basic news is: Yuzu and citra agreed to shut down with immediate effect incl. discords.
At least with an open platform youd have a chance to backup discussions or rehost. Youād probably still be dead in the water but it would beat the info being wiped.
I created a discord server for an open source project of mine, but grew to dislike it. It got spammed multiple times, people are off topic and talking about their lives in channels that arenāt for that, and so I started pushing the community toward GitHub discussions.
Discord isnāt searchable, nor archivable, nor public, but GitHub is (Iām aware of another conflict with Microsoft for some people, but to me this is the easiest solution to get contributors and have an easy CI setup).
I havenāt had much success yet, but Iām slowly shutting down all links to the discord and will let it die (for outside contributors at least). I might keep it to stay in touch with a few developers, to refine issues and prepare migrations that arenāt ready to be turned into public discussions/ issues / pull requests.
Iām not a fan of online games therefore canāt suggest you an alternative but Iām sure something better exists
chatting and making video with your daughter trough discord itās the same like having any discord employee watching you (see privacy policy ) if you are confortable with that itās fine . Iām supposing you are on lemmy to avoid reddit right ? do the same for discord.
Depends what you use it for, thereās some great servers for a lot of things. I donāt really care about platforms and basically use them all. Certain people really hate Discord but the alternatives donāt have many interesting things on them, and the people who use them arenāt a very diverse group. Checking all the right FOSS and feature boxes is nice but itās not what actually makes a platform good to use.
In short, using Discord for your free software/open source (FOSS) software project is a very bad idea. Free software matters ā thatās why youāre writing it, after all. Using Discord partitions your community on either side of a walled garden, with one side thatās willing to use the proprietary Discord client, and one side that isnāt. It sets up users who are passionate about free software ā i.e. your most passionate contributors or potential contributors ā as second-class citizens.
Interesting to do a ās/Discord/Github/ā replace on the above. Same situation yet hardly anyone gives a shit.
So yes, Drew DeVault is right. But he overestimates peopleās commitment to free world digital rights principles and consistency thereof.
Thereās not really much point in using a self hosted gitea or codeberg or sourcehut if you want the barrier of entry to be as low as possible for potential contributors. Maybe if some larger projects made the move. But GitHub has more features (like discussions), provides better hosting and ease of use. The focus of any open source project should be on development of the software, not the software which supports its development.
Thereās not really much point in using a self hosted gitea or codeberg or sourcehut if you want the barrier of entry to be as low as possible for potential contributors.
But GitHub has more features (like discussions), provides better hosting and ease of use.
Bingo. Prioritizing convenience features above digital rights principles is exactly why Githubās walled garden dominates over forges that have a lower barrier of entry.
The focus of any open source project should be on development of the software, not the software which supports its development.
Again, people to setting aside their principles is exactly what Iām talking about.
Itās not so much a case of people setting aside their principles, itās more like people considering stability, potential contributions and convenience alongside their principles.
Give Codeberg a few more years of stability and people might re-evaluate choosing GitHub. The controversy around Gitea forming a company and the fragmentation of development unsettles that trust.
not at all the same situation. Git itself is not proprietary so all the projects can survive without GitHub if the need arises. Additionally, you donāt need an account to view the repository or its discussions. There is of course a walled garden for participation and it is an issue, however it doesnāt compare to discord, which is much, much worse.
There is of course a walled garden for participation and it is an issue
And if you insist on using Microsoft GitHub, this contribution concern can be mitigated by offering an alternative mirror or a mailing list/email address to send patches. One way to help prevent lock-in would be to use MS GitHubās repository settings & straight-up disable non-portable features like āDiscussionsā, āSponsorsā & maybe even the āIssuesā tracker favoring a third-party option or the issue tracker of the mirror along with disabling āActionsā choosing a third-party CI option or the CI that comes with the mirror (or require checks ran locally before pushing).
Git itself is not proprietary so all the projects can survive without GitHub if the need arises. Ad
Youāre neglecting the exclusion thatās inherent in Github when the need to bounce does NOT arise.
Also worth adding that during the war in Gaza some of us boycott Israel. Which implies boycotting Microsoft.
Additionally, you donāt need an account to view the repository or its discussions.
Advocating read-only access is comparable to endorsing only freedom 1 and 2, not freedom 0 or 4. Which is precisely what Iām talking about: FOSS projects that discard digital rights and partake in digital exclusion for some convenience frills.
There is of course a walled garden for participation and it is an issue, however it doesnāt compare to discord, which is much, much worse.
Bug trackers have more of a monopoly on bug reports than discord has on discussions. There are countless decentralized discussions about free software all over the place ā threadiverse, probably facebook, ad hoc phpbb forums, IRC, usenet, mastodon, mailing lists, conferences like FOSDEM ā¦ and rightfully so. Discussions donāt need the centralization that bug trackers do. General discussions also do not have the degree of importance to QA that bug tracking does.
Case in point, when bugs are reported outside of Github, they donāt get noticed by developers and triaged.
not sure what to answer, I made clear in my comment that github is also problematic, discord is simply worse, therefore theyāre not the same like the original commenter said. Iām hoping both of them will fuck up like reddit and twitter did and more people will make effort to move away from it.
I give a shit. Open source contributions shouldnāt require proprietary services if open alternatives (even if it requires more than a single service) suffice. In the case of Git forges, the alternatives are greatā& the more you buy into the Microsoft GitHub-specific features the harder it will be to migrate which will lead to lock-in.
And certain projects I donāt deem it worth my time to contribute due to this fact. The unfortunate issue with that is usually there isnāt a good way to communicate that to the maintainers when they lock all coms to Microsoft GitHub & Slack/Discord. There are certain projects I have skipped on trying based on this too as to me it becomes an indicator of poor decision-making trying to capture hype/marketing rather than fostering goodwill of the free/ethical software movements. At least on Lemmy you get an upvote instead of harassed by asking for an open communication and/or contribution option š
I miss regular old web forums, mailing lists and that sort of thing. Discord / Slack / etc have zero discoverability. The ability to google your question is gone, and knowledge is ephemeral, when a chat is the central source of community.
on hindsight they are trying to implement a āforumā like experience, where you can create a dedicated threads channel where you csn search previous threads, but itās not exactly like a real forum, pretty useful tho
The search in their new forum system is really, really, really, very, very bad. It only searches for exact matches in post titles. So not very useful. I hope weāll see more projects start to use GitHub discussions, but it depends on the commitment of the maintainers
Iāve been finding this out at work recently. Got lazy and started doing most of my conversations via teams instead of email and now having to find shit from like a year ago is practically impossible. Even some conversations I know contained what Iām looking for just have random gaps where posts have disappeared.
Teams are just shit like that. Although my company has migrated to 365 for our work apps, the teamās main communication is still Slack. With Slack Iām still able to find old messages easily and be able to link it in relevant context.
A few weeks ago the community manager of the Helldivers Discord got upset and deleted the whole thing. Years of discussions and knowledge (and memes) gone.
Naturally you canāt even bring up the idea that a Discord community takes on a life past its āownerā once it reaches a certain size or level of activity. āYour container, your rulesā say the defenders unironically, while not acknowledging that you neither own the āserverā nor make all the rules.
Thank you!!! I feel the same way and I felt like I was losing my marbles.
Discord is just way too ephemeral and the answers you get depend on who is logged on at the time. I donāt expect an immediate answer but I also donāt wanna wade through 14 conversations either.
If youāre desperate for a discord-like experience (because lets face it, irc and mailing lists arent very flashy anymore!) you can try:
rocket chat - General purpose chat platform, very similar discord
mattermost - developer-centric platform, similar to slack
Matrix - open protocol, has a bunch of desktop clients
Yes you wont have voice/vodeo chat for these but IMO thatās rarely useful anyway. And if you DO need it then you can use stuff like teamspeak or zoom***
***yes i know the issues with these options but for devs you dont really ever need to use meetings for very long and sometimes using a shitty free service with all you need is better than self hosting your own. Maybe Nextcloud talk can work?
Some good arguments made for FOSS voice/meeting apps, and why VC and meetings are more important to the FOSS workflow than I thought :)
Matrix was built by Israeli intelligence & consumes so many resources that itās not feasible to self-host on most budgets. As such itās highly centralized & the community is still largely being ran by Matrix.org as the keeper of the implementation server, the most popular client, the specification, the largest server- which syncs back the metadata.
Mattermost is by-design centralized but itās self-hostable & AGPL so Iām not sure where the closed-source accusation is coming from. At least itās less wasteful than trying to be decentralized & if you wanted lightweight decentralization, you would reach for XMPP.
Well, thatās something I didnāt know, but it seems like theyāve been in the process of removing or giving the ability to remove the parts that communicate back to the main Matrix coordinators since 2019. And itās been 2017 since they had funding from Amdocs. Iād certainly listen if someone says theyāve recently analyzed that sort of data going back to the organizations servers. It doesnāt look like it though.
At this point, the fact that itās all opensource and the self-hosting options/configurations let you keep things internal now would make the point of its origin moot. TOR is another example of something that may have suspicious origins but because itās public and OS, most people trust the privacy of its implementation.
There are ways do funding while being in the shadows. Itās absolutely conspiracy, but something I can see being of importance to spy agencies as Matrix is defacto centralized with all metadata & assets syncing back to the mothership. Signal also had their server code closed for a while, & I wouldnāt be surprised if something regarding US intelligence wasnāt involved. I think you can trust these platforms more than most, but Iād prefer keeping an armās length until we are years removed & see open governance (something Matrix is slowly (finally) transitioning too, but other chat protocols have done for much longer).
Yah, I have my doubts about Signal as well, given the insistence, even now that the username function has been added, of needing a phone number to register. That doesnāt seem to fit with an application thatās supposed purpose is to be a private communications network and has been promoted for political change purposes in developing countries.
Mattermost is by-design centralized but itās self-hostable & AGPL so Iām not sure where the closed-source accusation is coming from.
The AGPL community edition of Mattermost lacks several crucial features for anything but very small private communities. It isnāt closed source per se, but very much open-core.
I didnāt say it was good or perfect :P ā¦Iāve also never administered it, but I know those that do self-host it. Open core isnāt the worst. Self-hosted GitLabās arenāt my favorite, but I certainly prefer it to the Microsoft-owned alternative (that includes have to create an account too! shock).
It get some resources from them at the start, but they do not fund it for a long time.
consumes so many resources that itās not feasible to self-host on most budgets
When you join large rooms like #matrix:matrix.org, it consumes a lot of space. But otherwise it is not that heavy. I hope they fix this, as this can be fixed with better resource planning, the biggest tables on the database are those like state_groups_state that does not hold bare information and just group information together for quick search. (I hosted a server and MatrixHQ room took 100GBā¦, 95% of the database).
As such itās highly centralized
Looking at server list it seems very healthy. Also (opinion alert) I think having thousands of public server running by a randoms like there is for big chunk of Fediverse will not be as healthy as dozens of well funded community servers.
the community is still largely being ran by Matrix.org as the keeper of the implementation server
Synapse is not the reference server, there is no one official implementation for a purpose. And old news, it is now hosted by Element under AGPL.
They could still be funding it in other ways. Itās a conspiracy, but one that would make some sense.
I gather you are saying there still are real storage issues. The bigger your server grows the more wildly this can get out of hand once just one of your users joins a big room. The whole model is about distributing the syncing of messages & no matter how they slice it to speed parts of it up, I feel it will remain an issue by design unlike other protocols that treat realtime chat as ephemeral & just give you enough history to get context of the current conversation. Iāve already witnessed 3 servers try to grow a following, then when users came, the bill inevitable shut them downāin the same way that Mastodon can skyrocket bills due to fundamental designs. Other protocols also handle decentralization better in ways that donāt require massive funding & empower users to host their own decentralized serverāto which I think is healthy & desirable.
Synapse more or less acts as a reference server in the way that all Twitter-likes are basically required to be Mastodon-compatible.
Matrix is the only suitable replacement for discord, as it is the only federated replacement.
No, stop recommending questionable open-source. Matrix is a metadata disaster and XMPP is the true and the OG federated and truly open solution that is very extensible.
XMPP is like email, a very open standard that was designed for interoperability even with more closed servers that included proprietary features and extensions. You can message anyone by email no matter whatās or whereās their server and can be configured to be secure and private. Here a quick overview of the architecture.
XMPP is the only solution that treats messaging and video like email: just provide an address and the servers and clients will cooperate with each other in order to maintain a conversation. Everything else is just an attempt at yet another vendor lock-in.
I think thatās actually what discord should be used for. Itās one of the better platforms for voice/video/text chat. Itās mostly just when people use discord for what should be a public forum or wiki that it becomes a problem.
And sure, itās not a great place for open source developers to do all their communication in, because being able to reference things in the future if a project lead closes the server is important. But itās probably fine for coding sprints and meetings here and there as long as someone is taking notes to be documented elsewhere. Discord is arguably better than zoom for that use case.
Depends what job, keeping a community ? Why not. Gaming with friends ? Yeah. Keeping track of a project ? There sure are many - even - free tools to manage that
The same applies to Android OS development. All of it. Android requires a very powerful 1000 USD desktop or laptop computer with 20 gigs of ram and 200 gigs of SSD hard drive space just to compile. This is unacceptable.
Meanwhile, mainline phone linux, like dreemurrs archlinux or postmarketos, can be developed using ***the same phone it runs on!!!***All you need is a 20 USD bluetooth keyboard. It is fully awesome. Imagine a world where anybody with just a smartphone and a bluetooth keyboard could be an OS developer!
It did last time I tried compiling AOSP. At least on the default settings. After I told the build system not to try building in parallel, I got that number down to 8 gigs. Still way too high. Thereās no way anybody could develop AOSP on a phone.
Discord is only good for coordinating game events and helping to facilitate gaming community engagement. Iām so sick of everyone pushing it as the central hub of everything social and the idea of entire projects centered around Discord is absolutely ludicrous.
Yes, discord is for chatting, thatās correct. Itās not a tech support platform, nor is it a documentation repo, yet people commonly try to use it as such.
I think discord is great for the technical support side of things. It gives you a chance to talk through a problem in real time with someone more knowledgeable and ask follow up questions without waiting hours for a reply lile frequently happens in support forums. That being said it should absolutely not be the repository for documentation.
The problem with using it for real time tech support is that when someone else comes along with the same problem, they have to search chat logs and hope they can find the thread where the issue was mentioned/fixed. Forums are much better at making past information accessible, but youāre right, a chat client like discord is better for quick response times. Itās a trade-off I suppose
I would argue that is the point of having an FAQ/Examples in your documentation. Ideally someone would stop their first before asking clarification questions in the discord. Admittedly a lot of people are just going to go straight to asking questions but personally thatās not really been something Iāve ever really minded. Some people just learn better that way and itās unusual for one of these discord channels to be so busy that repeat questions are drowning others out.
I get that people want a āsimple way to chatā and Discord does that well, I guess. I mean, everyoneās talking about the forum aspect but whatās the alternative for chat? Mumble?
Just, please, donāt hide documentation in the Discord. A neocities page costs literally $0. Please. Think of the poor SEO consultants!
I find that some Matrix clients make it easy to build and interact with a community. Even Element has a lot of Discordās core features, it just lacks the streaming and some of the gaming-related stuff. Otherwise, Matrix rooms are sufficient for building an āeasy to chatā community.
Yeah Iām indifferent to discord as a platform. Itāll eventually be enshitified and people will move on.
The bummer is that itās enabling people to be poor at documentation in a whole new way.
That said, if Discord went away tomorrow most software projects would still have garbage documentation, because most software projects are ephemeral at BEST.