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Comment by falcolas | Hacker News Reader

I agree that Discord is not a good choice, perhaps not even an acceptable choice.

But.

Discord (not to mention Slack) will simply continue to be the lowest friction choice until a FOSS alternative comes along that is free to use, comes with rich moderation tools, supports fine-grained notification settings, supports offline history without additional effort, supports rich bots, has a mobile client that shares state with the desktop clients, and already exists on most people's desktops.

So to impact the open source communication landscape, the standard that needs to be exceeded is Slack and Discord, not IRC.

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There is Mattermost, Rocketchat and Zulip.

all of which are high friction yes?

https://keybase.io/

I wouldn't say high friction, but clearly not as convenient/low-friction as signing up for slack/discord.

No mention of Riot/Matrix?

Does the matrix spec offer moderation tools? I don't see anything off the top of my head.

It's also a bit of a chore to even identify how to get a server. Matrix.org points you towards other implementers, Riot.im pushes you back to matrix.org for a login, and to "Modular" for a server.

This is kind of the opposite of low friction and ease of use.

It seems pretty slick from a technological point of view, but a bit of a mess from an implementation point of view.

https://matrix.org/docs/guides/moderation

http://exple.tive.org/blarg/2020/02/20/synchronous-messaging...

Respectfully, I've only heard of one of those before, and none of them are installed on any of my devices.

Now, I looked up each of them, and found that they all rely on hosting your own server, or some kind of strictly limited "community" plan. The managed (and for Mattermost even self-hosted) servers all hide features (such as message history, rich moderation tools, or support tickets) behind a paywall.

These are solutions aimed at enterprises, and they use open source (or open core) licenses as the foot in the door. It's commendable that they offer to let you host the server yourself, but I would not call it "simple" to do so.

I believe that this high friction and low install base will make them effective non-starters in the open source development space.

> they all rely on hosting your own server, or some kind of strictly limited "community" plan

Happily this is not true of Zulip! Open-source projects get free hosting on zulipchat.com, with the exact same features as our corporate customers. Quoting from https://zulipchat.com/for/open-source/ :

> The hosting is supported by (and is identical to) zulipchat.com's commercial offerings. This offer extends to any community involved in supporting free and open source software: development projects, foundations, meetups, hackathons, conference committees, and more.

(I work on Zulip.)

> The managed (and for Mattermost even self-hosted) servers all hide features (such as message history, rich moderation tools, or support tickets) behind a paywall.

I know nothing about the other systems but this isn't true for Mattermost. We run Mattermost ourselves and it does indeed offer message history and moderation tools, they're part of the open source Mattermost version. I can't think of any feature that I miss from it, to be honest.

With no or terrible voice support.

Its extremely high friction for the many developers who are not willing to sacrifice their freedom in order to contribute.

Then pick a project to contribute to that doesn’t use discord. But don’t try to change the world to suit your needs.

If anyone is trying to change the world to suit their needs, it's Discord Inc, who ban any attempt at trying to integrate a client with their platform in a freedom-respecting way. It's a classic walled garden: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17462138

Then don’t use discord.

I already don't use discord. My point is that it seems hypocritical to wall yourself off in a platform that bans third party software and tries to pressure everyone into using their client, while complaining that someone else is trying to change you to suit their needs.

Umm how does that make sense?

The project owner(s) picked a platform for their communication and presumably all current contributors are fine with the choice, and then some third party is coming along and demanding that the entire project change their entire communication system to accommodate this one person? How in the world is it hypocritical to tell said person to take a hike?

Because the "third party" doesn't have any other choice, they have been forced into that situation by the walled garden platform vendor. The demand does not come from them, it comes from Discord Inc, who refuse to let anyone access the service on any other terms. They are the ones who are telling everyone to take a hike, and when you relay that message I really doubt you're speaking for yourself. All you're doing is reinforcing their decisions. This isn't just some chat room you spun up, it's an active business with a plainly evident market strategy. To put it another way, if we got down to it you (or any of these other projects) don't seem like you'd be personally against an open source Discord client. But when you tell people to take a hike, that's effectively the stance you're taking, and it's only because that is the company's stance.

Don't get me wrong, I would love to have made an open source discord client years ago when discord was new and I was being asked to use it regularly, and if that panned out then this blog post wouldn't have even existed. But the company has always been hostile to the idea.

I really don't think anyone is holding a gun to the project owner's heads and forcing them to use Discord. So they aren't forced into that position.

I personally don't like Discord for lots of reasons, but the original blog post and other comments supporting it are basically arguing that project owners have to change things in order to accommodate some people who have an issue with Discord. My point is that no project owner has any obligation to change things for any random potential contributor who is making demands.

Sure, Discord being less slimy and/or having other client options would be great! I personally use IRC a lot partially for these reasons, but I object to someone telling other people how to run their projects.

>I really don't think anyone is holding a gun to the project owner's heads and forcing them to use Discord.

This is not related to what I said at all. No one is being forced to use Discord. But Discord absolutely is forcing the project owners to get all the other contributors to accept the discord terms if they want to use it. That is the entire reason they make users accept the terms before they even sign up. Some users don't care about being forced to do this. Some users do, and if the project owners want to accommodate those people then yes, they need to change things. None of this is really up for debate and you seem to understand it well, so it's unclear to me what your point is. It also is very strange to me that you're now blanket objecting to these type of requests when you mentioned before that it's easy for the project owners to just say no thanks.

And (unfortunately, in my opinion) those developers are in the vast minority. They may be a vocal minority, but they are still a minority.

How can I assert this? If they were not a minority, they would have sufficient clout behind them to push the project onto a FOSS chat solution.

You forget that it’s not a meritocracy nor a democracy. The project owner(s) get to set the official links to bug trackers, chat locations, etc and that’s it.

You also have the issue that the most vocal users are also the ones who produce the least code.

At least that's my experience.

the standard we need is IRC. just with encryption, ability to store messages, and notifications. we should stop reinventing things that work

Sounds a bit like what you'd get with an IRC BNC, plus the encryption.

We need IRC with a few tweaks. There’s quite a few holes in IRC’s spec including lack of a scrollback support. But yes, there is no need to be making everything its own proprietary system.

The old school solution to lack of scrollback support in IRC, and similar, is to run a persistent irc client (bitchx or irssi) inside screen or similar software, on a linux or bsd shell system, which has 24x7x365 uptime and network connectivity. And then to connect and disconnect to the screen session as needed.

Properly implemented, I've had much better availability with this sort of solution than with Slack. I've seen multiple hour outages of Slack services just within the past 6 months, it's well below four or five nines reliability.

The problem is, that only fixes IRC for you, not the other 99.9% of users who you are presumably there to communicate with.

Slack/Discord/etc. fix the problem for everyone.

Trying to community-build on IRC just seems like an exercise in masochism. I think most projects and their users deserve better than that, and it's hard to do worse than IRC.

I absolutely agree that a semi-public or public community built on irc would not be the way to go in 2020. In my use case it's for much smaller groups of individuals who all know and work with each other, within private companies and small work groups.

Fortunately, "IRC with a few tweaks" is being actively developed under the name IRCv3 and it seems that scrollback support is defined by a combination of these specifications:

https://ircv3.net/specs/extensions/batch/chathistory-3.3

https://github.com/ircv3/ircv3-specifications/pull/393/files

IRC is a protocol, Discord and Slack are complete ecosystems. This isn't just a protocol problem; there has to be user friendliness in the full experience.

IRC can be part of a solution but it's not a solution on its own.

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