Comment by ejj28
5 years ago
If they want to boycott them, they can go ahead, but I consider Discord to be the best place to build a community right now and I don't think that free software purists have any right to demand that devs build their platforms on something like IRC (which in my personal opinion is inferior and a relic of the past) just because they don't like Discord or non-free software.
And it doesn't matter if you can't archive or return to stuff if you're putting important stuff on Github Issues or something and using Discord for the rest.
> I consider Discord to be the best place to build a community right now
Why so?
> I don't think that free software purists have any right to demand that devs build their platforms on something like IRC
Sure, but they can kindly ask, I guess! Don't you think using readily available open source software is a reasonable ask from an open source community?
And well, IRC is not the only alternative to Slack and Discord. You have Mattermost, Matrix, Telegram, Wire and numerous other tools which are decent modern chat apps. However, the points about using chat in the original article still stand with these tools.
> Why so?
Not OP but building a community is best on discord because it's an environment that encourages focused discussion with everything being hierarchical in the form of server (guild)->channel category[]->channel[]. If someone is only into the general discussion of an OS project and isn't interested in the talk about maintaining it, they can mute the channel and/or collapse the channel category. IRC fails in this regard since things aren't situated as collections of readable-to-all channels unless every member specifically joins the respective IRC channels for the separate segments of discussion.
The reason Discord is chosen over the likes of Matrix and Telegram is because Discord is the clear winner in network effect. The chances of someone having a Discord account versus having a Matrix account or Telegram are small, so setting up there will severely reduce the amount of people that join just to be part of the discussion; people will join anything, even a phpbb forum, if they have a specific question or request to ask of the maintainers of a OSS project. With that, it makes sense to optimize for building a community that actually wants to chat, and part of that is making it super easy to check in on the discussion. Nothing is easier than just clicking on a different server in your Discord server list.
Discord is chosen over Mattermost and Wire because signing up for either of those is a joke. Wire puts you into a funnel with questions you have to answer when it asks you to "Create a Team" - even worse, the placeholder text is "Work email", they've obviously given up on the community-building/friends & family market segment. Mattermost is similarly trying to capture as many high-paying customers as possible with the homepage being about work, and both "Cloud" and "Self-managed" options having the button say "Start Free Trial". People just want to start their community for free. If they don't already know that it's possible to use these for free without being put into a sales CRM, they're not going to find out from visiting the home pages of these services.
Why does every piece of software need a community?
I don't want to be part of a "community" to use software, I just want to do the thing I set out to do.
Because if it's open source or aimed at developers in some way, it wasn't built for you. It was built for everyone. It works by everyone helping everyone else use it.
Maybe you should get out your credit card and call a commercial software vendor if you want personal attention?
I am a developer and I understand the need for person-power to continue the development of software. But that doesn't mean I have unlimited time (or money) to support the development of all of the software I might engage with.
If a new user (including devs using libraries) needs to join real time chat in order to get help with a "I tried X and I thought I'd get Y, but I saw Z instead" type problem then that seems pretty hostile.
Most users are going to be transactional in their engagement with the software, open source or not. The community around software grows over time as the top of the iceberg of users forms a community of active participants.
But forcing a "community" by trying to force transactional support style engagement into a real time conversation framework is detrimental to the users as well as the "community" you are trying to force into existing.
Edit: Plus as a Kiwi I am, as a general principle, against anything that reinforces the tyranny of time zones. Which synchronous communication definitely does.
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