this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2023
31 points (100.0% liked)

Free and Open Source Software

17915 readers
75 users here now

If it's free and open source and it's also software, it can be discussed here. Subcommunity of Technology.

This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Gaywallet@beehaw.org
alyaza@beehaw.org
31
Stop Using Discord for Your Open source Communities | mattcen's mumblings (blog.mattcen.com)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by noodlejetski@beehaw.org to c/foss@beehaw.org
44 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Recently I accidentally made a Fediverse post which went viral:

stop using discord for your open source communities

That post is short, punchy, opinionated, and prescriptive, which I suspect is the cause for its virality.

Unfortunately, like many micro-blog posts, it lacks nuance, which many replies highlighted. I made the post to vent my frustration at needing to join a Discord server to interact with a community, so it is far from a measured critique of the subject.

This blog post is an attempt to address those nuances in greater detail. This is not an exhaustive analysis, and I’ve resolved to not let “perfect” be the enemy of “done”.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] ono@lemmy.ca 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Putting a community on Discord also means locking it (and all the information you create over time) behind Discord's license terms, policies, and whims.

I care about my users. I wouldn't ask them to agree to those terms, let alone allow Discord to be gatekeeper of my communities.

[–] TheOtherJake@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Worse yet. Install a whitelist firewall or have a look at the connections required to access Discord. You will immediately stop using it. It involves dozens of undocumented raw IP address connections and weird ports. Top this off by telling me what their business model is and how they are profitable. They provide no documentation whatsoever about what they are doing and why. The best explanation anyone has ever given me when asked why they use discord is, 'because everyone else is doing it.' That is idiotic nonsense.

[–] ArcticCircleSystem@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago

The issue is a social platform is useless without the social aspect. If someone's entire friend group is on one site, they're unlikely to move to another. Trying to get the whole friend group to move is also easier said than done due to inertia and t eother members of the friend group also being in communities and friend groups that aren't on the new platform. Now imagine that on the scale of a site like Discord and combine it with FOSS alternatives often have fewer features, less software support (for bots, clients, etc), and higher barriers to entry and you have a recipe for disaster for many new social media platforms. ~Strawberry