Please don't use Discord for FOSS projects
Please don't use Discord for FOSS projects
The biggest problem with Discord is that its an information black hole. Its not properly searchable and not indexed by search engines.
Discord is fine for casual chat, but horrible when used for forum-type discussions and even worse when used for documentation.
You see the same problems being discussed and solved again and again, but you cant just "link" someone the solution like you could with a forum thread cause its spread out over 3-10 chat messages that are interleaved in-between other topics being discussed in the same room
Anything of long-term value for the project (forum-type discussions, documentation etc) should not recide in Discord
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
I get that people want a "simple way to chat" and Discord does that well, I guess. I mean, everyone's talking about the forum aspect but what's the alternative for chat? Mumble?
Just, please, don't hide documentation in the Discord. A neocities page costs literally $0. Please. Think of the poor SEO consultants!
I don't mind Discord being a centralized platform for open source project discussion, if and only if the only roles it serves specifically play to its one strength, which is real time discussion. Asking for live support (from the dev if they are there, or the community if they are not) and doing live bug triage are the two big use cases.
Should contact for these things be real time? Maybe, maybe not. Async discussion like you get on forums or via email can do the job. But if you value real-time chat, Discord does it well.
Everything else? Do it elsewhere. Do not make Discord your only bug tracker. Do not make it your only wiki. Do not make it your only source of documentation. Do not make it the only place you broadcast updates or announcements. Do not make it your only distribution platform for critical downloads. And for the love of god please do not make it the only way to contact you. I don't care if you allow Discord to additionally do these things using integrations, that's fine, just stop trying to contort Discord into your only way of doing these.
Is Discord the only capable option for real time chat? No. But it has several things going in its favor, namely how one can reasonably expect a good sum of their target user base is already using it independently for other purposes, in addition to its numerous QoL features.
It can also better integrate into the dev's personal routine if they already use it independently. Like, do I have an email address? Yeah. Do I read my email on any reasonable interval? Hell no. My email inbox is little more than a dustbin for registration confirmations and online order receipts. I've had email for decades and I think I can count the number of non-work, non-business conversations I've held over it in that whole span of time on one hand. Meanwhile, I'm terminally online on Discord. So if I'm gonna be a small independent FOSS project developer, am I gonna want to interface with everyone over email? No. I'll still make it an option, because being only contactable on Discord is cringe, but it will not be fast. Discord will be my preferred channel.
Should I put more effort into being contactable on other platforms, because it's the right thing to do? Meh. I have no duty of stewardship to be available on platforms available to anyone in particular. I maintain this hypothetical project for free, on my own time, of my own volition, and I provide it to you entirely warranty-free. I have the courtesy to make all static resources available in sensible public places, and I provide email as a slow, async way to reach me. But if you want to converse with me directly in real time, you can come to me where I'm hanging out.
I love Immich and Sharkey but both use Discord. Sharkey even used Matrix in the beginning but eventually switched to Discord. I think their reasoning was that they were often attacked by trolls etc. and that Matrix didn't had good options for moderation etc.
And while I love Matrix I fully agree. Yes there are moderation bots like Draupnir and they're good but you will need to self host them and register a user for them and and and. It's not as easy as with Discord or even Telegram bots. Also there are many Discord bots providing very fun elements like levels, reputations, roles etc. which simply do not exist or aren't even possible in Matrix as it currently is.
On top of that we have the decentralization "problem" for end users who aren't technical. They simply don't care much about privacy and they don't care if Discord stores every single message and picture in clear text forever on their servers. It's easier to create a Discord account on a centralized platform than understanding Matrix understanding which server to choose, understanding which client to choose and understanding how encryption, key management etc. works. Yes decentralization is important and great but for the average user it's still something that they do not really know which "overcomplicates" it for them.
And another point is that Matrix spaces are simply not the same as Discord servers. Channels are not as easy to manage because they are rooms on their own in Matrix and a space is not a server but rather a way to organize multiple rooms. Not every client supports spaces yet. Clients implement them differently. Then there's Element and Element X on phones confusing people new to Matrix etc. In Discord several channels can be grouped in another category. In Matrix you'd use Subspaces for that giving you the same issue as with normal spaces.
And most clients don't implement simple things on mobile like...sending multiple images at once. From the perspective of an end user that fact annoys the heck out of anyone wanting to send several pictures.
So yeah I think it's a mixture out of those things.
Matrix especially needs better bot support with bots that could be used by everyone as it is with Discord instead of being only usable by server admins or the bots creators as it is with many Matrix bots. And it does need a better solution for spaces with rooms or another thing in the specs that replicates how Discord servers work so that it's a "space" with actual "subchannels" without every space technically being it's own room dangling around in limbo and just being "sorted" into the space.
And it needs better moderation tools.
Devs ITT biting every single argument in the article and then saying "but it's easy" is extremely ironic
from the article:
In short, using Discord for your free software/open source (FOSS) software project is a very bad idea. Free software matters — that’s why you’re writing it, after all. Using Discord partitions your community on either side of a walled garden, with one side that’s willing to use the proprietary Discord client, and one side that isn’t. It sets up users who are passionate about free software — i.e. your most passionate contributors or potential contributors — as second-class citizens.
Interesting to do a “s/Discord/Github/” replace on the above. Same situation yet hardly anyone gives a shit.
So yes, Drew DeVault is right. But he overestimates people’s commitment to free world digital rights principles and consistency thereof.
If you're 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 that's 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 :)
This article has a few primary arguments for not using Discord—
- because it is proprietary software
- because it has poor accessibility
- because control over moderation and other administrative tools is ultimately in the hands of Discord rather than the community.
I know this opinion is going to be unpopular but here I go anyway.
Other than the accessibility argument, I find these arguments quite weak. Yes, Discord is proprietary software, but the reason it's used is because a lot of people are familiar with it and many people already have Discord accounts.
Although I'm a firm supporter of free software, I also believe that it's more important to use the right software for the job than to idealistically use inferior software just because it happens to be open-source. And yes, I regard most of the alternatives to Discord listed in the article to be inferior solely because they are unfamiliar to users. Sometimes, the superior choice happens to be proprietary and I don't think there's anything wrong with that. That's the way it is sometimes; you can't win every fight, as much as you'd like to.
If your goal is to foster a community of regular users and make it easy for normal users to interact with contributors, there is no choice that will hamper that goal more than using an obscure alternative software that nobody's heard of.
With respect to chat logs and administration tools... for the most part, nobody cares. Discord's tools are sufficient for most groups and few people consider the drawbacks to outweigh the other benefits.
I have never used Discord and never will. No project has ever been able to change my stance on it.
THIS.
omg If I have to configure another Matrix mirror bot for something I wanna self host, I swear...
This article is two years old, and perhaps discord have improved their accessibility, since this user find it more accessible then matrix. Yes, it's a single usercase, but worth mentioning nonetheless.
I think there are other arguments against Discord that haven't been mentioned: data privacy. I know there was an instance where Discord collected user without their consent, and that is enough for me to avoid the platform.
I much rather use matrix or the horridly old IRC protocol than Discord. Or forums. Or just plain old issues!
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!
To me, I
Matrix for synchronous chat Threadiverse/Fediverse community for announcements and discussion Discourse for forums (smaller possible channels) OpenSource based Software forges like Forgejo (codeberg.org) or gitlab (gitlab.com) for issue tracking, code repo, Dev artfacts, and CI/CD.
The exciting things for these lay in the future though: ForgeFed to federate between forges like codeberg, gitlab, and independent instances of those software, plus federate to whole fediveriverse!
With the fediverse plugin for discourse
the commune app's to take matrix chats and growing them into full posts on fediverse is super exciting to me too
All of these helping to meet people where they are at in Free internet instead of the techno feudal states. There should be work to bridge to those people too, but I hope we can the Free internet better more.
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 aren't for that, and so I started pushing the community toward GitHub discussions.
Discord isn't searchable, nor archivable, nor public, but GitHub is (I'm 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 haven't had much success yet, but I'm 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 aren't ready to be turned into public discussions/ issues / pull requests.
Or just don't use Discord.
Discord is a disease.
Use discourse instead? It's really the best in my opinion.
Can we just bring bitchx back?
Depends what you use it for, there's some great servers for a lot of things. I don't really care about platforms and basically use them all. Certain people really hate Discord but the alternatives don't have many interesting things on them, and the people who use them aren't a very diverse group. Checking all the right FOSS and feature boxes is nice but it's not what actually makes a platform good to use.
Ahhh, yet another "Discord bad" post. Let's see what alternatives they propose. After all, just telling me I made the wrong choice isn't productive right?
There are great FOSS alternatives to Discord or Slack. SourceHut has been investing in IRC by building more accessible services like chat.sr.ht. Other great options include Matrix and Zulip. Please consider these services before you reach for their proprietary competitors.
Hahaha hahaha. Good fucking joke.
There's a reason Discord is a million times more usable than all of those, and it's not just network effect.
...
I'm well aware discord is going to enshittify itself eventually. It's inevitable. However quite frankly as long as that hasn't happened yet, it will remain by far the best option. I am not going to knee-cap my project by using a Discord "alternative" that barely works.
The day Discord dies will be a massive loss for the internet. That hasn't happened yet. But it will. And it's not going to be a loss just because of all the communities locked in on it. It's going to be a loss because it's the best damn community chat software and there's no replacement.