we need to differentiate two things here: using discord as the only way to reach a project and find documentation about it. the author mentions sending private

we need to differentiate two things here: using discord as the only way to reach a project and find documentation about it. the author mentions sending private messages right after joining. i would not have joined discord to do that, i'd have searched for their emails. if they or other ways to reach the developers can't be found then that is where the problem lies. the author doesn't mention if he tried that, and he doesn't point out the difference exclusive and optional use of discord. but beyond that, communities form where the people are. many FOSS projects are on discord because the people are already there. there are lively communities for fedora, debian, javascript, golang, to mention just a few. they are not the central space of those projects but they reach a number of people that probably would not participate in those communities otherwise. one community that is important to me has the core developers on a forum that is gated to a mailinglist, while the wider user community used to hang out on IRC, but eventually switched to discord. there are a few communities that did that because participation on IRC was dwindling and not getting new people. getting new people is a lot easier on discord. bridging to discord is at least possible, even though not ideal, it does allow participation from people that don't want to use discord. we could for example create a bridge to the old IRC channel. for some communities the choice is discord or no chat at all. github would have to integrate messaging for that to become a more attractive option than discord. but then github is not ideal for FOSS projects either. unfortunately the current reality is that the more aligned a communication platform is with FOSS ideals, the less attractive it becomes for most users. sometimes it is a tough choice. side note: i don't appreciate that swipe against RMS. i don't care about your opinion of him. keep that to yourself please. backbiting is a vice that hurts us all.