Free and Open Source Software

17984 readers

41 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

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

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

Thanks! I did consider Matrix as well, and in fact just set up a personal server yesterday. I was worried about it being too high of a barrier to entry (the reason I stayed away from my first instinct, IRC...). At least Zulip is intuitively just a chat app, even though it might turn people away who don't want to register for yet another account. One option could be to add Matrix and IRC bridges for Zulip, in the hopes of keeping everyone happy?

I'm still not sure what the best way forward is. It's a tricky balance between promoting FOSS and remaining widely familiar.