Hi Alex! Please, please, please do not use Discord to organize your open source project's community. Open source projects should rely on open source infrastructure. Discord is a proprietary platform, with a proprietary client, using a proprietary protocol, and has no business being involved in FOSS projects.
Hi, we are working on setting up a Matrix server with bridges to other platforms. If you have suggestions or experience in this, I would appreciate your support.
Imho, the best chat platform is Zulip. It has channels, named threads, good search, and persistent history. It's also open source. IME, it's way better for communities than Discord, IRC, Slack.
It seems tautologically obvious, but I can elaborate anyway.
The benefits that led this project to choose an open source approach applies to other domains as well. If they believe in those merits, then they should naturally be apparent in the other systems that they would rely on, such as their collaboration tools. If you want the advantages of open source to proliferate, you have to cast your lot with more open source tools. They're equally suited to the task as, say, Discord.
Choosing proprietary tools and platforms can also easily serve to reduce your pool of potential contributors who don't want to use proprietary tools, and especially those who don't want to install proprietary software on their own computers, like the Discord client.
Some people simply cannot use something like Discord at all - it has a high hardware requirements floor, poor to mediocre Linux support and completely absent support for systems like BSD, not to mention grave accessibility problems. Only an open protocol enables anyone to build the clients that suit their needs, and are not dependent on the whims of some corporate board of director's determination of your merit (i.e. financial exploitability) as a participant.
As an open source developer I use some tools that are not open source, and which I would not even want to be open source. It doesn’t have to be an ideological battle. It’s just different distribution models with different benefits.
I generally prefer open source over proprietary, all else being equal. But there are some software categories where the best OSS examples are still leagues below the best proprietary examples in design and quality, despite many OSS attempts over many years. In such categories, I'd love it if a seriously competitive OSS example emerged, and I'd probably jump on it and start evangelising it. But until that happens, I have to assume there's something about the proprietary model that just works better to produce high quality software in that particular category.
Forcing yourself to use a bad piece of software on ideological grounds, or worse still, engaging in doublethink (deluding yourself that it's actually a good piece of software and that everyone else is mistaken) does not help the open source movement. It damages it.
>Forcing yourself to use a bad piece of software on ideological grounds, or worse still, engaging in doublethink (deluding yourself that it's actually a good piece of software and that everyone else is mistaken) does not help the open source movement. It damages it.
Exactly this. It reminds me of the worst type of Apple fans, when people try to argue that a piece-of-crap software provides an equal experience to a ridiculously polished piece of proprietary software. Sometimes open-source has better software, but sometimes it doesn't and there's nothing worse than being gaslit by zealots.
This might be true of Discord, which I guess is an Electron App, and is a strong reason to eschew Elecron (which ironically is open source), but it’s pretty hard to claim accessibility as a win for open source with a straight face.
> Only an open protocol enables anyone to build the clients that suit their needs, and are not dependent on the whims of some corporate board of director's determination of your merit (i.e. financial exploitability) as a participant.
This doesn’t really seem true at all. An open protocol is necessary but very far from sufficient.
In order to build and maintain software, you need hardware, expertise, and time, and often it is simply impossible to do alone.
These cost money, and getting this money means someone determines your merit, in the case of open source development that is in fact typically although not exclusively corporate boards.
I’d like what you are saying to be true, but it just doesn’t seem to be in our current world.
Please consider using IRC or Matrix.