Please don't use Discord for FOSS projects | Hacker News Reader

Please don't use Discord for FOSS projects

drewdevault.com

606 pointsTomte460 comments

People choose platforms because of their functionality, not because of their code licensing status - see the case of Scala, linked in a different sibling comment. Matrix and Zulip, even after years of chasing, still sadly haven't caught up to Discord functionality- and UX-wise; until that happens, people won't have a good reason to budge.

Regarding IRC, Drew is kind of famous with his ascetism, claiming that the impossibility to share GIFs, videos, files, use threads, have internal chat history, are all features rather than limitations[1]. The thing is, people don't care about it, they'll simply vote with their own legs. Mail and mailgroups face a similar UX challenge. Not everyone is willing to endure the pain of learning and using mailgroups and IRC just because they're FOSS.

[1] https://drewdevault.com/2019/07/01/Absence-of-features-in-IR...

He's probably right they are features, features most people prefer over IRCs barebones experience. Not being able to catch up on what was said while you're offline is another one of IRCs features, sadly even less people seem to prefer that.

Here's the catch.

I'm someone who likes the idea of IRC being impermanent, available only if I was online at the time.

However, I also want people to be able to @mention me so that I can see it later, even if I was offline, overriding the default. AND, when that happens, I also want to be able to read the context before the message and probably some conversation after. In other words, I want "@smichel17 ^" to be a thing.

I don't see any way to combine those features. I can approximate this experience in Discord and its ilk by having all history about l available; muting conversations, except for notifications; and relying on willpower not to read the backlog unless I was mentioned. So that's what I do. Maybe the closest thing would be Snapchat, where messages can be "saved" by any of the participants so the whole group can read them later.

There's no way to approximate this experience in IRC. So although I still use IRC, it's mostly over a matrix bridge; matrix becomes my bouncer.

> There's no way to approximate this experience in IRC.

Yes, there is.

   <bmn__> !tell smichel17 crowdmatch me, see HN frontpage
   <reminder`bot> 1 message stored. will deliver when smichel17 rejoins or unaways.
   ⋮
   * smichel17 is no longer marked as being away, gone 04:30:55
   <reminder`bot> smichel17, bmn__ wants you to know: "crowdmatch me, see HN frontpage" (2021-12-28 13:12)

I've done that, too. It misses the context bit. As I said in the post you replied to,

> In other words, I want "@smichel17 ^" to be a thing.

Most networks support leaving memos to registered users when they're offline. So IRC does have that functionality.

It sounds like you're referring to MemoServ. This requires both parties to have an account on the server, and a separate private message to a dedicated bot.

What was being described was more like saving a highlight; with much less friction. On Discord, I can @someone even if they're a nickname-only user with no account.

You could run a quassel server somewhere. If you're already running a server somewhere for something else, adding quassel to the mix is pretty easy. Then use quassel as your IRC client.

I've been doing this with IRC for about 3-4 years now, and it means that I'm "always online" as far as IRC is concerned (except for server maintainance stuff). To a reasonably approximation, I never miss anything.

I feel like this and most of its sibling comments are missing the context of the thread: I agree with the viewpoint that "not always online" is a feature. The problem is the lack of "some things available when returning from offline".

From this perspective, the "always online" approach just makes IRC like Discord et al, where you receive everything and have to choose what to read when you get back.

Snapchat is the closest, with its "messages disappear after 24h by default, but can be saved by members of the group".

"i'm going offline but i want to hear about X, Y and Z when i get back" is a level of interaction with a messaging system that i personally find hard to imagine.

With Quassel at least, private messages show up elsewhere, tagged messages will generally be color-coded for easy identification. I suppose that people who participate in busier messaging systems than #ardour on libera.chat may need the sort of thing you're referring to, but it is so foreign to me that it's beyond my imagination.

You can use a ZNC bouncer, or a client like TheLounge. It's always "online" so I see the context for any pings. It's trivial to set up.

I think most of the points about IRC are solvable with the biggest pro of them all being that it's fast, omnipresent and low bandwidth, if you need to have history and other things, and can afford to have a raspberry always-on, then install a quassel server and keep it there, I have a dedicated server running my email and media server where I also put a `ghcr.io/linuxserver/quassel-core` docker container, and it doesn't consume anything

I think you forgot "and never ever have internet or electricity issues" to your list. The big advantage of Slack/Discord is that once a message was sent, everyone will receive it. Maybe in some time if the user is not always up but it will be received. Not to forget, not everyone interested in this or that FOSS project is tech-savvy enough to setup what you said.

Yeah I'm not sure if those are problems that happens often enough to be mentioned, I guess that depends on a user's perspective but you're right, I have a UPS at home, so I solve that easily, for internet I've had a lot of problems in the past, but now I have a FTTH so that never happens, I guess if you have frequent issues with electricity and internet you have bigger issues other than saving IRC channel history :D, but I guess those are solvable with UPS, 4G modem backup connection and there are also some websites that save IRC channels history

> Yeah I'm not sure if those are problems that happens often enough to be mentioned, I guess that depends on a user's perspective

It is, but the the average user's perspective is not that they'll set up an IRC bouncer (which odds are high they don't even know exists) so they can have message permanence and cross-device sharing.

Instead they'll say that IRC has no history / offline support (which is, technically, true) and will use discord because it does.

I bit the bullet and set up ZNC for my IRC connections this summer. Even by the standards of open source software, it was a chore, and the web interface is unbelievably clunky. I continued to use irssi in tmux instead.

What we learned from the Freenode implosion is that for most IRC users the concept of different networks was entirely alien. IRC was Freenode for those people.

It doesn't help that the authentication story for IRC is a bloody mess. In Discord, I have one account and can join any server^Wguild and have a different nick in each (and the nicks support unicode, and emoji). If I want to have different nicks on different channels on an IRC network I need 2 separate logins.

I tried ZNC a few years ago, but the replaying of chat history, that had already been received and seen, on every connection to the bouncer was frustrating and made it feel like a bad hack. Maybe I missed an option there, but I moved onto Quassel (and Quasseldroid), which was a game changer in ease of use, but I'm not personally a terminal IRC fan so I don't miss that aspect.

It's the same for me, I've used ZNC for a while and I think it being an agnostic IRC bouncer not forcing you toward a protocol and being usable from any IRC client is very big pro, but it also means that it always requires a bit in order to change anything, while quassel might be a bit less portable, even if it has clients for any platform I use (so it's personal), but being able to easily configure the server from the client easily for me was enough to stick with it

As the lead quasseldroid dev, and a contributor to quassel, it’s awesome hearing these success stories, as over the past months I haven’t heard anything from users.

I’m sorry that the new update for quassel and quasseldroid is taking so long :(

Hi, thanks for your efforts, it goes without saying, but I've read that some open-source software users started being rude with maintainers, so maybe it's not needed but I'll say it anyway, I really like your software, or your software is really useful for me, there is a thing I would like to have, but it is something that is given to me for free, so I will just say thank you a lot

Also IRC net splits used to happen often enough to be a concern a few years ago when I last used IRC.

And one big one just happened this year: https://ariadne.space/2021/06/14/the-end-of-freenode/

Freenode imploding was not a netsplit.

As sibling commenter said, that's not what I am talking about.

Please see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netsplit

netsplit is a disconnection between two servers

Once again, the average user does not have all that. Discord has the advantage, for me as a user, of not having to pay hundreds of dollars simply not to loose messages because my connection go down ~5 minutes a day.

This is a very narrow and short-sided point of view. Push the logic of this argument a little bit further, why is the issue lnxg33k1's internet and electricity a problem? The reason is that of course Discord controls the servers and they pay for the infra, and they essentially own your ability to chat with your friends. That isn't a problem until it becomes a problem[0]. Until then it's buying time, hoping Discord doesn't get bought by Amazon or Meta and then daddy decides it's time to extract rent.

Again, going to highlight it's such a short-sided POV, this sort of thinking "today it's free, it's better, and thus it is the right choice for the investment of my time, my community's time, even my project's time." Such short sided thinking in favor of convenience right now is way too common leads to a lot of problems (in society generally but that's another discussion). I really want people to have a longer term view of utility for the sake of longevity and stability of things as important as our channels of communication.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29711001 this was just posted a few hours ago.

That's a very genuine problem with Slack where my email address is somehow unable to register with their site, so I've never been able to use Slack. I don't even think I've been banned or blocked - since I never used the service - I think there's just something broken at their end and it's been impossible to find anyone who can fix it.

I haven't said that I wouldn't prefer a free alternative, only that trying to say IRC is the solution to all this is short-sighted too.

In short, using IRC for your free software/open source (FOSS) software project is a very bad idea. Ease of use matters — that’s why you’re writing code, after all. To make peoples lives easier. Using IRC partitions your community on either side of a walled garden, with one side that’s willing to use the complicated, archaic client, and one side that isn’t. It sets up users who are passionate about ease of use — i.e. your most self aware contributors or potential contributors — as second-class citizens.

I do mentoring for LibreOffice and this year I've interviewed over 100 people on IRC and had over 200 further mentoring chats. Most have never used IRC before and KiwiIRC web chat seems to work fine as the first client.

But there is also IRCCloud, like I think it stands to support my initial point about it being omnipresent, which now makes me wonder if one of the main issues of IRC for many people is not just about the presence of choices

Perhaps we should get rid of command lines in open source software, too. It's just so uninviting!

I'm not against people choosing discord for some projects, but there's nothing so terrible or oppressive about choosing IRC. It doesn't deserve the "considered harmful" treatment. Hopping on IRC is a very low bar for a potential contributor to clear.

Using IRC is not oppressive, I agree, and it wouldn't come to my mind to complain on an IRC channel about it not being Discord, but the point of the article is to show you must not use Discord and you are bad for doing it.

In my experience slack/discord are close to unusable when you have a really bad internet connection (for example on certain trains). They will pretend to send your message, but it will not actually go through (if you even manage to start slack/discord in the first place).

Mosh is the only thing that actually works in those cases.

I agree that SDiscord too is far from perfect in this circumstances (Though usually, the Discord client explicitly shows me when it acjieved to send the message as is it shown in light gray before this point)

But using Mosh means having a server, seting it up and so on. Yeah, Mosh+IRC is better from a FOSS perspective. But it comes with usability drawbacks too.

> if you need to have history and other things, and can afford to have a raspberry always-on, then install a quassel server and keep it there

I can't believe how delusional some people are. And sorry for being so rude.

In 2021 everyone expects history and other things. You can't realisticaly expect everyone to "just have a fully set up always-on raspberry pi and install some server on it". That's why IRC and XMPP are mostly dead.

> I have a dedicated server running my email and media server where I also put

Good for you. The absolute vast majority of users, however, don't.

I think there was a misunderstanding about my message, I wasn't forcing anyone to use IRC, I was offering a solution in case someone wants, I am quite happy if people want to use Slack or Discord, I use IRC, and a lot of people use IRC with or without a bouncer be it quassel or znc and talk every day, works for us and everyone is happy, but if other people is happy other ways so be it, was just mentioning that if those are issues, then there are solutions, so I didn't take the rudeness personally, as I don't feel that I have to convince people to use something or what people wants is my concern to be worried about?

The irony being that discord is absolutely horrible for discoverable/searchable history. I would argue the main value of searchable history for FOSS projects is not that you yourself can go back and look at the chats you had, but that it gets indexed by search engines, so one can find the solutions when encountering problems.

That's the big value of mailing lists over most of these chat solutions.

I think another value of mailing lists is asynchronicity of conversation and the time that can go in the thought process enriching the conversation, and I think that is unmatchable by any chat protocol/client

Yes but it's also the problem. Email is, for the most part, horrible to use. Even the crappiest chat app is nicer in almost every way than email.

People are more thoughtful about email only because it's slow and relatively low volume. You see the same on stack exchange.

I don't. I bugs the hell out of me when I open discord with hundreds of new messages in different channels that I am assumed to want to keep track of. Yes, you can disable notification but still annoys me when it doesn't immediately show me the last messages.

The general idea of group chats was to facilitate ad hoc real time communication. People were not assumed to be always online and messages were only of interest for the discussion happening in the moment. There are much better options for sharing information that might have a longer lived scope of relevance anyway. Plus remembering some chats that I hung out with friends, it had a sense of intimacy, sometimes I wanted to share the information exactly with those online at the moment, so no history was a feature. Popular open source IRC channels have archives that one could look up if need be anyway.

Of course there is also the modern idea of work-oriented chats like slack that have a powerful search function and are mostly about async communication, being a bit of everything, a way to share information with lots of people, a documentation system, discussion and so on.

> I bugs the hell out of me when I open discord with hundreds of new messages in different channels that I am assumed to want to keep track of. Yes, you can disable notification but …

I really don’t understand how people can think that having everyone self-host and maintain things like Quassel on a Raspberry Pi is a perfectly reasonable solution to the UX shortcomings of IRC, but then also insist that having to spend 30 seconds adjusting the basic settings in Discord is an unacceptably difficult task.

At some point, this conversation isn’t actually about UX or functionality. It’s about hating the new thing and clinging to the old ways.

People argue against discord for different reasons. You are making a straw man.

I would argue that those Raspberry Pi based solutions are nice to have but not needed. In fact I argued you don't need history most of the time and that not offering central storage of history can be reasonable.

> That's why IRC and XMPP are mostly dead.

IRC is still used by countless open source projects and there are many public XMPP servers everyone can use. I switched my family and most of my friends to XMPP this year and no-one runs an XMPP server at home.

> And sorry for being so rude.

You freely chose to post the insult, so you are not.

> In 2021 everyone expects history and other things.

I should hope I am included in "everyone" and I do not expect that. I think IRC rules and I think chats are better when they are ephemeral. I know people disagree with me; that is the point of discussing it. It's strange (a cheap rhetorical trick, really) to point out the expectations of a group of people in the current year as if that was an inevitability and that is how things always shall be unto the ages.

They didn't. They are saying that if you poll 100 in the grocery store about whether they expect to eventually receive messages sent to them during the period where they were riding through a tunnel or lost power in a thunderstorm, 90 of them will say "yes" and 9 will say "I don't know" and then there's you.

So my biggest problem with IRC in 2009 was that it lacked newlines.

Is this now solvable? Okay.

I have limited time & limited yak-shaving energy. In the choice between something whose problems are solvable and something whose problems are adequately solved, I am going to conserve my time/energy by choosing the latter 95% of the time.

I think I've noticed this pattern about tech people today that for example is concerning for me, I am not sure how old are you or what is your background, but I feel that today people don't enjoy stuff as much as my cohort, I go at work, and then SQL is a waste of time, Regex are a waste of time, Linux is a waste of time, Email servers are a waste of time, setting up a bouncer that takes 30 seconds is a waste of time, I am not sure if everything has become a waste of time, but do you people have a passion for tech related stuff, not specifically related to your message but every now and then I wonder what is not a waste of time

> I've noticed this pattern about tech people today that for example is concerning for me

Why should "I don't want to spend time on stuff that's not interesting to me" be concerning?

> I feel that today people don't enjoy stuff as much as my cohort, I go at work,

Your "cohort" is apparently hardcore computer people who are fine doing computer-related stuff both at work and in spare time. Well, tech people toda is a much bigger "cohort" than that.

> but do you people have a passion for tech related stuff

Yes. Yes we do. And tech-related stuff is often emphatically not fiddling with Raspberry Pis to set up obscure servers to maintain chat history.

You're just stepping into the stack at some arbitrary level and figure "everyone should know how to do (and do) this at least".

For you it's configuring email servers and compiling linux kernels. Why not dig trenches for power cables or build towers for wireless communications? If the answer is "but I don't care enough about those things, I just build on top of them", that's exactly what others think about compiling linux kernels, writing boot loader configs or configuring email servers.

yeah but I think the context is important, if I am talking with developers/sysadmin there are some things that I would expect to be interesting, which I feel are matched when I speak with tech people in their 30s, but I have had many coworkers in their 20s that sometimes I have little in common with, but yeah I guess if I was an electrician or else I would be interested in that kind of stuff, I guess my mistake here is that I consider every one on HN either a dev or a sysadmin, but as my previous message, I was not talking specifically about that person specifically

> I consider every one on HN either a dev or a sysadmin

Again. Even if 100% of people on HN are devs and sysadmins, why do you assume that your particular interests are a must for everyone on HN?

Or that everyone on HN would be interested in spending time to set up a Raspberry Pi with a media server and IRC bouncer?

I'm a dev. I have far more interesting things to do in my spare time than that. Far more interesting to me.

I mentioned multiple interests that I couldn't match, but yeah I think you're right, but also I was wondering, so you know we are social animals and try to find connections, and most of the times I hear that things are a waste of time, so I asked what is not a waste of time so that maybe I can learn it and find something in common :D

I feel like to have something in common with my coworkers I should have to watch unlimited amount of netflix and marvel movies.. which of course every one lives the way it wants, but I am more frustrated because loneliness is bad and not being able to find common passions feed that, I guess I gone OT ^^, but yeah I got your point, you're right I guess this argument is saturated now

Common passions are great! If I’m joining a chatroom of your open source project, I’d be grateful to share in your passion for the open source project itself.

> loneliness is bad

You can say that again.

> I mentioned multiple interests that I couldn't match

> I've noticed this pattern about tech people today

> I am not sure how old are you or what is your background, but I feel that today people

> I feel like to have something in common with my coworkers I should have to watch unlimited amount of netflix and marvel movies..

Step 1: stop being condescending and assuming moral superiority just because you have an interest in a random list of things you assume everyone shold be interested in.

Your approach is the classical "kids these days" that is so classical even Aristotle and Horace have said the same things.

Step 2: Accept that people are free to do in their spare time whatever the hell they want to. Watching unlimited Netlfix? Good for them. Setting up IRC bouncers? Couldn't be happier for them.

Step 3: if truly interested, you could try and figure out what exactly interests people in tech, and why they do it. Could be it's just because it pays more than the alternatives and they are much hapier carving out wooden dolls on the weekends.

If that's not your cup of tea, there are now communities around any and all things any person could be intersetd in, no matter how bizarre or "out of fashion".

I read this long thread of complaints as "Back in my day, we were nerds that managed to find jobs that would pay us for it. Today, new hires are just here for the money." I.e. the complaint is that our field is now a "normal" industry and not an esoteric hobby that only attracts hobbyists, which is an unwelcome change to them.

Yea, my reason for not wanting to solve the problems of IRC isn’t a disinterest in solving problems. On the contrary, if I’m joining an open source project’s discord, it is most likely because

A. I’m interested in the problems that the open source project focuses on.

B. I was in the middle of solving a different problem and see the project as a path to achieve that.

My disinterest in solving the problems of IRC is because I want to avoid context-switching from my problems or your project’s problems to IRC problems I encountered over 10 years ago. If I’m forced to kerp context-switching, I lose hope that I can stay focused and get my current problem solved. I would rather have a way to pay money and get support than to try to solve an ever-growing yakstak of problems all at the same time. Progress is better than futility or overwhelm.

> if I am talking with developers/sysadmin there are some things that I would expect to be interesting

The cool thing about technology is that there is progress. We can do more, we can do it faster, easier, better, etc. Twiddling with the same shoddy tools from decades past is the opposite of that. A long time ago IRC was a cool new capability that was worth putting effort into setting up and using. These days all the hacks and workarounds involved are still required, but all they get you is an inferior chat platform. So, no. The tech that excites me are the new ideas and inventions that people are coming up with today, not some chat platform that is older than I am.

just because someone is a dev (even a good one) doesn't mean figuring out IRC is worth their time

disclaimer: i have 80 buffers in my irssi session, but i know why most people aren't me

I'm in my late 40s now, and have been using computers for nearly 40 years (yeah, one of those kids.) Installed Linux on my 386 from floppies, and now in my day-to-day I write C# and maintain the linux servers where the .NET Core business application lives.

I've set up bouncers, ran my own email for years, and at some point I just became immensely bored of doing those things. There's an ungratifying sameness to having to fiddle with self-hosted email or hunt down why my irc bouncer crashed/went offline. This kind of friction extends up and down the stack, too, which irc client works on my phone? There are a few I might choose from, do I spend time trying them out over a period of days to see which is a decent one? Oh, well I still don't have threads, even if one client or another will auto-preview image URLs. And on and on.

I am disinterested, as you say, not because I don't want to learn it, but because I have.

It is waste of time when most of you learn quickly becomes obsolete. Linux was a once crude heap of hacks patched together with shell scripts, but the knowledge was stable enough to ship HOWTOs and FAQs with distributions.

As we know, everything is broken.

Most of the stuff is broken in known ways to a terrible degree. Usability sucks. You can literally see the brokenness. Most of the stuff does not work properly, is slow, insecure and just stupid. It does not do what it is supposed to do, at least not without risking you harm.

Some stuff is a little bit better and only broken in more subtle ways. Some edge cases might not work. Some obscure security holes might be in there.

Then there is some very rare stuff, which has exceptional quality. But even then, we all know it probably is still technically broken. On the unlikely chance that the thing actually works and no mistakes were made, there is certainly a bug deep down in the Kernel or somewhere in the CPU.

You take some of the very rare stuff of exceptional quality. Does it do all the things you want it to do? Probably not. So at best it somewhat works, does most of the things you want it to do and only has unkown brokenness, hopefully very deep down and hidden away as far as possible.

Now comes the biggest problem: Even if you choose the least broken stuff, you know have to start maintaining it. Things below it will start changing and reintroduce more brokenness. By using it, you sign up to fight it.

Now I have this superpower to actually fight it. I make things less broken. But I am fighting an ongoing avalanche of brokenness. My day has 24 hours, I need to sleep some of them and the avalanche just keeps coming. Some days I like the amount I have shovelled away. Some days are ending with me still up to me neck inside it.

I am not like Sisyphos, other people are using the space where I shovelled most of the brokenness away. So it does make sense and is fullfilling. I have fun, when I look at a small area, where the brokenness will stay away for some time, even though I know, it will come back at some point.

I am not immortal. I can probably do this for another 50 years. So 50 more years of shovelling but vast mountain chains all around me.

So I have to be very careful to only pick the most precious areas to clear.

To me, this sentiment feels similar to "Oh you claim to like pizza? Can I see your wheat and tomato farm and your cattle? What, you buy those at the store? I don't think you really like pizza."

I believe you're halfway right.

The way I see the tech space today is that everybody likes pizza. Except back in the days, you'd have to go to the grocery store, buy your ingredients then cook it at home.

Today you have to drive for a 1-2 hours to find those ingredients, as people are simply not interested anymore in cooking, stores started just selling ready made pizzas.

In a few years you'd probably need to build a farm and start raising cattle. Or you could chose one of the five most popular pizzas from the supermarket. That's it, only five. It was deemed, by popular vote, or maybe "data shows", that those five pizzas are good, every other recipe is cancerous so it's outlawed.

I would add, that for the way I see things happening, I would expect someone to say "There are too many pizzas, so pizza are bad/fragmented/confusing, can't we just have one?" :D

> setting up a bouncer that takes 30 seconds

Part of the problem is that I've been burned by enough hours spent on 30-second tasks.

> I think most of the points about IRC are solvable

See - it's "solvable" versus "solved". People seek solutions, not possibilities.

> solvable

Ask ten people and they’ll likely tell you ten different solutions (not to mention the feasibility of such solutions). Most people just want to set up a chat space for their project, or ask a question and get an answer; they don’t want to make a million choices about something they don’t understand before they are allowed to do what they set out to do.

> I have a dedicated server running my email and media server where I also put a `ghcr.io/linuxserver/quassel-core` docker container, and it doesn't consume anything

It's still consuming your time and energy and that's a running cost by itself. I'm also a long-time Quassel user in addition to be a long-time IRC user, but I have no more energy to manage my own Quassel server and my current instance has been long neglected.

> if you need to have history and other things, and can afford to have a raspberry always-on, then install a quassel server and keep it there, I have a dedicated server running…

Some people enjoy investing the time and energy into setting up something like this and maintaining it. I am one of those people.

However, it’s just not realistic to propose these things as solutions for the average user or even average developer. Cloud services like Discord are popular because you don’t have to think about it or invest time into maintaining anything. Click a few buttons and you’re in.

I think that fact is lost on a lot of devs who invested the days and days into setting up their own servers, learning things like Quassel, smoothing out all of the issues and so on. It’s easy to forget that every piece of that solution came with a lot of labor and learning spread out over years of time.

On the other hand, I suspect a lot of the people who propose these as alternatives actually like the barrier to entry that it all represents. If only the people dedicated enough to learn all of these steps and maintain their own infrastructure can fully participate, it represents a barrier to entry that makes the group feel more exclusive.

I, for one, like the barrier entry, think I recently quit the company I was working for because asking for help was like the first thing in case of an issue instead of researching a solution, and I couldn't deal it with a paid job, imagine how could I deal with it by staying on a discord channel where people (I have the impression) think that documentation is lava ^^

Also in general just because you have your history doesn't mean everyone else can easily get it. Which is part of the need. If we had working search engine, one could just browse through the history of chat and try to find existing conversations. Even if they are not part of the community and do not see need to be.

https://thelounge.chat/ seems a pretty good solution, but of course the average person would still need to know someone running an instance and trust them with their chat history.

Having to run server or access to one where you can run your own client has always been worst thing about IRC in my mind. Made sense back then and make sense for what IRC is. But really these days we should have something better.

> Mail and mailgroups face a similar UX challenge. Not everyone is willing to endure the pain of learning and using mailgroups and IRC just because they're FOSS.

Yeah, it's really hard to use. I can't seem to find definitive documentation about mailing lists anywhere. I've found documentation for the software itself but actual use seems to be some kind of arcane knowledge. Last time I tried to participate in one I ended up emailing someone directly by mistake.

That depends on the used email client. At least in thunderbird it's as easy as hitting the "reply list" button (as it automatically detects the email was sent via a email list).

Internal chat history? I mean you literally can have history with your client if you choose. Discord famously is avoiding that very feature...

You can also share files through urls...

> I mean you literally can have history with your client if you choose.

Unless you were not connected when the message was sent.

> You can also share files through urls...

You could also share them by mailing a usb drive. Both are a lot more annoying than just copy pasting them into a chat.

Have a bot connected to the channel that records the conversations to a text file and you have history. The bot can run anywhere if you don't want it to run on your own computer of course. Also, for pings to you if you want notifs bouncers exist,

Also, people need to be a little more precise regarding sharing files. OP just said "share file" they didn't say host files or whatever. Often times the file I want to share isn't hosted or can be embedded (in the past I had to pass around multi-GB binary dumps and you can't embed that in slack and I definitely think you can't do that in discord).

> Have a bot connected to the channel that records the conversations to a text file and you have history. The bot can run anywhere if you don't want it to run on your own computer of course. Also, for pings to you if you want notifs bouncers exist

Or, you know, just use a product that has all that built-in freeing you to do other things

Sharing files via URL while possible, is:

1) Impractical. You have to upload files to third party services that usually require an account. So you have to leave the chat, upload the file, and then get back to paste the link.

2) Bad integration. Some sites work better on mobile than others. Some barely work on slow internet connections. Some required logins, or show ads. And you have to leave the client just to see a GIF.

1) Why do I want discord to have a perma-copy of everything I share? Where's the peer 2 peer file send?

2) Clients can auto integrate URLs, like IRCCloud. It works just as well as server side integration.

What are the functionalities for a FOSS project that matrix/zulip miss over discord, or over a mailing list for that matter? I'm seriously wondering, because I've not found anything that I would miss.

> Mail and mailgroups face a similar UX challenge. Not everyone is willing to endure the pain of learning and using mailgroups and IRC just because they're FOSS.

I'm seriously not sure if you are being sarcastic. Learning mailinglists is an obstacle compared to learning discord??

Sure, the UX is guiding you and it's also more in line with what people already know, each channel is a bit like a FB messenger conversation after all. You also get instant feedback since you can see your message on the screen, unlike a mail where it sometimes seems that it's thrown into the void.

I think it's not as much a statement about ease of use but rather about comfort and playing into UX tropes everyone is used to now.

But both Zulip and Matrix work pretty much the same. So it's different to mailinglists (which I still regard as superior compared to chat programs, because of discoverability/searchability), but I don't see the superiority of Discord over Zulip/Matrix/Rocket ... At least not in context of FOSS programs.

This I don't know tbh, it might just be a network effect: everyone is used to Discord so everybody keeps using it.

Personally, I like forums for the same reason you like mailing lists.

Agree with regards to forums. I think hyperkitty [1] is probably the best of both worlds, i.e. a forum-like webinterface to mailinglists. Not sure why this is not used more often.

[1] https://gitlab.com/mailman/hyperkitty

Thanks for sharing, I didn't know about that!

That's the exact reason I find discord annoying. Instant gratification with its feedback means constant distraction. It might be okay for gaming, but using that for collaboration?

Agreed, a competent Markdown only (with code highlight) messaging system would be better.

> Learning mailinglists is an obstacle compared to learning discord??

I still don't know how to reply to an old discussion started before I joined the mailing list, and I've been using them for 15 years.

Sort of, but it's not the whole story. It's not uncommon to hear claims that Matrix or Jabber doesn't cut it becasue they don't offer shared history, or E2EE, or something else that's obviously not true. Those people are unlikely to change their system even when they learn that those features are available elsewhere.

People are creatures of habit, and mass products are built with either heavy marketing or piggybacked on other systems' popularity. It's hard to break into a market, but if it's any consolation it's equally hard for non-free products.

> that Matrix or Jabber doesn't cut it becasue they don't offer shared history, or E2EE, or something else that's obviously not true.

It's obviously true because when you stat looking at, say, Jabber, it turns out that it only offers that for a single mobile client on Android that should connect to properly configured server with all the relevant XEPs enabled.

So yes. For practical purposes Jabber doesn't cut it. No idea about Matrix.

On the Matrix side, it's a mandatory part of the protocol for a server, but not clients. Only some clients support negotiating E2EE right now, though the situation is improving quickly.

Shared history is Matrix's whole schtick. E2EE is supported in most popular clients.

The "creatures of habit" thing is definitely not true if people are literally closing their irc channels and joining discord.

So, not figuratively closing them?

Because of the new people who were born <25 years ago and never even used IRC.

They have the habit to use a web service for everything, or at most a phone native "app" that they expect to be distributed by and integrated with some centralized service that exercises total control.

That does happen,but I've used irc for over 10 years, and I'm down to hanging out in only 3 irc rooms. 2 of them are dev related. Otherwise, I'm in multiple discord "servers" or slack.

I know i'm not the only one like that either.

Right, but we're just following the younger crowd.

I don't use Discord's web client and it was ages before I used the mobile one, not that it makes sense to sneer at a native application on mobile but not a native application on desktop. What I have a habit for is using software that works well and has few sharp edges with minimal screwing around. If it comes with a centralized service or total control, that's still miles better than not being able to scroll up to see what people were talking about when you joined. Users do not care about protocols, they care about results. Mastodon proved that you can actually build a usable app on a federated service, so if IRC is the future, I'll consider going back to it once someone goes and actually makes it the future.

The scroll up on IRC problem is typically solved with various "bnc" or "bouncer" mechanisms.

I've also encountered an IRC server that caches and rebroadcasts the last hour of messages.

But yeah with IRC you run into the problem that it wasn't originally designed for that use.

> Mastodon proved that you can actually build a usable app on a federated service

I don't see how anything needs to be "proved." Do we actually need proof that IRC could cache messages and repeat them for joining clients? It just wasn't originally designed that way.

XMPP also has an extension for caching the scroll.

A piece of functionality that's missing/broken by design in Discord is data export. Discord client can show me all the conversations I've taken part in. When I request a copy of all data Discord "has on me" I get only the messages I've sent (which is borderline useless), and I am only allowed to do that once a month, with a days-long waiting period.

It's because you don't have any right to other peoples data under GDPR. That's a feature to help stop doxxing.

Cool, that’s fucking useless for a chat client though. If someone sends me a message in a chat app, I should be able to get it.

Discord isn’t ephemeral. Making a shitty UI that pretends it is doesn’t change that.

If you send a message to a public chat room; You should expect that the contexts of the message and its attachment to your username are permanent and accessible to anyone.

If you are not comfortable with that, then don't send the message in the first place.

(Or, use Discord to send the message.)

The message is still accessible to anyone using the blessed client, and is available in perpetuity to anyone willing to violate TOS by using a reverse-engineered client.

It's only available in public chat rooms private messages are not recoverable no matter the client.

I can run a reverse-engineered client that just logs all the messages I ever receive, if I don't care about TOS.

Chances are you won’t, though, because for virtually all chat rooms, why bother? And so in the vast majority of cases, Discord’s approach works well at achieving its outcome. Either no one will hoard data in violation of their legal contract with Discord, or any published/searchable logs will receive takedowns, and that’s just enough to have the intended effect.

In the context of FOSS project chat rooms that we’re discussing here, it is quite ironic that many FOSS community members will, predictably and with tacit or explicit support from their peers, openly break their legal contract with Discord in order to hoard chat logs for private or public use — while in the same breath demanding use of, and compliance with, legal contracts such as the GPL. Human beings certainly do excel at developing blind spots for cognitive dissonance when it’s to their benefit to do so.

If I had no right to see messages others send to me, then sending messages would be pointless -- the recipient would not have the right to read them.

Every other chat service I have requested data export from gave me all the messages in conversations I was a part of (even if they were mangled somehow -- e.g. missing attachments in FB Messenger). I think this is an example of Discord applying motivated reasoning for the company's benefit (E: at the expense of their users).

That's something completely different. GDPR takeouts are only referring to YOUR data. The data entered from other people is not yours. It's not that hard to comprehend if you think about the legal aspect. This is a compliance issue more than anything else if they could they wouldn't give you anything.

The original comment was talking about lacking data exports tools/options. The workaround is using GDPR but even that is lacking.

It's not a workaround because it's not working.

> When I request a copy of all data Discord "has on me" I get only the messages I've sent (which is borderline useless), and I am only allowed to do that once a month, with a days-long waiting period.

What he is trying to paint as a broken feature is just compliance to GDPR and with that you only get your data.

>A piece of functionality that's missing/broken by design in Discord is data export. Discord client can show me all the conversations I've taken part in. When I request a copy of all data Discord "has on me" I get only the messages I've sent (which is borderline useless), and I am only allowed to do that once a month, with a days-long waiting period.

Full comment because context is important.

The first part of the comment is explaining that there's missing/broken functionality. They're trying to export data and that's missing. What Discord has, which could count be used as that feature, is requesting a copy of all your data and THAT is broken for the use case because it's missing the messages of others and, even then, it's once a month and there's days-long waits.

They want to export data out of an application that has no data export feature and with discords strategy atm they don't want to implement one. There is one feature implemented for GDPR purposes which is GDPR compliant (even the long wait times). He is complaining about a non existing feature and than argues that the law whole HN is going on for like 6 years doesn't reach far enough? Just don't use discord if you need features they don't offer OR even better call your senator and tell them to regulate it OR scrape it yourself.

Well this is pretty dumb if true. If someone willingly participates in a one-on-one conversation with you, and you can literally screenshot any of their messages that are so important they must be withheld, what's the point?

To me it’s like asking for a mass DM feature. Discord can’t stop you from messaging 100 people about an exciting new investment opportunity, but it’s not a workflow that we’d want to encourage so there’s not a UX primitive for it. (A sibling comment asks why Facebook and Google messaging apps let you export other people’s messages; I think they’re wrong, driven by an earlier era in UX design when people were focused much more on user power and much less on its downstream consequences.)

Note that I didn't mention GDPR or any regulation. Data export is for me a feature that makes it easier to walk away from a service (and, as a side effect, makes it easier to use the service by performing the export periodically and keeping an indexed copy of that data in your favourite database). What Discord offers doesn't help me walk away from it at all, so from my POV it's missing this feature.

Do you know why Google Hangouts and FB Messenger provide a data export that includes others' messages? Do they base it on a different interpretation of the law, or is there some other reason for them to do so?

Messages sent to me are MY DATA. The same as letters sent to me. Packages sent to me. Physical things given to me, Etc... The enter point is you send me a message. That message is now mine (my copy). If you didn't want me to have it you shouldn't have sent it to me.

If I send you something by accident and delete it before you read it I should be able to delete it with no way of you recovering it.

If you read the ToS it also is very specific that it's not your data.

You've now moved the goalposts from "a discussion about what constitutes "your data" under GDPR" to a discussion about moral rights for deleting accidental content, and a reference to Discord's ToS, neither of which have anything to do with GDPR.

You are arguing about a law that is in place and available to read. Discord is in compliance of that law by only sending you your parts of the conversation. Do you really believe they did it without checking in with their lawyers?

Check the ToS you don't own anything on Discord you even transfer copyright for every word you type. What even is your argument here? That it would be nice otherwise?

> Check the ToS you don't own anything on Discord you even transfer copyright for every word you type.

This is blatantly false. https://discord.com/terms under "your content" claims that I give Discord a forwardable and nonrevokable license to do anything with my content, not that I transfer copyright.

I think there's confusion. A chat is by definition not a single owner property. Its not like photos you upload on a host, blog entries or your FB wall.

By this logic, if I ask my email provider for my data, it would only supply an archive of emails I sent. It certainly seems like the emails sent to me are mine as well. I'm not a Discord user, but is it really true that exports only contain one side of DMs? Seems almost like malicious compliance when I consider the purpose of such archives!

There is no take out feature. There is just a GDPR compliance one that does the bare minimum to be law compliant. If you read the ToS you would know that you don't own any data on Discord.

> The data entered from other people is not yours.

Citation for this? It seems pretty intuitive to me that messages sent to me are considered to be "my data", and your claim doesn't seem to be consistent with the overall theme of the GDPR...

At the very least, there's a distinction between personal information such as your name and address (which the GDPR regulates the collection of), and non-personal content like anonymous usernames and sent messages.

the only thing you can take out is your content... read here. That you don't have ownership of anything on a platform like discord should be clear with all the ToS threads about user generated content in the last years.

https://discord.com/terms under "Your Content"

https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/360004957991-Y...

> By uploading, distributing, transmitting or otherwise using Your Content with the Service, you grant to us a perpetual, nonexclusive, transferable, royalty-free, sublicensable, and worldwide license to use, host, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, perform, and display Your Content in connection with operating and providing the Service

They have a license on everything sent AND they can use it to reproduce, publish, etc. So they very much can create the functionality.

ofc they could but for what benefit to them?

People using their platform vs looking for others with the feature.

I guess they reasoned about it and decided it's not worth their effort with a growth rate of 40%

Now you are moving the goalposts from "a discussion about what constitutes "your data" under GDPR" to "what would the benefit be for Discord", as you already have in another thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29715101

Yeah thanks...now i have to delete all my received emails.

Why would you? That's data you own.

So mail from others are mine but not chats?

Not on Discord and we are still debating about a feature that was never implemented and Ops misunderstanding of GDPR and it's compliance.

>Not on Discord

Ah ok that makes sense....not

> It's because you don't have any right to other peoples data under GDPR.

Citation needed that messages intentionally sent to you are "other people's data" and regulated under the GDPR. They're certainly not personal information such as a real name or phone number.

> That's a feature to help stop doxxing.

This has nothing to do with doxxing. Doxxing is easily prevented by merely changing the takeout so that there's plausible deniability - e.g. if person A and B have a conversation and A uses the takeout feature, person B's username would be redacted or minimized such that they could reasonably claim that that person in the transcript could have been anyone.

If others' messages to you are their personal data, and you "process" them -- which is rather broadly defined -- as which of the entities defined as processing data are you subject to the Regulation?

It depends on the ToS of the service you are using at discord the "Your Content" part is pretty specific.

So, which is it, and exactly how -- noting that those terms can change without notice? "the Company is not responsible for any material that you upload, post, or otherwise make available" seems to be trying to disclaim any GDPR responsibility for these personal data. (I'm not just going to accept that lawyers are right in the light of quite explicit violations of regulations I see, and legal actions.)

"The terms of service raise very serious concerns." -- TOS;DR extension

https://github.com/Tyrrrz/DiscordChatExporter

Matrix might be playing the catch-up game, Zulip is IMO better feature-wise for group collaboration because of its threading model, especially for large communities (like Rust).

Unless one wants to stick with synchronous voice chatting, I failed to see any reason to use Discord apart from its popularity.

Because you are already using it for other things.

Well, I don't know Discord that well, but on Matrix there's a ton of FOSS and other communities to join from many different decentralized servers. After a long period of slow progress, Matrix seems to me like it is taking flight now. It bridges to IRC and with Github and new integrations become available all the time. And the UX, to me at least, is quite pleasant (maybe initially you have to get used to some stuff). Matrix it is for me, my default choice of chat app.

I've joined Matrix a couple of weeks ago, and the UX has been extremely confusing from the very first moment - logging in, private messaging, joining groups... everything is considerably more complex that a standard chat application (like Discord or Slack).

In my opinion, there's no way Matrix can be a valid alternative, until it's as usable as the competitors.

Are you using Element? I find the web version good enough to be used, but I admit the mobile client is still a mess (they plan to improve it in 2022 though).

I've used two of the webapps, however, the problem is in the workflow.

On login, I was asked to validate from two devices. This is novel in this type of apps (at least, the mainstream ones), and it took me a while to figure it out.

Part of the confusion was also the fact that notifications about validations started to pile up, and I wasn't sure about I was doing.

I still don't know how I got the validation key (or however it's called) in this workflow.

Another novel concept is that, as far as I've understood, sessions are associated to keys, so, I suppose, if I lose a key, all the (encrypted) communications are gone. This would be acceptable, but the warning is very pushy; it's not clear to a new user if it's very strongly advised to enable encryption or not (will the other people trust me without?).

Communicating with other people is also confusing - I had two channels open with another user, and didn't know if any of it was valid.

Joining groups was confusing as well. I had a name (which was also strange; I still don't know if it's normal for the names to be "strange"), and again, couldn't figure out if I joined it or not (until I joined via other means).

This may be all necessary for a safe design, but definitely, it's a huge barrier to entry for somebody who expects a Slack-like experience.

Let's not sugar coat Matrix.

Joining from federated networks to some larger rooms takes hours or even days.

Tried it a few months ago, was not impressed. I spent a couple days debugging it and asking for some support, but it turns out the official server software is by design incapable of joining large rooms instantly. It literally took 2 days for the room to appear in my chat client. And the message delivery was also delayed and far from instant.

To me personally IRC is way better than Matrix, when it comes to basic instant text messaging. For more advanced features I would rather use Discord, than spend days trying to get Matrix work.

Hours and days?! I've certainly never seen that, that's a bug. The most problematic rooms (like Matrix HQ) took no more than 20 minutes for me, and that's only for the first join -- subsequent users get to join "for free".

Performance is going to be a major focus in 2022, with [fast federation room joins](https://matrix.org/blog/2021/12/22/the-mega-matrix-holiday-s...) and a new version of [the sync part of protocol](https://matrix.org/blog/2021/12/22/the-mega-matrix-holiday-s...).

This top post misses the main point of Drew's post. He doesn't focus too much on the license more than the fact that it would fracture your community into two disjoint sets, with one of those sets containing disabled folks, poor folks, privacy conscious users, amongst others.

One thing Drew didn't say (but should have!) is that with FOSS you can actually change the software to help meet the needs of these people while for discord you're at their mercy.

If it were so simple to change FOSS to meet needs and make it easier to use, we’d have a FOSS Slack and Discord competitor that does it. But we don’t, because it’s not that easy. Matrix isn’t it. If it was, we wouldn’t be having this discussion.

> Matrix isn’t it.

Why isn't it?

> If it was, we wouldn’t be having this discussion.

Are you suggesting things don't take time and luck (i.e. initial conditions) don't play a role, especially with phenomena such as market consolidation?

Matrix is currently behind Discord (from my pov as proj lead for Matrix) because:

* We didn’t prioritise UX polish sooner.

* We burnt huge amounts of time on E2EE (which turns out to be really hard in a decentralised world).

* Building out decentralised comms in general requires about 10x more effort than centralised comms.

* Managing an open spec process and governance model burns huge amounts of time too.

* We built the flagship Element apps in triplicate on web/iOS/Android with no code reuse, in order to dogfood and provide native SDKs, burning >3x more time.

* We’ve also invested a lot of time in beyond-chat work, to try to inspire folks to use Matrix as a generic comms fabric.

Frankly, if we had been aiming purely to be a like-for-like FOSS Discord replacement, we would have done a lot of things very differently.

Hopefully we can shift that balance as the UX of apps matures on top of Matrix, and we focus exclusively on usability. The current situation is pretty depressing. You can see more about how we’re trying to fix it in https://matrix.org/blog/2021/12/22/the-mega-matrix-holiday-s...

Thank you for your straightforward appraisal. Makes me take Matrix a lot more seriously.

> We burnt huge amounts of time on E2EE (which turns out to be really hard in a decentralised world).

For whatever it's worth, I think Matrix's approach to E2EE and investment into trying to solve some of the really hard problems in that space was completely worthwhile, even though it's painful and even though it set Matrix back in other ways. It's the type of fundamental problem that would be hanging over Matrix indefinitely until all of that time was devoted to it, and I think doing it early was the right move.

My feeling is that what Matrix demonstrated was that decentralized E2EE is itself a giant UX problem (both for users and in some ways for developers who are building clients as well), and that solving it requires a ton of UX iteration and thoughtful iteration on how to share/encode keys, handle sessions, respond to unencrypted sessions, etc, etc... That is something that a lot of other platforms haven't really grappled with, and I think ignoring that problem would have risked imposing a hard limit on how effectively Matrix could roll out E2EE by default without it just staying as a really annoying option that most people avoided.

That being said, I do agree with the rest of your comment. I've noticed some faster improvement on UX lately from Element, and it's been getting steadily better (I love the direction spaces are going), but it's still not quite over the line for me.

I'm just not sure... I don't know that I would phrase that core work that's been happening as if it was the wrong focus, I think that stuff just takes a long time to build and the benefits aren't always immediately obvious to users, or that it takes a while to start paying out those benefits. A good E2EE UX isn't really about impressing users, it's more about being invisible, which can be frustrating because getting it right just means people complaining about it less, it doesn't mean having an advertisable feature. But it's still important though if you want people to actually use E2EE.

I am still excited about P2P chat, about taking server moderation seriously, etc... That all has a ton of potential that could pay out in really significant ways in the future, even if it's not user-facing right now. I don't think any of that is wasted effort or that it's not important. But I'm also happy that Matrix/Element is focusing more on general user-facing UX now, and I do agree that there's a lot of iteration and improvement to be done there.

One other factor: I think there is something selfdestructive in FOSS projects in general thanks to large amounts of incredibly loud feedback focused around the strong opinions which predominate FOSS communities - which very often pull directly in the opposite direction to building a usable polished app like Discord.

Stuff like “Matrix is crap because they didn’t make it E2EE from day 1”, or “Because servers store metadata” or “Because it didn’t have a legally registered foundation at first” or “Because Element’s default config points to the Matrix.org server” or “Because Synapse supports shadowbans” or “Because the Element apps influence the direction of Matrix” or “Because it’s not XMPP” etc etc etc. It’s surprisingly hard to keep focused on building apps that optimise for mainstream users when the loudest voices are campaigning to optimise for their own crusades. I suspect the same effect has substantially negatively impacted Linux on the Desktop and other places where FOSS usability has failed to punch its weight against mainstream usability.

On the other hand, there are quite a few examples of FOSS apps which have successfully pulled themselves out of this hole of being “built by geeks for geeks” into being successful and even delightful to a more general mainstream audience: Firefox, GitLab, Blender, Audacity all spring to mind. And that’s the model we’re trying for at this point.

That hella vocal minority is NEVER satisfied.

I currently pay for an Element subscription for my close friends and while there are some minor issues, we’re happier using it than Wire or SMS (one of my friends is Android, otherwise iMessage would suffice).

Matrix is awesome (thought you’d like to hear that).

Sure it has tons of warts, but it’s way better than just a year ago, and now a truly usable replacement for many use cases. (We actually use it instead of Discord/Slack/etc and have been happy with it.)

FOSS is hard. Having good leadership makes all the difference. Linux had it, Apache had it, MySQL had it, and I think Matrix has it.

The key thing to remember, and it is easy to forget, is that FOSS is a momentum game - Blender is a fantastic example of people plugging away at something and then “all of a sudden”, they have a world class tool. The same will be true with Matrix, and probably a lot sooner than many people realize.

Those apps you mentioned are the pinnacle of what open source software can look like for me. Blender was always powerful but when they put effort into redoing the UI it was a complete game changer.

The number one problem with matrix in my experience is latency...it's common for loading the app or a room or message history or sending a message to take multiple seconds. I wondered if dendrite might be the solution to this, but the readme says it can handle only 10-100 users, which feels off by a couple orders of magnitude. Is the overhead of decentralization really that bad?

It‘s being worked on. The feature is called „Sync v3“ - you can read about the current status in ararthorns year summary: https://matrix.org/blog/2021/12/22/the-mega-matrix-holiday-s...

I’d argue that technically it would be easy. Paying for it, less so….

https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-server

But we already do have alternatives. And people use them. And they're popular with the FOSS crowd. Might want to take another swing at this with a better argument?

Part of the problem is that there is a certain divide in what people actually want in their platform. There are some people that actually don't want any of the modern features of these platforms.

Not everyone likes everything being flooded with inline images, super-long monologues, people being able to edit their messages after the fact, etc. Personally I find this all a major distraction.

So in addition to the divide between FOSS and walled garden, there is also the divide between minimalistic chat and "rich" chat.

Ironically Matrix does all the stuff listed lol

Matrix protocol has a lot of features, some of them is not even used by clients (stable versions) yet.

But the point is matrix client app. Let's take element (usually it's a default choice) - it not very user-frindly and sharp on edges. Of course, it changes literally on your eyes (if you use nightly builds), but still cannot compete with Discord client in terms of UI/UX.

Matrix is awesome, but it needs more time to be polished and "slick" enough for average user.

Disclosure: I'm developer of https://etke.cc and have very huge interest in polished matrix clients. As part of my job I use nightly element clients on desktop and mobile platforms to be able to guide customers after features' releases

> because it’s not that easy

It's infinitely easier than with Slack or Discord, where it's outright impossible.

> If it was, we wouldn’t be having this discussion.

We definitely could still be having this discussion even if Matrix provided better UX out of box, because that doesn't mean it would automatically win the fight with existing network effects.

If the business or project are unrelated to a different tool, they’re not giving a damn about fixing FOSS.

You all get the idea of division of labor, right? We went into software development, not everyone else did.

Consider Discord has video and voice. You go ahead and patch that into IRC.

> it would fracture your community into two disjoint sets, with one of those sets containing disabled folks, poor folks, privacy conscious users, amongst others

Drew is honest enough to quote in the footnote one of his blind friends who points out that Discord has made a lot of accessibility improvements and lots of disabled folks use it.

And let's be real, which FOSS software is, generally speaking, more accessible for disabled folks than alternatives? This is an argument that is made because accessibility is in the spirit of FOSS, which is true, but in reality most FOSS software is often less accessible, simply because it is clunkier, than whatever is on the market, so it's not a real selling point, just a theoretical one.

The same goes for performance. Yes in theory people in FOSS tend to be more conscious towards low-end or old hardware, but what is the number of developers who have a computer powerful enough to build modern software but who can't run discord? Not to mention that most feature equivalent FOSS projects are no less hardware hungry.

In reality how many disjoint sets of community members you have depends on just one single thing, the quality of the software, that's it. The fact that you can change FOSS software to your needs practically only makes sense for small pieces of software. Nobody is going to roll their own Matrix client for their three person FOSS project.

The difference here is not that any particular client is FOSS, but that Matrix is a protocol. There can be multiple compatible general-purpose clients already in existence, and hopefully one of those is accessible enough.

> People choose platforms because of their functionality

I think most people choose platforms because of their popularity. Everyone uses foo, let's just use foo.

This is why my community moved over to Discord; our IRC channels were dead, even the forums are slow. When switching over to Discord, we had a great deal of new users and a lot of older users who have since switched to Discord jumped back on.

>I think most people choose platforms because of their popularity. Everyone uses foo, let's just use foo.

The "popularity" reason does not explain the cause & effect timeline.

Discord was started 2015. But Matrix, XMPP/Jabber, IRC were older than that and thus by definition back in 2015, they were already more popular and well known.

Thus, the original first reason can't be popularity -- because there was a point when Discord was not popular and it was still chosen over Matrix & IRC. The reason is that it's easier for project maintainers to create new Discord servers + channels. E.g. : https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/204849977-How-...

Put a different way... What caused Discord to become more popular than Matrix? The obvious answer is that a few clicks on a web page is easier than installing and configuring a Matrix server. Is there really a better explanation than "ease of use"?

EDIT reply to: >Discord was first popular with gamers because it offered _good voice chat_; and this popularity drew in other communities.

I emphasized "good voice chat" because in that sentence, it's the more explanatory reason than just "popular". So the other and older alternatives like IRC did not have good voice chat. And this drives decisions of gamers that prioritize a desirable feature such as seamless VoIP over the need to use an open protocol (IRC) that's not owned by a corporation.

In other words, whenever the proposed reason for product dominance is "popularity" or "network effects", we always want to dissect that further and look for the reason that caused the rising popularity. If we don't, we just end up with infinite recursive reasoning such as "it's popular because of its popularity" -- which is not a satisfactory nor helpful analysis.

Discord was first popular with gamers because it offered good voice chat; and this popularity drew in other communities.

Exactly. I moved to Discord for VoIP gaming from Ventrilo which was proprietary, centralized, and subscription-based. It also had terrible latency. I moved our entire gaming team of 30 people to it. Mumble already existed, but it lacked a few pros Ventrilo did not have. Discord had so many pros that it outweight the cons, and on top of that: the main con (our privacy / data gathering) is practically invisible.

You’re assuming the platform chosen can’t be changed.

> Thus, the original first reason can't be popularity -- because there was a point when Discord was not popular and it was still chosen over Matrix & IRC. The reason is that it's easier for project maintainers to create new Discord servers + channels.

Matrix did not have "servers" (in the Discord sense) until very recently. It's also much harder to produce an open, federated protocol than a proprietary one so Matrix has been less featureful than Discord for a long time, but the gap is closing quickly.

There's also the matter of marketing: Discord is a product, Matrix is not, thus it's harder to market. Yes, now there's Element, which is a product, but given above, Discord has had an effective head start of several years.

Give it a bit more time.

Please, even discord internally calls them guilds. Don't call them servers, call them guilds or teams or spaces or something descriptive.

I was just responding to the term used by my parent comment. Not sure why you're telling me this, I agree it's a confusing term.

Discord had a really nice UX.

Click the link, choose a nick and you are thrown into the chat. That way you could checkout a new community and discord in general with a really low barrier to entry.

The community that drew me to discord made the jump when their self-hosted IRC network became increasingly unstable. The multimedia features like easy picture sending ware also very nice, as was the mobile client.

Still dislike the condecending tone they have towards the users tho.

And I still use IRC on other networks. Both with a shell running irssi in screen and hexchat on my desktop that starts up with windows. That's for more ephemeral communities.

> What caused Discord to become more popular than Matrix?

Its focus on gaming communities.

I think it is pretty simple really. If your goal is reaching the largest number of people through communication, you kind of have to adopt whatever is "meta."

Aka the network effect.

> People choose platforms because of their functionality, not because of their code licensing status

Some people, valuable open source contributors in particular, choose to use software exactly based on its licensing status.

I don't mind paying for software but I do mind running binary blob that I have no idea what it does. I also mind being unable to fix an irritating issue which, with open source, I at least have a potential to be able to fix myself.

> People choose platforms because of their functionality, not because of their code licensing status

I choose software based on the freedom behind their licenses and always will. I value my relationships with others over mere technical differences.

I hope you at least learn something of our existence, besides that without people who think and act this way, there'd be no Wikipedia, Linux, Wordpress, or alternative to Windows.

people chose those things due to superiority, not any dogmatic reason. i.e. wordpress was there and does what you expect it to. (besides, linux displaces windows on the server, but not on the desktop for reasons.)

imagine an alternate universe where wikipedia was a ghost town devoid of information, but hey, it's open!

> People choose platforms because of their functionality, not because of their code licensing status

Licensing status is part of "functionality".

If 3rd parties cannot deploy their own instance and federate/mirror contents the whole community is in lock-in.

Closed source walled gardens are not eternal. The change policies, start charging money or shut down.

This endlessly fragments the user community. This bad functionality.

oh, you don't know what you're talking about! let me tell you why IRC is vastly superior...

* tomasklaen has quit IRC (*.net *.split)

This isn't a problem intrinsic to IRC; Ergo solved it: https://github.com/ergochat/ergo/blob/master/docs/USERGUIDE....

I find myself happy in asceticism too. I've seen a few discords about different topics and crowds and I found no better organizational improvement, or even communication. It's no study, just a feel (don't hit me) but you'd expect a vague tangible sensation, but I saw the same exact medium level convos you'd find elsewhere.

I've been more enthralled by dusty mailing list threads. Oh and to illustrate my point, good old c2 wiki had infinitely more value than discord ever had, even though it provided near nothing beside text edits.

Disregarding closed source issue I find Discord, any chat, unsuitable as a public user-developer interface.

Why?

1. Asynchrony. User needs time to collect data, write a bug report and so on. Developer needs time to reproduce the issue, work on it. Finally there are a lot of timezones - people ask/answer at different points of time.

2. Long lasting. Communication can take days, weeks and even months as new details emerge. Accessing a year old thread should be as easy as accessing a thread created yesterday.

3. Publicity. You want everything written to be as public as possible. Read access should be available to everyone without registration. Read access should be available via web browser. So that other users (who often experience the same issues) can easily find existing communication on the topic, and if they can't find it themselves you can at least send them a link which brings me to permanence.

4. Permanence. Each individual communication (message) should be accessible by a URI which never changes. Each individual communication page should have links to thread/parent/children/references.

5. Searchability. Follows from (3) and (4) but the easier it is for a user to find past discussions - the less noise you'll have.

Chat systems such as Discord, Slack or Matrix are fundamentally incompatible with these requirements as they are focused on synchronous, ephemeral communication.

Permanence, long lasting messages and cross-server replication are one of the primary selling points of the Matrix protocol.

Discord servers can be configured to not require an account

Each message has a URL. You can easily copy a link to a message.

Discord allows you to search all messages in a server and use filters too.

> Discord servers can be configured to not require an account

But literally no one does this because of spam concerns

> Discord allows you to search all messages in a server and use filters too.

In Discord, while a forum or github issues or whatever will show up in your general internet search engine of choice.

> Discord allows you to search all messages in a server and use filters too.

Which is an absolutely terrible experience if you've ever actually needed to.

> Discord servers can be configured to not require an account

Still requires Javascript, no SEO, popups and nagging dialogs, overall bad experience.

I think it’s a mistake to assume that developers can, or should, only talk to each other in one specific way.

Every project I’m involved in has some mix of ephemeral chat and more permanent, long-lived communication. It could be as simple as a Discord and GitHub issues. Everyone understands that the chat is for quick conversations and GitHub issues is where things are documented for collaboration.

In my experience, trying to force everyone into a single mode of communication becomes more of a problem. GitHub issues are impossible to follow when they have hundreds of side debates that should have been chats. IRC logs are impossible to consume when you have to search for vague keywords through endless months of backlogs to try to parse out specific topics.

Let people discuss things where it fits best.

The Zig programming language approach to communications is a great example of what you advocate: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/wiki/Community

I disagree.

Matrix has perma links to messages and can be indexed by Google.

Asynchrony: threading should help here, perhaps also with long lasting

I disagree; of the requirements listed, only #1 is part of my needs from a publicly-accessible text chat group for a project. The remainder are familiar, but for various reasons and in certain combinations can end up promoting and enabling unsafe environments for healthy interpersonal discussion, so I no longer consider them as mandatory as I used to.

To contrast our needs, my number one requirement from a chat system is that free-text searches of discussions cannot be performed without limit by non-members and non-participants.

(I’m fine with bug trackers existing, of course.)

Others have already pointed out that pretty much all your point are wrong (1 is also wrong incidentally, discord is not a phone call, and wrt 2 nothing prevent moving discussion off of discord if it turns out to be a large undertaking, that doesn't remove the value of the simpler and more accessible channel as first step), but aside from that sometimes you want to ask a question about a question e.g. you've noticed something you find odd and have not seen whether it was normal or not, or you think that something is missing but don't know whether it's considered in scope for the project.

Opening an issue is a huge signal, putting in little investment means the issue is likely to be closed with barely a look, and putting in a huge amount of investment is a waste of time when the issue gets closed as out of scope.

Having a less formal channel with lower investment from all parties is useful.

On a related note, I’ve found myself actively seeking alternatives (edit: to the project itself, not just to chat) when an OSS project only has a chat-based community as opposed to forums or mailing-lists, for two (edit: three) reasons:

- it’s impossible to search chats meaningfully, whereas forums/DLs let you quickly figure out if you’re facing a common issue (and finding resolutions easily)

- asking about something in chat and tracking replies a day or two later (because you will quite likely not get a quick reply to complex issues) is also quite hard unless you just happen to be awake at the same time as a core dev and can actually spend the time together (although that usually devolves into “file an issue with more details and tag me”).

- I don’t want to sign up for a dozen different services or private forums to even access that info.

Not to mention that (depending on community) you might just get a lot of irrelevant chatter thrown in, or just plain “this is the wrong channel” replies because there are no signposts.

I don't like mailing lists, it feels a bit dated to me, and you either get a lot of noise in your inbox or hope that people don't forget to CC you when replying. Forums are OK, but do you really need one for most projects when there's GitHub issues and even discussions now?

I personally like it when there's a chat (Discord, Telegram, whatever), it shouldn't be a replacement for an issue tracker but there can be things that aren't clear-cut issues, and I feel less embarrassed to ask in a chat if some behavior is intentional rather than opening an issue.

Mailing-lists are the most effective way to keep track of things long-term and “catch up”, and they are trivial to filter into a folder IMHO.

I disagree, mailing lists suffer from many issues. Editing or deleting messages is impossible, which means moderation is also impossible unless you force pre-approval for every post. There is no reasonable way to categorize discussions after the fact, only creating separate lists and hoping people post in the correct place. Trying to share code is the worst, you have a few options here:

* Attach it and hope everyone's clients handle attachments properly (especially the online archive will likely not include them).

* Include it inline and hope people aren't using a proportional font and it's formatted correctly in the archive. (I've recently had the displeasure of the python-ideas mailing list archive "helpfully" formatting >>> [which is the Python REPL prompt, so you'd think they would have thought of this] into a 3 levels deep blockquote. Thank god we're using such ancient technology in 2021 which makes it impossible to edit the message to correct it!)

* Post it on a pastebin, and hope the link isn't dead in a few years when someone is trying to find a solution to their problem in the mailing list archives a few years later.

None of those are real problems, IMHO, and Discord or chat certainly don't solve them either.

Then again, I've used mailing lists since UUCP and VMS, so maybe I'm just exp^Wold.

Editing messages and sharing code isn't a real problem? Seriously? And how does Discord not solve them, when it's one button to edit and three backticks to share code?

Going to play the devil's advocate for a minute here.

I've found discord's search feature to be quite powerful, specially if servers are well partitioned into channels based on topic, and are searched(and therefore indexed) semi-frequently. It's not as good as a search engine, but throwing some keywords in there does often get me the answer I'm looking for.

Also regarding irrelevant chatter, discord's gotten a lot better with that since the recent introduction of the threads feature, allowing each discussion to branch off into its own thread instead of getting intermingled.

Discord's search cannot look across multiple "servers". If I remember saying something to one of three groups of friends, but cannot remember which one it was, I need to repeat the search once for each "server".

It is still much worse than searching a forum, at least in my experience. Or just using Google.

Zulip is threaded by default, with mandatory topic keywords as title, so pretty much a hybrid chat/forum solution. Maybe you want to take a look at for example https://rust-lang.zulipchat.com/ to see how it works.

It still requires me to sign up for another service instead of just browsing and searching.

> it’s impossible to search chats meaningfully, whereas forums/DLs let you quickly figure out if you’re facing a common issue (and finding resolutions easily)

From a user's perspective, that's a more important aspect than the underlying platform being FOSS. Also as a maintainer, I would neither want to answer the same questions again and again nor would I like to create the impression of answering in real time, as chat clients usually do.

I don't care if it's Gitter, GitHub discussions, or a mailing list, but please make it easy for search engines to index the messages instead of placing them behind a proprietary wall like on discord.

I've never arrived at a gitter chat log from a Google search result where the search result was in the page.

I remember a while ago I was very much in the "I guess it's ok to use Discord, even if I don't like it". A number of tech/programming communities are there, and so I participated despite having a bad feeling about it.

Now more recently I started receiving my first "hey we believe there is something wrong with your account, attach a (first time, new) phone number to it to join this server". That is most likely a lie of course, Discord just wants to blackmail me into giving them my phone number. Also apparently there is an option to make an attached phone number mandatory in order to join a server, which quite a number communities activate for some reason.

So it turns out the bad feeling was correct.

Its more likely that they just want the number for Multi-factor authentication. Not that I like, that every site now asks for a phone number. But it is more of a security reason. Otherwise there must be real people involved in oder to restore your account. It also insures that most of the user accounts are no sock puppets. Not every user has access to vast ammounts of mobile phone numbers.

Another great thread, describing this dilemma is "Don't build your castle in other people's kingdoms" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29108662

In discords defense: It was never made for open source projects in mind, but gamers and small private communities. Having a free service provided might come with traps and pitfalls, but I would prefer that over having only paid online services. Choose your poison. I don't think discord is the right choice for FOSS communities.

It's to prevent people from creating unlimited "anonymous" accounts. Phone numbers cost money and are, in many cases, something that can identify you if needed.

Ah sorry. I did not see your comment while editing mine to include this argument as well.

It's also a good way to signal to investors and advertising partners about how many real humans actively use their services versus how many bots are using them.

> Its more likely that they just want the number for Multi-factor authentication.

You can do that with an app or an U2F key. You don't need a phone number for that and, in fact, SMS-based 2FA is mostly discouraged by now due to sim swapping attacks.

So it boils down to avoiding sock puppets (most likely IMO) and to collect your data (which is something nice to get on top).

The reason for having SMS-based 2FA as a default is that it's At least something.

Adding a U2F token and having SMS as a backup means that you don't have people locked out because their yubikey failed -- which happens.

Discord is trying to solve some of the bootstrapping problems that arise from "oh fuck my computer and phone were both stolen" -- which, again, happens.

While it's annoying, the reason communities activate this is to reduce spam/bot accounts.

It's a big problem on Discord and requiring a phone number linked to the account helps quite a bit :(

Same goes for twitch. Found this cozy stream and followed. Was called out, wished a merry christmas.

Wanted to say thanks, but couldn't, because apparently "verified accounts only chat" is a thing.

Well, not gonna share my phone number with the world.

My phone number is kinda holy to me.

Uhm that thing about the phone number is a totally losing battle. You should adapt by getting a burner phone with a separate number.

Or I just don't use such services.

I know it's not en vogue, but abstinence is one possible solution.

I don't feel like having to pay 10€/year for a burner phone (so the SIM isn't deactivated)

It's fine, I can live without most of these services just fine.

And if I can't any longer, I will walk that bridge then.

How do you achieve multi factor auth at all then, if you regard tour phone number to be a secret.

I only have multi factor auth enabled for clients of mine

Apart from that I use strong passwords.

Wasn't hacked in over 20 years :)

Your password can be as strong as it can possibly be, but a lot of services nowadays require MFA.

Correct and I don't use most of such services.

I survived without them before, I will now.

And I have more spare time then, to read, to exercise, to enjoy nature, to code...

TOTP does not require a phone number, and it's not vulnerable to SIM jacking.

That's up to the broadcaster not Twitch, everyone can set on their own.

https://i.imgur.com/im2JAkc.png

Well aware. It's not the only stream I am interested in.

Also similar to discord, because so far I wasn't forced to add a number there.

Maybe it's not up to the server owner, but it's also not mandatory on the whole discord platform

Up to the server owners

https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/216679607-What...

Thanks, so it's actually totally similar to Twitch.

Also not very inclusive, if you ask me.

I know people who have no phone on purpose :)

A lot of smaller Streamer only allow verified accounts only because there is a lot of spam happening and they don't have enough mods to deal with that

Was the first small streamer with such a restriction for me. (Mostly following small streamers, being a tiny one myself ;))

That's totally fine, I am not mad at them, I understand their motives.

It's then just simply not for me, is all.

You'll also enable it when your chat starts getting flooded with spam bots.

Na, I'll code a counter measure on stream and have fun with it.

Or just leave twitch g

Just an unimportant hobby, is all ;)

It does however sound like you put the blame on Twitch. Streamers are demanding more ways to combat spam. The community wants more intrusive verification, not less.

There is no sound in written word. While I totally get what you mean (being a non native speaker), I don't care as much as I did.

It's the same tone for me as was used on Discord. There it's also not discord, but the server owners (as I learned a few comments down)

Apart from that: yes, I somehow blame the "give us your phonenumber approach". It's a lazy solution and a couple of years back, before the "war on terror/drugs/childporn/whatever" we used to get sim cards without r egistration and a DNA test (the later is a slight exaggeration ;))

And of course big companies such as Amazon or Discord love data such as the phone number.

It's a super data point to link profiles across a variety of services

Is there really a lot of spam? In my experience, I just saw a robot subscription storm once in the past year at a small streamer (~100 people). I watch twitch roughly 3hr+/day.

Unfortunately a lot of twitch streamers get some very unpleasant spam attacks - things like racist chat flooding using bots.

Requiring an account to be verified, or a follower, or in extreme cases a subscriber is the only practical response as twitch moderation tools are practically useless.

I get robo-called and scam-called every day, several times a day. Do you? I am interested to know whether your cautious behavior involving sharing phone numbers helps you to avoid this sort of attention.

I haven't even thought about it that way yet. I just generally want to avoid sharing things with companies unless really necessary. But no, I rarely if ever receive calls of that kind.

I get spam calls every day and they leave voicemails. Until a few months ago, I had disabled incoming calls on my phone because of this but recently had to activate it for a specific reason.

Often, the spam calls spoof the number to be either my OWN number or my area code too.

Phone number verification is purely one of many ways for Discord to drive down the amount of spam. Not used for any other purposes. We’re ofc working hard on enabling alternative solutions.

Source: I lead the anti-abuse team at Discord

Do you understand how invasive it feels to be asked for a phone number?

For most people, not really?

Plenty of apps require it now, and I wouldn't be surprised if it overtook email as the standard verifier.

As a multi-time victim of SIM swaps and even a related SWATing, I sure as hell hope not.

I think this is a generation gap thing. Most people under 30 don’t call or text anyway, so a phone number feels like pretty useless and low priority personal information.

I don't call or text much, but I don't appreciate how phone numbers cost money and are intrinsically tied to your personal identity (unless you're an adult and spend time and money shopping for burner phones), whereas email addresses and Matrix accounts are permissionless.

The phone number being tied to your identity is the entire point. If you get banned from a community are you really going to go to Verizon and ask for a new one every time you want to join again? The alternative is the kind of problem that is all too common on IRC where a troll keeps making burner accounts faster than the mods can ban them and generally ruining the experience for everyone else in the channel.

… you really think most people under 30 don’t text?

Not via SMS in my experience, no.

Your experience is a bubble, and a very different claim than "most people under 30 don't text"

I imagine this is geographic. Texts are quite expensive in some places, and that means people use alternatives instead. Also some people had pervasive mobile phone usage for a long time before smartphones made other options available, which I imagine would add to their popularity. Here in Denmark SMS is very entrenched, but I know it varies in other countries.

I thought it was pretty clear I was referring to SMS by context given that other forms of texting don’t require a phone number

I'm under 20 and still share the same opinions with most in this thread. I don't give out my phone number unless I'm talking to you in person.

Then don't use the service...

> Not used for any other purposes

...for now. I'll never give out my phone number to discord. The messages aren't even E2E encrypted.

I understand the concern, trust me. We’re working on alternative methods.

So let's say that in the future you got this alternative method deployed but then, what happens with already acquired phone numbers? Will you remove it once this method will be running nicely? Or you'll keep phone numbers giving a promise you won't use it to anything naughty and users will have choice to either keep it for "security purposes", or they will have ability to remove it by themselves directly from the client or by going the longer way, asking support to remove it from account data? Can you tell which solutions were considered so far?

Also, not sure if you're aware there but in some countries it's no longer possible to use SIM card without registering it first under name and last name and that means, the state has a possibility to track your online presence.

If you give me the option to verify my account for 1$ or something like that instead, I'd much prefer and just use that and accept it as an alternative. If phone number is enforced as the only option, I find it hard to believe that spam is the only reason you want it and that the phone number won't be used for other things (in the future).

As has been said, there is sadly little reason to trust a company in that regard. Usages of user data are always expanded upon, official (or unofficial) promises from companys aren't worth anything, and leaks also happen all the time.

Honestly, after running into the phone number requirement it's gonna be hard to get back my trust.

You required the phone number after you got all my account details. You wouldn't let me remove my account without first giving you my phone number. When I contacted your support to get you to delete my data, a simple back and forth like "you're gonna lose all your data!" and "I don't have any data" made them completely fail the Turing test. It's clear they don't really read what I was writing, they're just responding to whatever the first thought is that comes to their head.

I don't know if they're overworked, underpaid, or have quotas. Either way, none of the experience of trying to join an OSS development channel on Discord are in any way conductive towards trust. I mean, I couldn't even copy and paste the phone number requirement error message.

Provide a specific commitment. What methods, and when will they become available? "We're working on it" is worthless and when I'm told this I assume I am being blown off.

This phone number thing is a deal-breaker for me. Skipped several communities over that in fact.

I can't be bothered to fetch a burner sim every time someone or other wants a number.

And I'm not giving out any of my more permanent numbers to who knows whom.

I have enough spam and phishing attempts on them already, thank you very much.

(and it's not like I imply that you're behind the attempts, it's just numbers leak left and right)

Create a Google voice number and use it as a burner for all such accounts?

They probably block Google voice numbers, many similar services do.

I run into issues occasionally, but my GV number works more often than not.

i get phone numbers for pennies on the dollar, who do you think you're stopping?

Honestly, even if you're only paying $0.01 to send some random spam message before your number is blacklisted and message deleted, that's a pretty shit cost per click.

I'm not a spam guy, but even small costs like that would massively change the economics of bulk spam.

The many, many people who can’t. You can’t stop every spammer, but you sure can stop the angry twelve-year-olds.

Can you link to any terms of service, where it guarantees that pure use in a transparent way, so that I do not have to take word for it?

Terms of service can change at any time. If the data gets collected, given enough time, there is a non-zero chance that someone will look at it and go "how can we make money from this?"

That is true of course. I would like to have some terms, that really guarantee, that this aspect would not change and then I would like to see transparency in how data is handled on their end. Maybe those are not TOS then? What would that be called?

Facebook also once said that phone numbers will only be used for 2FA.

Given your entire business model is "growth and engagement", there is no reason to trust your word. It may be true currently but this can change at any time.

If they're only used for driving down the amount of spam, why don't you say so? You're not the only ones to do this, but I find "there's a problem with your account" demeaning as hell. If you want to use phone numbers to enforce one account per physical person, say so.

This is the spirit of the GDPR, by the way: collect as little information as possible and only use it for purposes that are related to the service you're providing. This seems like a very fair, very obvious deal, and you could just be open about what you're doing.

I registered an account several years ago, and it was blocked requesting phone number verification. I've been using it as a human for several years now. Why does it instantly get blocked again when I remove my phone number? Do you still, after several years of nonstop human use, owning servers, enabling 2FA, see me as a bot?

Resolved this with nyanpasu64.

Most other chat services use the phone number as a unique identifier that aids discovery of other people the users know. So using it just to drive up the cost of sending spam is kind of a waste. If the phone number was used as an identifier then most would be happy to just ignore attempts to start a discussion from people they don't presently have in their phone book.

In general, there are better approaches to avoiding spam in an IM system...

Interestingly, IRC operators also combat spam. But they never ask your phone number.

Spam does happen on IRC, but gets shut down eventually. Same as Discord and other messaging platforms.

I’ve run into far less spam on Discord than I have on IRC

Gee, you are doing a terrible job. Not even kidding, "Elon Musk profile picture Twitter account tweeting about giveaways" level of ineffective. You got the reverse problem too of banning perfectly normal users for spurious reasons and losing them in a support hell of "this decision is final".

There needs to be another way. Requiring attaching a unique physical identity (which phone number effectively is in many countries) is in my book unacceptable and the moment I saw that was a thing I immediately deleted my account and started trying to push people and projects away from it.

I can't believe how many people are having a negative to reaction to you saying, essentially, "We're doing the best we can." I can't begin to imagine the type of horrible stuff you and your team have to see on a daily basis.

> Not used for any other purposes

I'm willing to trust that you are there to help enforce the "not used for any other purposes." ... What happens when you leave the company? History says that 5 years down the road after the current team leaves, these numbers magically start being used for marketing, etc.

Discord already has a huge problem with spam as-is. Yes, it may suck to be randomly locked out of your account when you haven't done anything wrong, but if they removed the requirement altogether it would just open the floodgates even more. Even if you don't trust them fully, they're not some random shady website that's likely to leak your number or use it for advertising. I've been regularly providing my phone number to big services like Discord for years and have never once received spam calls or texts for them. In the incredibly rare case that I do get spam it's always some Hungarian number rather than a foreign one, and they probably just got my number from some public database. It's much more common to get spam via email instead.

Either way, it's pretty easy to get a burner SIM or use Google Voice (if you're in the US), or services like getsmscode.com which provide disposable phone numbers that work with hundreds of major services for 10 cents per SMS, and you can even pay with crypto.

It feels like more than a coincidence that the flavor of "security" that comes out of these companies hinges on infringements of ever increasing amounts of their users' privacy.

> Even if you don't trust them fully, they're not some random shady website that's likely to leak your number or use it for advertising.

The last few years of leaks and hacks say that trust should never be implicit. Every company has the incentive to use your data for profit.

> It feels like more than a coincidence that the flavor of "security" that comes out of these companies hinges on infringements of ever increasing amounts of their users' privacy.

It is the same as in politics: saying 'because security', is a very convenient and easy way to get about anything accepted, little by little.

My opinion, but I think this a Stallman-esque, overexagerrated and unrealistic thing to say. Discord is by far the best chat/voice client, any alternative you try to mention, I'm sorry but it's inferior in atleast a dozen ways.

If you don't want to alienate those of your users who are so allergic to proprietary software - what about alienating all the users who prefer discord and don't want to install whatever "free" alternative you suggest? Serious question, because in my experience, the amount of people in the latter outnumber the other 100:1. Almost every developer I know loves having all their projects and developer communities on discord, and get annoyed when there's one using IRC that we want to interact with.

Another thing to consider is, how user/developer friendly discord is (privacy/donating to open source/opensourcing their tech/etc), its not like they're some big evil company - their code is proprietary, they're a business.

I completely respect you personally not wanting to use discord for FOSS projects, as a matter of principle/ideology, but I just think it's not realistic or practical.

> their code is proprietary, they're a business.

Their code can be proprietary, but their protocol shouldn't be. Walled gardens are antithetical to the spirit that built the internet, and no amount of donations can't change the fact that Discord is bad for the net.

I'm not surprised they don't want to "un-wall" their garden to satisfy a truely tiny amount of people. The "walled garden" is an argument that goes in circles, what if we all like our walled garden? Apple too, for example. If there were more competitors outside of the wall that would be a lot more beneficial, than trying to attack the wall because users are so happy they don't want to leave it.

It's because most people don't understand the societal consequences of it.

We are dependent on the whims of single companies like no other time in history.

What could those whims be? To go out of business?

> We are dependent on the whims of single companies like no other time in history.

If discord whom one might depend upon, on a whim shut down, there are about 50 alternatives. The consumer has the most power they have ever had in history, and the companies are all desperately hoping that they are not going into the wikipedia page next to myspace (at least until the c-suite cashes out).

Chat forums are so incredibly low stakes anyway, that the disappearence of a handfull would probably be a net contributer to the world anyway. Nothing of great value would be lost. So the societal consequences you speak of are meaningless.

I disagree that we are dependent on the whims of single companies more than anytime in history.

In fact, once you go 100 years or more back, I think most of history is dominated by major monopolies, trusts, and nation-sized companies in ways that we can't fathom. There is no East India Trading Company today. There is no U.S. Steel or Rockefeller Standard Oil. There is no Big 3 newsmedia companies controlling all news.

Just saying, a little historical perspective is useful.

> satisfy a truely tiny amount of people

If this were true: Why go after the people creating alternate clients, as Discord has apparently done a number of times now? Apparently "un-walling" is not a problem here, people not being walled quite as hard (without any involvement or development cost for discord themselves) is.

Devil's advocate:

Because things like unauthorized clients make abuse easier. If you control the client, you can do more than if you merely control the API.

They've sent out cease and desists to every project trying to create an alternative experience like TUI for those on lower resources or want to cut a lot of the 'crap' and tracking out of the app.

Their protocol has been reverse engineered. I've been making bots since the early days and it started from people reverse engineering the protocol. Discord has done a ton to support bot makers.

Communities and their documentation need to be resilient to change. Discord is just the chat app du jour. There will be other seemingly preferred apps in the future that will annoy some people if you don't use them. When that happens, you cannot migrate your community and its content. It lives in, and belongs to, Discord's walled garden.

I generally agree with you here. However I think there's some nuance, are you suggesting discord add a way to export all the data of a server (copy my messages), so you can move it to another platform? It sounds like potential privacy issues/violations to me. I think it's not that simple. I don't disagree they should reasonably allow you to easily migrate.

But you can migrate. Have a bot running bridging both apps and then phase the old one slowly out. Like

https://github.com/reactiflux/discord-irc

https://t2bot.io/discord/

That way you are not stuck in an ecosystem. Sure some ppl will always be unhappy and looking up content in the old system is subpar but thats the nature of the game.

Discord could ban that bot whenever they feel like.

Stallman was right.

I like Stallman. He's a man of principles, we need people like him to stand up and advocate for the things he does. But his ways are extreme and not something that's reasonable for many people.

I thought about the same when I listened to him live like 20 years ago, then SCO vs Linux happened, the Sony rootkit happened, mobile spyware disguised as apps happened, devices with built-in privacy violation code happened, etc. So, yes, he's an extremist and uncomfortable at times, but we badly need others like him in the tech field.

To point out problems and as a voice of warning: I absolutely agree.

But on the other hand: a lot of negative things happened because a lot of things happened. I doubt we'd have a similar amount of things happening if everyone only used the purest of pure software and "learn, configure, maintain and run seven services so you can use chat" was what everyone does.

Having zero wiggle room is terrible for making progress.

Stallman never advocated that everyone should learn, configure, maintain and run seven services so you can use chat.

If you like Stallman you've never worked with him. But he was right about this.

> what about alienating all the users who prefer discord and don't want to install whatever "free" alternative you suggest?

You don‘t need to install anything. There are web IRC clients, and you don‘t even need an account. It‘s actually easier to use and has a lower barrier of entry in that regard.

You don't need to install discord either. It works just fine on the web client, and this was (I assume) largely why it got so popular at first.

You have to create an account, agree to a shady ToS, and solve hCAPTCHA sudokus leaking data over to Cloudflare, and your session isn't saved when you restart your browser so you have to go through that whole annoying flow every time you want to use the web client.

Discord only requires you to input a name. Some servers have configured themselves to be more locked down because of spam.

>your session isn't saved when you restart your browser

This has never happened to me. Have you tried with a fresh instance of chrome / firefox with no extensions?

I have it in an isolated Firefox container for a single contract project with uBlock, uMatrix, and Privacy Possum, and blocking third-party cookies. If there's an issue with this setup, maybe there should be an issue as I won't be disabling these extensions.

Maybe umatrix is blocking needed cookies? It's easy to break apps with umatrix.

> "Needed"

If it's not first party, it's probably not needed--especially if it's with Cloudflare.

> Some servers have configured themselves to be more locked down because of spam.

every server I've clicked on has required logging into discord (and an account means also providing an email+DoB), is there really a majority of servers that only require entering a nick?

Most servers I run only require a nick. It's not unheard of in IRC land for channels to require you make an account.

I have never found anything about discord to be that compelling.

You are trying to dismiss FOSS using the word "ideological".

Describing using closed source IM as "practical" and FLOSS ones "overexaggerated" is in itself an example of ideology.

> Almost every developer I know loves having all their projects and developer communities on discord, and get annoyed when there's one using IRC that we want to interact with.

Consider that this is likely the result of bias in your social circles. While I have no doubts Discord is currently the most popular, the "almost all" part is the result of bias. For me, it's the opposite, again a result of bias.

Regarding practicality, I think Matrix (specifically via Element) is definitely practical today and improving extremely quickly. This holds even more due to the existence of bridges to other protocols, including Discord.

> its not like they're some big evil company

Unsure how you want to quantify this, and I'm curious what makes you say that. Are you affiliated with Discord in some way? I'm not trying to accuse you.

Even if it is true and Discord is some benevolent company when it comes to their long term intentions (which we can't know): The thing with companies is that their leadership is always subject to change.

It's not like we have any shortage of companies betraying the trust of their users, leaking data due to either user hostility or negligence, becoming shitty or "evil", or even turning their product into something entirely different.

Almost every company is an aspiring "big, evil" company, and they can pull out the rug whenever they feel. Discord fits the mould of proto-bigevil-co exactly. What companies in their position reliably do is be as inviting as possible until they have solidified a dominant position, e.g. through network effects, then turn up the pain and the profits when it's safe.

The only question is whether they get big enough and safe enough to start abusing their position.

It's a complete kafkatrap. Everything is great, which is how you know they're evil.

I think the piece overlooks the fact that most FOSS software these days is written by corporate America for corporate America. This became apparent back when Redhat was being sued by SCO for Unix copyright infringement. Turns out IBM had "donated" a bunch of code to Linux, including their journaling file system code that had once been part of AIX. It is a moot point to ask FOSS developers to use FOSS tools when most FOSS code these days is donated by corporate America.

I find it interesting you label this "Stallman-esque" when time has shown Stallman was pretty dead on.

I recently did a little survey of the top 2,000,000+ GitHub repositories and found (corrected) 28k listed a Discord, 4.3k a Slack, and 1.4k a Matrix chat room[0] This is one of the reasons I chose Matrix for a new game engine project I'm working on.

Highly encourage anyone who has not used Matrix/Element since they added Spaces[1] to give it a shot, it is not perfect but it's the closest FOSS messaging system to reproducing the Discord experience (which I truly love, a good UX is so absolutely critical)

[0] https://twitter.com/slimsag/status/1474453626328207362?s=20

[1] https://element.io/blog/spaces-blast-out-of-beta/

Note that there's an error in the assumptions behind the discord regex, discord invites do not necessarily have "invite" in the url, and may use the domain discord.gg instead. For instance the yarn repo[0] uses the url "https://discord.gg/yarnpkg" which was missed by your search. Another worthwhile mention is the Svelte repo[1], which uses discord, but instead of linking directly to their discord invite, links to "https://svelte.dev/chat" which then redirects to their discord invite.

Looking for the "discord.gg/invitecode" pattern[2] gives 27k results, safe to say discord is severely under-represented in your statistic.

[0] https://github.com/yarnpkg/yarn

[1] https://github.com/sveltejs/svelte

[2] https://sourcegraph.com/search?q=context:global+https://disc...

Bah! Can't believe I fumbled that, thanks. Looks like the most accurate count, if you include both, is then:

* 28k for Discord[0]

* 1.4k for Matrix[1]

[0] https://sourcegraph.com/search?q=context:global+%28https://d...

[1] https://sourcegraph.com/search?q=context:global+https://matr...

Another interesting number: 4.3k for Slack (`https://join.slack.com`)

Spaces is the most important thing I miss in Slack. The use of different accounts for different communities is understandable in the business point of view, but is very unacceptable for people just curious about multiple open-source projects. They are also adding conversation threading [1], which I think is one of the most notorious features of Slack.

The thing I like about Matrix is they are basically implementing every feature in the other platforms, so it's just a matter of time before we get a decent UI that can compete with the existing platforms

[1] https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/pull/3440

This is my point as well. I can see the Slack model of basically completely independent workspaces works well for something that I am doing full-time but for open source work it is just too much effort to follow. Discord is better but I still find that switching between different servers is a lot of clicking and for non-focused servers you only see server-level read/unread.

I really like the Matrix (and WhatsApp, FB Messenger, Telegram...) model where every chat is just a different room that I can have in one recency list. Spaces of top of "just rooms" does a nice job to help discovery and filtering.

At least for how I work Matrix "Spaces" is actually the best UX for my personal life as opposed to "Servers" or "Workspaces". Element could definitely improve on other fronts but the way it "merges" my different communities on the client is excellent.

I agree that Discord ain't perfect, but over like 15 years of using various voips to talk with friends - ventrilo, mumble, teamspeak, skype and recently teams

I found Discord unparalleled - it has great chat, great voice, streaming, files/images sharing and also is centralized, thus secure for user.

I don't have to worry about joining random ass server and then getting DDoS'd (yes, stuff like this happens, especially in gaming from my experience)

___________

>Users who cannot afford new enough hardware to make the resource-intensive client pleasant to use are also left by the wayside. Choosing Discord is a choice that excludes poor

Sorry, but C++ compilers are N times more resource intensive than Discord's client

Where's the boundary? what's the minimal level that should we "require"?

Ability to code in VS Code? Visual Studio? JetBrain IDEs? ability to run Chrome? Firefox? VIM?

256 MB of RAM? NVMe M2 DISK?

________________

>are also locked out of the client until Discord sees fit to port it to their platform

How about via browser?

_______________

I'll go even further and provoke

You're increasing entry level for younger/newbie developers by using arcane and dated ways of contributing instead of "standards" like GitHub.

> Sorry, but C++ compilers are N times more resource intensive than Discord's client

I personally don't have a problem with discords client, but this statement does more to harm your argument than you think it does.

Compilation is a specialised process, and an intensive one.

You might as well say "Why shouldn't my wallpaper use all my resources? Video editing does!".

Niche workflows and one-off tasks are inherently different beasts than platform software which by its nature requires everyone to be running at the same time.

>Niche workflows and one-off tasks.

The context is about FOSS, I believe it's programming heavy, thus software compilation it's not niche workflow, but something that you do a few times per programming session.

Some people within project don't write code, but majority I'd say at least tries.

Where's middle ground?

OK, but here's my problem with that take:

1) CI/CD Systems exist, compilation does not have to be on my local machine. So do build farms. In Google compilation does not happen on your own machine.

2) Not all FOSS is compiled. (Python, Ruby, in some cases javascript; though that is increasingly not the case).

3) Not all FOSS contribution is compilation: Art, documentation, support.

So a compiler does not need to be run by "everyone". But discord/slack/teams/irc/zulip/matrix and outlook/thunderbird/gmail kinda need to be run by everyone.

In many cases the former (IM) need to be running all the time, where mail and others can run async.

So, with all due respect, don't try to pretend that instant messengers should not be held to a higher standard than our developer tools; where the output is more important than the tool itself.

>So, with all due respect, don't try to pretend that instant messengers should not be held to a higher standard than our developer tools; where the output is more important than the tool itself.

What are those standards?

Look - Discord/Slack/Teams at the end of the day can be accessed via web browser just like normal page.

I just checked and Microsoft Chrome with just Discord takes me 300MB of RAM

Is it a lot (in general)? no

Is it small amount? no.

Firefox with 13 opened pages (some of them are just static pages like HN) takes above 1GB.

What would be the amount that would satisfy you? 100MB? 50MB? 30MB?

I can tell by the tone of this comment that you're becoming aggravated.

Lets try to cool our heads a little, I'm not attacking you or your ideas.

The resource usage question is a real one, and nobody is going to give you a "standard" because it depends a lot, it depends what features are requested, it depends on what platforms it will be running.

As I stated previously: Discord is by no means the worst offender when it comes to system resources. But how does it compare to IRC?

Obviously there are way more features in discord.. and it looks nicer! Surely that's worth something! Yes, it's worth something.

It can be interesting to take the reasons that people give for choosing discord (or, slack): Inclusivity.

If you listen to certain people then you might believe that connecting to Zulip/Matrix or IRC requires a PhD.

But it is less inclusive to force your users to eat up a "good portion" of their machine to talk to you.

Discord for me, across its various processes is using about 400MB of ram after I open clean. This goes to about 900MB of ram if I leave it running all day, which I'm fine with because I have 32GB of ram.

A person with a "modern household computer" (IE: a school age person who has what their parents would consider a "good enough" computer) might have 8G of ram, I know some people still using 4G of ram because their parents don't think more ram is worth buying a new computer after spending $500 two years ago.

Are you comfortable taking nearly 1/4th-1/8th of a persons computer because you like the pretty images of discord?

---

I should note, again, that discord is not the worst. But slack used to chew through multiple gigs of memory and pin a CPU core with the gif rendering for me. So while I definitely have a cross to burn about performance, my grievance is not specifically towards discord; but my "problem" would be completely alleviated if I could just use a third party client. But these walled garden companies do not want that.

> "standards" like GitHub.

GitHub is a for profit American company owned by Microsoft. They are beholden to no one other than their board, share holders, and US export control laws. Do not make the mistake of thinking they offer free repository hosting out of good will or altruism.

I never said that they aren't doing it for money, but the giant majority of developers uses GH, thus it makes is some kind of standard.

On job interviews they ask you about your GH (by default)

That's some bullshit IMO. The interviewers should ask for your Git forge(s) and not specify platform. I recently helped a team doing interviews and I had them do this. Did they get only GitHub links? Yes, but this didn't exclude anyone nor did it implicitly promote a platform and all candidates seemed to understand.

Ok, my bad on this saying that recruiters suggest GH, but

What is one popular advice that people wanting to enter the industry do receive?

- put some stuff on *gh*, very often.

> I found Discord unparalleled - it has great chat, great voice, streaming, files/images sharing

Discord's voice and streaming are kind of crappy.

> Sorry, but C++ compilers are N times more resource intensive than Discord's client

Uh, I don't know what you're on. Discord's client is web-based and you claim it is less resource intensive than a C++ compiler?

> Where's the boundary? what's the minimal level that should we "require"?

> Ability to code in VS Code? Visual Studio? JetBrain IDEs? ability to run Chrome? Firefox? VIM?

> 256 MB of RAM? NVMe M2 DISK?

Not sure what you're talking about.

> You're increasing entry level for younger/newbie developers by using arcane and dated ways of contributing instead of "standards" like GitHub.

Sourcehut is by no means "arcane". Neither are Matrix, nor Mastodon.

He didn't say everyone should send patches by email to mailing lists.

>Uh, I don't know what you're on. Discord's client is web-based and you claim it is less resource intensive than a C++ compiler?

I do. On bigger projects C++ compiler can be as heavy as triple A games.

for comparison: I compiled C# compiler in 1/nth of the time that it took me compiling LLVM and it didnt ate my all gigs of RAM.

>Not sure what you're talking about.

Author claims that some people don't have good enough hardware for Discord

That's fair, but what we should aim for? when I will know that my project's "environment" is too heavy because e.g I "require" contributors to use e.g some fancy tool like Docker with 5 containers that need 3GB of RAM

So I agree with this but not for any of the reasons the author states.

I find the UI/UX of Discord to be beyond awful, like really, really bad. Am I alone in this? I can never intuitively find a setting, for example. There are multiple settings buttons. Adding channels to your own Discord so you can collect notifications you're interested in sounds cool except it often doesn't work. I suspect the source Discord has disabled this. Why is that even possible?

the other big reason is discoverability. Finding things in a Discord is terrible. I've never seen Discord posts pop up in Google search so I suspect that's not possible. The search in Discord is of course bad (pretty much every non-Google search is bad, to be fair).

People don't care about it being a walled garden. They only care if it accomplishes the job they want it to.

The horrible UX is part of why I use Ripcord. In practice though, I would rather not use Discord at all - but I have to since that's where my friends and coworkers are, so the best I can do is a third-party client.

Checked out Ripcord, does it really look like this https://cancel.fm/ripcord/static/ripcord_screenshot_win_6.pn... ? Usability may be better but damn their design is from like the 90s. Have they ever heard of padding? And colours?

> Have they ever heard of padding? And colours?

my first reflex whenever I see a website with tons of paddings and colours is ctrl-w. gimme those win9x UIs please !!!

The worst searches I have encountered are Thunderbird and Discord. While Google is the gold standard, there's a whole range between the former two and the latter. Just fuzzy search goes a long way, but it seems Thunderbird and Discord only match whole words, exactly. The worst kind of search, but could be easily improved.

Check out Thingiverse, for the worst search engine in human history.

Please don't use any real-time chat as the main community channel. Use a discussion forum instead. FOSS projects last many years while rarely needing real-time collaboration -- using a "slower", more focused and more searchable communication platform makes better sense.

Also, and this is very subjective, from my experience real-time chat (Discord especially) allows toxic community members to be toxic without much fear of punishment since the interactions are ephemeral. Moreover, toxic people often lurk the channels 24/7 and thus are the first to respond to questions. Questions that happen to be "stupid" since the same question is asked often -- even though the last instance has already been drowned out by a half-kilometre of memes and off-topic talk.

This. The real problem is not communication. It is the online searchability of the issues and source code.

I'm about as far away from Drew as possible when it comes to my views about the benefits of open source yet I also loathe Discord as a method of supporting users because its essentially a memory hole. I want to be able to ask or answer a question once and then for it to be easily findable by a future user searching on the public web. That's just not possible with Discord, especially if a server shuts down.

A lot of the discussion around a large open source project I develop add-ons for has migrated onto Discord and it makes it an utter nightmare to work out what is happening, why certain design decisions were made, or get an answer about a technical question without directly contacting someone. If that discussion instead took place on their public forums (which is where it was previously) then I wouldn't have to bug someone 90% of the time.

What moaners of Discord often forget is that setting up your own IRC channel and monitoring that isn’t the value add for the FOSS project. It’s an additional maintenance overhead. So if maintainers choose Discord because it is easier for them to work with (and thus allows them more time to work in the FOSS project) then that’s a good enough reason to use Discord.

Furthermore as someone who does run some reasonably popular FOSS projects, I will also use whatever damn platform I chose because it’s my FOSS project.

Indeed, I think we have to be pragmatic when running a FOSS project. The infrastructure is chosen based on cost and required maintenance, not based on some FOSS ideal. That's why we're on GitHub and not hosting our own Git server, and we're on Discord for the same reason.

> By choosing Discord, you also lock out users with accessibility needs, for whom the proprietary Discord client is often a nightmare to use.

The author takes it for granted that accessibility issues are more prevalent in proprietary software like Discord (vs FOSS alternatives), is there any evidence to back this up? I ask because it seems counter-intuitive. Since most proprietary software in this space tend to have more users than their FOSS counterparts, it seems pretty straightforward to think that accessibility will be less of an issue in the former category (i.e., more users = taking into account and addressing more accessibility needs vs when you only have a few thousand users).

Maybe the logic is being open source encourages volunteers to address accessibility issues and submit patches? Although even that's debatable; unless the project is quite popular, there will always be shortage of volunteers.

One very simple point is: Forbidding third-party clients puts you at the mercy of the main developers caring about accessibility, a small-but-caring group of outsiders can't fix it. Whereas if you have an ecosystem of clients in an open system, a) users have a choice of options and can pick the one that suits their workflows best and b) don't have to rely on the main devs to care to be able to tweak one for their needs.

EDIT: this also supports the "bridge everything to IRC/Matrix/..." approach, since it lets people use whatever setup they already have working for their specific needs. And if Discord kills our bridge one day because "evil bot", well, rest of the group still works. And if something new and shiny comes up, sure, bridge it.

I mean, Discord have only recently committed to making it easier for blind people to use[1]. Their forums seem to have a lot of people complaining about accessibility issues too.

[1] https://www.lflegal.com/2021/10/discord-press/

Accessibility issues, user to user security and privacy issues, API design issues, developer relations issues...

Discord gets a lot of complaints but they seem focused on chasing their success metrics to the absolute exclusion of everything else. Those complaints don't register in their chosen and still upward trending metrics, therefore they don't matter. It doesn't matter that a significant part of Discord's growth is backed by users benefiting from bots which will be broken by the upcoming API changes, it doesn't matter that their developer relations are so bad that major developers are abandoning their projects instead of updating to the new API, all of this doesn't matter as it isn't being measured by their success metrics.

I guess it's a dual-edged sword: From my experience, I agree with you that proprietary software is more likely to provide accessibility options (because they usually have more funding and, sometimes, legal obligation), but if they don't, you're out of luck and can't change the situation.

The author is making a statement about Discord specifically, not proprietary software in general.

Sure but the argument seemed to be more general. From the article:

  Perceptive readers might have noticed that most of these 
  arguments can be generalized. This article is much the same 
  if we replace “Discord” with “GitHub”, for instance, or “ 
  Twitter” or “YouTube”.

There are some multi-protocol clients that are accessible and if the server uses an accessible protocol, it makes it more accessible. Sometimes commercial services are accessible, sometimes they are not and it is hit or miss. The big ones make an effort to cover that part of the market, but it might take them time to fix a11y bugs when they introduce one in the rush for new features.

Your logic is extremely flawed, accessibility at many commercial companies takes a back seat because it is not viewed as something that will drive metrics or adoption. Dev Time will be spent on things that will drive new users, or improve profitability, Accessibility rares makes that cut.

I am not sure where you believe that more users == more time given to accessibility features.

Open Source on the other hand is development driven by need, thus if an an open source software does not do what I need, I can modify to do that thing. This allows a small niche of users to adapt the software to meet their particular accessibility needs, or for a charity to pay a developer to do so, neither of which is possible with close source software. So at the end of the day people that need or want accessibility features have to shame the closed source companies into doing it, or have regulations passed that require it, both of which will result in just enough development time to either cover the regulations, or the bad PR, and likely will result in a subpar experience to that of Open Source (IMO)

And yet iPhone is one of the best examples of accessible product. Can you provide any examples supporting your "IMO"?

perfect example of foss accessibility issue: https://github.com/iSoron/uhabits

this dev refuse to consider accessibility as it means ui changes or new option. users with visual impair are unable to use app and dev just locks issue reported for it and ignores users. probably to boost number of dls/markerting.

even if user does a patch dev just closes and does his own thing that dont help. even foss projects kick contribs out for try to help

I find it remarkable how many people here will willingly defend discord as not being evil and "its fine, what could go wrong" and many will in the same breath decry facebook for being bad and privacy invading and so forth.

At one point in time facebook was cool and trendy and nobody was really freaking out about it. Discord can at the drop of a hat become a new facebook -- or get bought by facebook or some other megacorp that wont just bleed money on their investments and will start selling your information, and we can start the new cycle of everyone jumping on some hip new product that has all the same problems.

The average person (my parents, grandparents, all non technical) can successfully navigate email and its a bit insulting to the average person to insinuate that something like matrix/xmpp with a little bit more UX work is simply too hard for the layman to grok. Maybe discord is convenient right now but it wont be when everyone has to jump around to some new maybe less evil service.

Nitpick:

> Discord appears to inflate its participation numbers compared to other services. It shows all users who have ever joined the server, rather than all users who are actively using the server.

There are plenty of popular IRC channels full of sessions whose only activity is rejoining on disconnection. I mention this because the recent forced move from Freenode to Libera made me notice how many IRC names simply kept on joining Freenode during the period when all other activity on the channels has otherwise died and the topics were updated to point towards Libera.

To be fair, I rejoined most of the channels on Libera AND stayed in the Freenode channels to keep an eye on them (until they wiped all accounts overnight, didn’t re-register).

Yes, that's one other point that inflated the statistics a little bit - still, on the channels I was a part of, I kind of knew which names belonged to people who were active lurkers and which ones were names that I hadn't ever seen say a word.

This is absolutely true but "all users who could be bothered keeping a client running w/autoreconnect to that specific channel" is still less inflationary than "all users who bothered joining this channel cluster ever".

So ... you're absolutely correct, and it was kinda fascinating to get a clearer handle on those numbers as I helped what felt like half the world migrate to libera, but I don't think your being right about that makes your point a particularly good nitpick of the article itself.

Yep, I agree. I simply wanted to notice that user inflation is also a problem on IRC, even though it's a smaller one - now even more so after Freenode is gone.

Another nitpick:

> with one side that’s willing to use the proprietary Discord client, and one side that isn’t. By choosing Discord, you also lock out users with accessibility needs, for whom the proprietary Discord client is often a nightmare to use.1 Users who cannot afford new enough hardware to make the resource-intensive client pleasant to use are also left by the wayside

Discord runs fine in the browser, I've been using it for years any never installed anything. So there's nothing more proprietary than other websites, and you can probably use chrome accessibility features.

I have this slight feeling this guy has a grudge and is writing this in bad faith. Matrix, Zulip and Rocket Chat are good alternatives, but I can't believe he's suggesting to use IRC in 2021. Way to drive people away from your project that way when nobody knows how to use your limited team chat haha.

The problem with using Discord for FOSS projects for me is that there are hundreds or thousands of unread messages on a server. People are chatting in short messages and I just don't have time to read all this. Forum-like platforms as Discourse seems more readable for me and it can be indexed by google and other search platforms.

Chats can be indexed by Google as well, see Matrix and Gitter

This is usually handled by having like an announcement channel so important messages don't get buried.

Along the same lines as author's opening paragraph. The Apache Airflow team used to use Gitter.im, which was actually pretty good in terms of search. Google search results would link right to a specific conversation and that provided great value. Joining was easy too.

However the community voted to move to Slack. The main reason given was around its popularity, more so than anything else. It was also the Slack free tier, so there was very little in the way of conversation history being available. However, it is what the community wanted, even though it became a barrier for me.

I have used Discord for some gaming communities and I use IRC for some projects I want to follow, at a certain point I have looked for the channels of projects I want to follow on Discord and left, as I feel like there are things that used to affect IRC which now affect Discord channels (users looking for warez, stupid battles about which distro is best, battles about DE, users shaming like "Oh only stupid people use XYZ", meanwhile IRC is clean, I'd say IRC is very clean today, I idle every day, and other people are either idle too or having some interesting conversation, so I think Discord and IRC and Slack have good reason to exist for the kind of users they are willing to adopt, like IRC more technical, Slack is where you find corporate clerks, and Discord is for young fanbases?

Elitism can be a force for good. IRC is great but somewhat impenetrable compared to modern messaging platforms, this acts as a filter. Mailing lists seem to be the most impenetrable, still haven't figured those out.

What is there to figure out? Usually you get some e-mail telling you about new messages on the mailing list. That e-mail usually also contains a short info on how to reply or how to send a new message and perhaps some addresses of sister mailing lists. What you need to do is read the e-mail, use the "Reply" button on your e-mail client and put the mailing list address in CC. If you want to reply to the whole lis, not to a specific person, you click the "Reply List" button instead. All you need to look out for is, what you have as TO and CC, like any with other e-mail, only knowing, that there is a general address for the whole list, in case you want a message to be seen on the list and not have a private conversation with people.

> What is there to figure out?

Plenty. Do I reply to the person or the list? How do I make sure my reply is properly threaded and doesn't show up as a new thread in the list or something? If I'm emailing the list in reply to a post, how does that even work? From my research it seems there is some kind of in-reply-to message identifier that's supposed to be included in the email headers. Does gmail even do that or am I supposed to use mutt and edit my email headers by hand? At that point I gave up because I didn't want to assume things and risk looking stupid.

> Do I reply to the person or the list?

Up to you! If you want to reply to the person only, then you hit "Reply". If you want to reply to the list (so that everyone on the list can see it), you hit "Reply List", if your e-mail client has such a button. If your e-mail client does not, then there is no magic either: Reply to the person in your TO, so that they get the message immediately, and put the list address in CC. No magic.

> How do I make sure my reply is properly threaded and doesn't show up as a new thread in the list or something?

That is a better question already. I asked myself this before and also asked other people running a mailing list or at least being very active there. There is some kind of message matching algorithm, which looks at the "subject" of your e-mail. It is very reliable to simply put a "Re: " in front of the subject of the message you want to reply to. This is usually done by e-mail clients automatically, if you are using "Reply" buttons and the context is clear for the e-mail client. If the context is not clear to the e-mail client or cannot be clear from my actions in the UI of it, then I copy the title and type "Re: " myself. Never failed me so far.

It is really not that complicated and no magic is involved at the usage side of things. Use a proper e-mail client, not some limitted web interface, and you should not have much problems. Gmail does not play into the question of whether it is simple to use mailing lists. It is merely one e-mail service provider of many, and not a specifically good one at that. Lets not make this about gmail. I am using mailing lists almost every day in my e-mail client (Thunderbird). No editing of e-mail headers or anything. Don't over-complicate or overthink things and you will be fine. No one demands of you to edit e-mail headers in plain text.

> [headers] There is some kind of message matching algorithm, which looks at the "subject" of your e-mail.

There are dedicate headers fields for that purpose, they are set automatically.

I would make the exact opposite argument: We should make it easier for open source contributors to focus on their FOSS project instead of all the infrastructure around it. This is an insight that's fairly undisputed in most other spaces (use the cloud because your business is not in running servers, use SaaS because your business is not in hosting applications etc...), yet somehow every maintainer of a "check-is-email" npm package is expected to host their own Matrix Instance, Git Server, Build Status Dashboard and ideally video tutorial portal?

In fact, wouldn't it be great if Github would offer a public realtime discussion board for each repo so that everything about your project is in one place?

In fact, wouldn't it be great if Github wasn't owned by a money grabbing multinational conglomerate? Yeah, that's not happening.

Does it provide more value to you than it expects you to put in?

Depends on how much my code is worth to them for their machine learning projects.

All the reflexive anti-capitalism/anti-corporatism aside, the emergence of company-backed hubs such as Github has been a massive accelerator of the success and overall relevance of open source. When FOSS was confined to Linus Torvalds and co, sharing postings on Usenet groups, transparency and adoption stayed low and larger adopters rather paid intermediaries like Redhat to mitigate the risks of what was perceived as "niche software". Today, open-source is an undisputed standard and has a bustling scene of creators - made possible by easy-to-use and accessible tooling and hubs. Operating these isn't free - but in difference to OS itself, I don't think there is any inherent conflict between providing OS infrastructure and a profit motive. Maybe there will be a fully decentralized, blockchain-based version of Github with individual users contributing for the value they receive in the future, but until then Github - whether owned by MS or not - remains a massive enabler for OS at large.

Wish the Scala community had read this. They literally just switched to discord and it’s just another facepalm in a long line of daft moves.

Yes. And the frustrating thing is that they are moving away from an FOSS solution.

> But in the end, Discord’s feature set and its sheer popularity decided the matter.

Sad.

[0] https://www.scala-lang.org/blog/2021/12/21/discord.html

At least they bridge to Matrix

I think you can simply point out that if the protocol was open, beyond bot development, if users could choose their clients, and searchable plain text archives could be made available, etc, all but the most political detractors in these arguments would be appeased. But the thing is, that will never happen, because we are not talking about a protocol, but a service. And that to me is just the whole problem. There is just nowhere to go, and people who try to develop in this space are squashed by the TOS. At the end of the day you can either be fine with the lock in here, or not.

The only advantages of discord over IRC or other things, is the chat history, voice, and the ability to delete messages.

Discord is made for gamers.

Not to mention each server has channels, which make it impossible to follow up certains topics. You can't even favorite a channel, and you have to "subscribe" to the whole server.

Oh yeah and a full electron instance, of I don't know how many megabytes, just to display images, gifs and a certain interface style.

I hope the low tech trend comes back.

We started using Discord recently, bridged to IRC. There are 10x more members on our Discord than on the IRC. Conversation went from nearly-dead to weekly help threads and updates. Project feels alive again. Member acquisition and retention is much better.

You cannot grow an open source community by only selling to the open source crowd.

A good thing about that article that I haven't see anyone else mention: it's easy to send it to people to explain your position. It's not aggressive, it's based on fact, and clear about its values. Thank you for that, this will save me a lot of time when the topic of Discord comes up.

I've had my Discord account permanently deactivated because I somehow triggered an automated system to think my account was suspicious. My phone number was verified, I was a good faith participant in many servers for years, and a paying Discord customer. My only guess about what might have happened is that I was using a VPN and there may have been someone using the same IP that did something suspicious. In any case, there is no recourse for me, and I am permanently banned from using Discord. So yeah, please don't use Discord for FOSS projects, or anything else important.

I've been using chat clients since the '90s but for the life of me I can't figure out how to use Discord. At least for me, the interface is effectively unusable.

It was bad enough for me to attempt to use such a proprietary service, even if I couldn't figure it out. And then I learned about all the shady practices, such as going after third party clients, seemingly random deleting and/or locking of accounts, requiring phone number, and now I just refuse to touch it.

I am clearly not Discord's target audience.

I'm in the same boat. I find Discord's UI a strangely unintuitive mess. Slow and clunky, and for some reason there's always a bunch of patches that need to be applied every time I start it. Patches that never seem to improve the core experience.

For my own projects, I have git repositories on self-hosted infrastructure, and IRC channels on Libera and OFTC. But I don't want to force others to use my preferred infrastructure. So I also have mirrors of my git repositories on GitHub and GitLab, and I don't mind if people send pull requests or create issues on those platforms.

Basically, just don't put all your eggs in one basket, and make sure at least one basket is under your own control.

The problem is that the group of people I lock out if I _don't_ use Discord (or Slack) is much bigger than the group of FOSS advocates.

The magic of IRC is that you are not always connected and there isn't any way to reliably keep a connection alive. The urge to always be online, always want to lookup history, is a kind of FOMO-paranoia. We've developed weak memory a species for some important reason. It's ok to forget things, it's ok to not attend everything, it's ok to have off-time. The important things will surface by themselves, there's no need to be digging, plus you have a lot of work to do already. So, in my view, IRC is more like the being in the park, flowing with the Tao. It is simple and it is good. Discord is like getting cocaine and going to a festival. It's fantastic, but exhausting.

choosing them is a short-term, individualist play which signals a lack of faith in and support for the long-term goals of the FOSS ecosystem as a whole. The FOSS ecosystem needs your investment

I will never understand this "command economy" vision of some FOSS advocates. FOSS and proprietary software can and do coexist. Considering most FOSS code is written by people whose income is dependent on revenue generated by proprietary code, the purity obsession becomes frankly ridiculous. Proprietary code needs FOSS to keep it from stagnating and becoming abusive, and FOSS needs proprietary code to put food in the stomachs of the people writing it.

I hate Discord passionately, but even as head of operations for open source development groups, I have not been able to make the case that alternatives are viable replacements.

Who wants to step up and give us a grant to change this situation?

We rightly shut down the sense of entitlement that some users have to project maintainers' time and effort. I believe this whole recurring "open source + discord = bad" talking point comes from the same sense of entitlement.

As an open source maintainer, I use discord (along with email, issues, discussions, PRs, Twitter, site chat etc.) as another option for those wishing to use it. It's not forced upon anyone. A small groups' esoteric (sometimes self-imposed) handicaps doesn't constitute a change in course for everyone else.

You do realise who the author of that blog post is? I guess you could accuse DDVault of many things, but entitlement towards FOSS maintainers is pretty far of that list IMO. That guy is one of the most prolific free software authors and maintainers at the moment. So I think he clearly knows about the burdens of maintaining software.

It's not entitlement. It's a large cohort of people who have seen what happens when you buy into products not protocols, got burned (everyone has their example but for me it was Google Talk back in the day), and said enough is enough businesses cannot be trusted to be good stewards over any significant length of time.

I'm sorry to say but this is a youth-oriented vector that exploits a lack of experience in the target population (game communities were the bread and butter of Discord in its early years) in what happens when you trust any essential product in the hands of a corporation. When I was younger I did the same thing and it's unfortunate because the fact is a drive for profit eventually turns any business against its users' interests and with it torpedoes years of knowledge that could have helped others for decades to come.

CEOs come and go, boards change, teams change, investors expect their money back, etc. etc. Just follow the money.

I totally agree with this and I find real time chat is a terrible way to support and collaborate on software. But in my case, the users of my project overwhelmingly prefer Discord. I have begrudgingly accepted it. I started with just GitHub issues and discussions, then went to a subreddit. Users created their own unofficial Discord for my project and everyone flocked there.

> It sets up users who are passionate about free software — i.e. your most passionate contributors or potential contributors — as second-class citizens.

False premise. Die-hard free software fans who refuse to use proprietary software aren't numerous enough to make significant part of your contributors.

On the other hand I think people should keep their discord history as at some point I suspect more "corporate earnings" will be the goal and the "board" will require to start charging for channels and there will be a mass exodus to matrix or something similar

How does Slack compare?

The only couple of FOSS projects I know using either app, are only using slack. They are both American and open source rather than European libre projects if that is a characteristic?

For me, the lack of history and good search in Slack unless you have a paid account is hostile.

Opening sentence of article begins : “Six years ago, I wrote a post speaking out against the use of Slack for the instant messaging needs of FOSS projects”

Won't discouraging Discord usage when developing FOSS limit the number of contributors? Why focus so much on the tooling instead of actually creating fantastic free open source software?

Using Discord excludes contributors who, for instance, don't want to provide their phone number to participate in the conversation when Discord demands it. There are other chat solutions that never demand as much personal information, and this includes both FOSS and closed source software.

Where are the HN chat communities now? Matrix? Zulip? Discord?

Discord functionality is driven by market forces, which is more than I can say for FOSS. FOSS is less likely to offer a product that works for mainstream users.

Licensing, hosting and privacy aside. IRC not having built-in chat history is actually a wonderful feature.

The Discord communities I’ve experienced are a mess of dozens of topic driven channels each with long backscroll and various pins to jump around to various points in the chat history. Conversations between the same set of people are fragmented across numerous topic channels. I find it hard to follow and cumbersome to find/search information.

IRC forces chat to be transient, and any information that should persist or reach a wider audience must be handled intentionally.

Nit

> the right to set up useful bots

Discord allows bots. They probably can't do _everything_, but there are useful bots and even bridges for IRC (and probably others).

Discord hates bots. They've been trying to restrict their power for the last three years.

Once I logged in once manually from a browser running on the VPS the bitlbee plugin for discord has worked fine for me since.

I am, however, very much aware that it may stop working at any given moment and have made sure I have 'plan B' ways to keep in touch with anybody/anything on discord that I actually care about.

Then make something better than Discord. It's that simple. People choose Discord because it's genuinely better for their needs.

If you try to connect via VPN, Discord insists on a phone number for verification. That says all ...

Open source is a philosophy. Open cook book vs closed recepie.

Ie you share openly vs keeping secrets.

Look, FOSS is great. But FOSS fundamentalism is not (perpetrated by those who refuse to use any proprietary software).

More sermons, and it isn’t even Sunday.

By choosing Discord, you also lock out users with accessibility needs

And by choosing Sourcehut, you deprive yourself of anything resembling usability.

Please many altenatives that are as good or better.

Please don't tell other people what to do.

Hm? He's free to say whatever he likes, it's up to the audience to decide whether they agree or not.

So please don't silence people.

Haha! Surely you see the flaw in your argument? If he's free to boss people around from his high horse telling them not to use Discord, then I'm free to remind him that bossing people around is not an appealing sight. And you're free to tell me that you don't like nobodys like me criticizing bigwig darlings of HN such as Drew DeVault, whoever he is. We're all free! I mean seriously, re-read your last sentence and note the contradiction!

Did you reread your sentence and noted the contradiction? You literally wrote "Please don't tell other people what to do"

Exactly! We're all free, and that freedom includes the right to be self-contradictory.

>you also lock out users with accessibility

This might make me a terrible person but I don't care. They should get a better screen reader.

>Users who cannot afford new enough hardware to make the resource-intensive client

If you can't afford a computer that can handle Discord you should probably be focusing on earning more money than working with my software.

>Users of novel or unusual operating systems or devices

Discord works in a web browser.

>Discord also declines service to users in countries under US sanctions, such as Iran.

I don't care.

>Privacy-concious users will think twice before using Discord to participate in your project, or will be denied outright if they rely on Tor or VPNs

Discord cares about people's privacy, but also has to deal with abuse coming from people who want to be anonymous.

>Ownership over your chat logs

99% of my chat logs are garbage

>the right to set up useful bots

Discord has great bot support

>or to moderate your project’s space according to your discretion

You can moderate your server however you want. As long as you don't get reported you don't even need to follow Discord's somewhat restrictive ToS.

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