going to sign up for your discussion group without being able to get a feel for the community first.
    - pferde 2y ago
      Indeed. There can never be just one platform for project communication, because there are different kinds of communication - mostly sorted between synchronous and asynchronous. So, IRC, Matrix (these can even be interconnected) for synchronous, mailing lists or forums for asynchronous. And of course issue tracker, where some topical communication can happen as well, but that could completely be covered by mailing lists. There's no reason to ever have anything non-open in your FOSS project's infrastructure.
      - lukan 2y ago
        "There's no reason to ever have anything non-open in your FOSS project's infrastructure." Except, that it is easier to set up? What you describe sounds reasonable. But someone needs to set all that up and host it and needs to be trusted etc. So I guess if many people get involved and do set this up, they would convince the rest of the team to join them. But right now it is just a demand for more work for them.
        pferde 2y ago
        You are correct, of course. If the project leadership does not see a value in using open infrastructure, of course it would look like additional (and unreasonable) demand. It's up to them.
        guappa 2y ago
        Until some company pulls on them what happened to linux to invent git :)
    - lukan 2y ago
      Would you volunteer in setting up a forum for ladybird and host it and can you convince Kling and co. that you will be around to host it for the next years to come? Because that is a project in itself and as much as I despise discord, I understand why they just went with it.
- zzo38computer 2y ago
  IRC. And for slow discussions with long messages, you can use NNTP. (However, GitHub is accessible by git in case you only want to download the repository, regardless of what else they do; however, having multiple mirrors on other services as well can be helpful)
  - fullspectrumdev 2y ago
    While I’d love to agree: many people these days simply don’t want to use IRC.
    - guappa 2y ago
      You can bridge to matrix and use a matrix client. Then you get history even offline.
thiht 2y ago
> but Discord? In this day and age? Discord IS the platform of this day and age, what the hell are you talking about? You might not like Discord for whatever reasons, but trying to make it sound outdated or legacy is very weird sounding.
- pferde 2y ago
  It is the platform of this day and age much like Instagram or Xitter is. Doesn't make it very smart for FOSS projects to be using it for their primary coordination and communication.
- snvzz 2y ago
  Discord is not E2EE. It is a non-starter.
  - MobiusHorizons 2y ago
    That doesn’t seem like a nonstarter if the goal is to have public conversations. While I certainly agree that E2EE could be very valuable to some of discord’s use cases, I expect there are a lot of valid use cases for public discussions in open source projects where E2EE would not be an improvement at all.
    - snvzz 2y ago
      >public conversations Not public. Got to register an account and accept Discord ToS first.
- shufflerofrocks 2y ago
  I think you maybe taking it in the wrong context. There was a hype for discord about 5 years ago for EVERYTHING - discord servers were made for every little thing and there was little to no objection about it. But in recent times, I have seen many people complain about the lack of searchability, discussion-thread management, and other stuff in Discord and moving away to forums, especially for software projects. There is definitely a lot more disgruntlement with Discord today, so their statement makes sense.

by pferde 2y ago

dandellion 2y ago

Agreed, Discord is a terrible platform and I wish people stopped using it. I expect in the next five years or so it'll undergo a very rapid enshitification and people will start using other things after that, but by then we'll have a decade of lost content.

komadori 2y ago
Ditto. Discord is fantastic platform to use and I'm a member of so many interesting communities across a range of subjects, but it does seem so very precarious to rely on the company to keep it going as it is.

paulcole 2y ago

> but Discord? In this day and age? What’s your recommended alternative?

guappa 2y ago
discuss?
freedomben 2y ago
Matrix is a wonderful alternative
- account42 2y ago
  Better but a the real alternative is what we had before: publicly visible forums, mailing lists with an archive, etc. I'm not going to sign up for your discussion group without being able to get a feel for the community first.
  - pferde 2y ago
    Indeed. There can never be just one platform for project communication, because there are different kinds of communication - mostly sorted between synchronous and asynchronous. So, IRC, Matrix (these can even be interconnected) for synchronous, mailing lists or forums for asynchronous. And of course issue tracker, where some topical communication can happen as well, but that could completely be covered by mailing lists. There's no reason to ever have anything non-open in your FOSS project's infrastructure.
    - lukan 2y ago
      "There's no reason to ever have anything non-open in your FOSS project's infrastructure." Except, that it is easier to set up? What you describe sounds reasonable. But someone needs to set all that up and host it and needs to be trusted etc. So I guess if many people get involved and do set this up, they would convince the rest of the team to join them. But right now it is just a demand for more work for them.
      - pferde 2y ago
        You are correct, of course. If the project leadership does not see a value in using open infrastructure, of course it would look like additional (and unreasonable) demand. It's up to them.
        guappa 2y ago
        Until some company pulls on them what happened to linux to invent git :)
  - lukan 2y ago
    Would you volunteer in setting up a forum for ladybird and host it and can you convince Kling and co. that you will be around to host it for the next years to come? Because that is a project in itself and as much as I despise discord, I understand why they just went with it.
zzo38computer 2y ago
IRC. And for slow discussions with long messages, you can use NNTP. (However, GitHub is accessible by git in case you only want to download the repository, regardless of what else they do; however, having multiple mirrors on other services as well can be helpful)
- fullspectrumdev 2y ago
  While I’d love to agree: many people these days simply don’t want to use IRC.
  - guappa 2y ago
    You can bridge to matrix and use a matrix client. Then you get history even offline.

thiht 2y ago

> but Discord? In this day and age? Discord IS the platform of this day and age, what the hell are you talking about? You might not like Discord for whatever reasons, but trying to make it sound outdated or legacy is very weird sounding.

pferde 2y ago
It is the platform of this day and age much like Instagram or Xitter is. Doesn't make it very smart for FOSS projects to be using it for their primary coordination and communication.
snvzz 2y ago
Discord is not E2EE. It is a non-starter.
- MobiusHorizons 2y ago
  That doesn’t seem like a nonstarter if the goal is to have public conversations. While I certainly agree that E2EE could be very valuable to some of discord’s use cases, I expect there are a lot of valid use cases for public discussions in open source projects where E2EE would not be an improvement at all.
  - snvzz 2y ago
    >public conversations Not public. Got to register an account and accept Discord ToS first.
shufflerofrocks 2y ago
I think you maybe taking it in the wrong context. There was a hype for discord about 5 years ago for EVERYTHING - discord servers were made for every little thing and there was little to no objection about it. But in recent times, I have seen many people complain about the lack of searchability, discussion-thread management, and other stuff in Discord and moving away to forums, especially for software projects. There is definitely a lot more disgruntlement with Discord today, so their statement makes sense.