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Please don't use Discord for FOSS projects (drewdevault.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/opensource@lemmy.ml
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[–] 68 points 2 years ago (60 children)

As someone deeply involved in Foss for many years and with multiple large Foss services running on my back, these constant requests for purity from outsiders will go nowhere until volunteers people step up to do the hard work of setting up and maintaining the infrastructure and management of such Foss solutions in the place of the core developers

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  • [–] 27 points 2 years ago (46 children)

    ? What's the difference between setting up a free forum (they're everywhere) versus setting up Discord channels? It's the exact same process.

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  • [+] 33 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (10 children)
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  • [–] 23 points 2 years ago (8 children)

    I'm not sure what point you're trying to make unless you're saying no one has to create a Discord account, or have to download an app, or have to find an invite to locate the server. My keys are auto-generated and auto-saved, simple 20 second process. Forums are also a lot easier to sign up for than Discord, if you're worried about making another account I don't know what to tell ya because every service requires it.

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  • [–] 14 points 2 years ago (6 children)

    You set up a discord account once. When you want to join a project discord all you have to do is click the invite link and hit „accept“. Bam. Done. No need to join a forum. No need to keep track of another website and check if you got a personal message from someone or something. The benefit is that it is all one location.

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  • [+] 13 points 2 years ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)
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  • [–] 8 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

    Discourse, NodeBB and Flarum are all currently working on ActivityPub federation support. The first two have some basic support already available.

    Edit: I read "decentralized". The "centralized" system for forums is obviously Reddit.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    This makes me wonder if there is a centralized system for forums.

    Is this not what Lemmy is, to a certain extent?

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago

    I'm probably way out of the loop but from the perspective of devs getting to contribute, don't stuff like Discourse ship with "login with your Github account" already? Or Google, or Facebook, or...

    Also, please, it's 1 click nowadays to make your browser remember your logins for you, if it comes down to laziness

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  • [–] 21 points 2 years ago* (34 children)

    Ease, convenience, existing userbase, familiarity, choose a few

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  • [–] 10 points 2 years ago (33 children)

    I guess we have different perspectives. Ease, convenience = forums, existing userbase? = Do you prefer Reddit for this reason?, familiarity = forums lol, search-ability = forums, privacy = forums, etc etc.

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  • [+] 21 points 2 years ago (5 children)
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  • [–] 15 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    The discussion seems very muddled and opinionated ITT because I'm not even sure if you're talking about a Discord Server or a forum/communication platform on a dedicated server. You might be able to slap together a Discord server faster, but the organizational power and not putting that extra work on users for Discord participation makes forum's superior. Part of the project development is sysadmin. If it's not, why take it FOSS at all? Discord is designed to take up your time, those pretty bots and "perks" keep you viewing. What could've been a well thought out message on a board with a reply now becomes 20+ texts which you're stuck communicating on. Rinse and repeat every day, on a forum you simply link the previous conversation and you're done.

    I think it's a neutral wash atm, Discord may be packaged better to be mainstream but it's bloat all around with lots of negatives. Anyone saying Discord is better is just preference at this point, lots of counterintuitive comments like we need "real-time" communication but also anything else takes up project development, like Discord is some kind of time saver.

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  • [–] 17 points 2 years ago (26 children)

    Forums are not the same as real-time. And yes for most of the people using discord, forums wouldn't cover the same niche.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 years ago (8 children)

    I think you might just be blinded by Discord for some reason. I'm not sure what "niche" you're referring to with Discord that can't be provided with forums (unless you're worried about cosmetics I guess?). There are forums with real-time communications like chat, notifications, direct-messaging. I'm not trying to argue, getting your perspective is always helpful and might show something I'm missing, but your responses seem vague and not really a counter-point.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (5 children)
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  • [–] 18 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    I've used matrix and spaces before. Nowhere close as convenient as a discord server. In fact I even had a matrix to discord bridge so I can get the best of both worlds until I had to hide all my matrix channels because of uncontrolled spam

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