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Comment by haunter | Hacker News Reader

Why Discord though? Truly independent project, keep big corps away, future of the web at stake here yada yada yet using the most walled garden of walled gardens. If there is no publicly accessible and searchable archive then might as well not exist.

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I think Andreas made a comment about this in some of his videos along the lines of: It's where the most people are.

Would like to hear your suggestion of an alternative that:

* has a modern interface and allow people to communicate efficiently

* does not cost a fortune to use

* has good moderation tools

* supports multiple channels

* has enough built-in moderation so that spam/illegal content is minimal

etc.

Zulip. Open source, self-hostable, looks decent and not only does it have every feature that discord has, their version of threads/topics to spin off individual conversations is extremely well done.

And, don't overlook the indexability of Zulip so that information doesn't instantly /dev/null just because Discord hates having bots or because one can only ever(!) join 100 Discord servers

e.g. https://servo.zulipchat.com/#narrow/channel/416780-feature-t...

Zulip?

Andreas has made it clear he’s not interested in free software politics. That’s not his battle

That's fine, but I don't see what free software has to do with searchability and persistence of the backlog

I didn’t say it did. The person I replied to mentioned free software adjacent principles

Doesn't LadyBird get a lot of support because it is FOSS? Seems useful to lean into that frame of mind then!

Because network effect. You either use Discord or nobody comes.

> You either use Discord or nobody comes.

WAT? Not even close to true. A lot of people gravitate to other discussion forums. Some even dislike chat-style "communities" that they steer clear. (Someone can find market research if we want to pin it down more.)

My summary (exaggerated for effect): Discord is a time waster. Slack is Stockholm Syndrome. GitHub Issues is comfortable. Zulip is lesser-known but great and FOSS.

So many of these products have redefined our frame of mind for how we interact, for better or (let's be frank) worse.

Also, interaction with a Free and Open Source project ideally shouldn't require use of proprietary software.

Some examples of major open source projects that don't insist on Discord:

* KDE offers its own forums, mailing lists, IRC, Matrix, and, yes, Discord. [0]

* Gnome offers its own forums, and Matrix. [1] Its old mailing lists are archived but now closed.

* Postgres has mailing lists and IRC [2]

* The Linux kernel has mailing lists [3]

[0] https://community.kde.org/Get_Involved#Many_Ways_To_Reach_Us

[1] https://welcome.gnome.org/

[2] https://www.postgresql.org/community/

[3] https://lkml.org/

Because it's chat if you treat it like a knowledge base it's on you.

The distinction isn't always clear. If you're studying the history of the Linux kernel, you'll want to make use of its mailing list archives.

If that were true than IRC would be absolutely perfect.

SerenityOS used IRC but when Andreas changed to discord he saw a massive influx of developers. I assume that it was a no brainer to use discord when forking Ladybird...

So would be Discord, and so it is.

Come on, it's inevitable that chat history becomes a knowledge base to some extent even if the participants are aware of this pitfall.

Only if you let it.

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