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Comment by chrisasquith

8 months ago

Hi! Ty! And Hack club is totally free to teens and we provide travel stipends, hardware, electronics and more. (We don’t charge 7 percent to clubs to sell things :)) hack club run a fiscal sponsorship and adult-orgs using it pay us 7percent- which we use to make more things free to teens. - hack club cofounder here

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chrisasquith

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commandersaki  8 months ago

I don't know if it's still the case, but a young developer in Bangladesh has been making pretty cool neovim plugins on a mobile phone. Hack club is (or was?) collecting donations to get him a macbook laptop to hopefully reduce the pain points: https://hcb.hackclub.com/oxy2dev-laptop/transactions

  • squigz  8 months ago

    On the one hand, that's awesome. On the other hand, I do wish open source people would have opted to get him something more free than a MacBook.

    • Sayrus  8 months ago

      He choose the laptop for durability because he can't get it repaired in Bangladesh. People didn't pick a non-free laptop without consulting him.

      15 replies →

ugh123  8 months ago

Have you thought about moving to Discord? I'm sure it won't be free for your org, but could be friendlier terms.

  • viccis  8 months ago

    Discord is (rightfully) finally under the scrutiny it is due. I would say that their choice of Mattermost is apt.

  • N-Krause  8 months ago

    Isn't this basically the same as Slack, just good for _now_?

    I do use discord myself. But as a company I wouln't put all my communication data in the hands of a company that could just do the same as Slack did, in some foreseeable future.

  • self_awareness  8 months ago

    This is hilarious. People suggesting to move to Discord, because Slack walled garden has started to profit from the vendor lock-in they've created.

    This shows that many people still have no idea what's going on. That you shouldn't use Slack OR Discord.

    It's really incredible, although expected.

    • anthk  8 months ago

      Yep. We millenials spent decades talking about free and libre protocols (and software) and kids today love another walled garden against another one... good luck with that.

      Inb4 "IRC sucks"... Jabber/XMPP exists since late 00's (at least ready enough compared to the first versions) and there are pretty fine clients for every OS.

      11 replies →

    • drnick1  8 months ago

      This. It is mind boggling to see an organization that teaches tech related stuff be so clueless about the dangers of proprietary software, cloud services and walled gardens.

  • dns_snek  8 months ago

    I would recommend that people stop taking this kind of bait, especially as an organization. Discord is free for now but that's bound to change and you can't have any expectation of privacy there.

    In my eyes they're practically the poster child for an organization who could (and arguably should) be running their own solution on their own servers.

    Perhaps self-hosted Revolt Chat [1] which I've been keeping an eye on but I don't have any first hand experience with it. There are many more solutions in this space though.

    [1] https://revolt.chat/

    • omneity  8 months ago

      I explored revolt with a group of friends earlier this year, along several other solutions such as Matrix Element, Telegram and the new TeamSpeak.

      Neither Revolt nor others are unfortunately at the right level of maturity to be adopted seriously. The team is doing a great job, but it’s still extremely basic.

      Discord with all its warts is still the best way to have group calls in a casual setting.

      1 reply →

  • sfn42  8 months ago

    I was going to suggest the same. Why would it not be free? I would expect it to be free. I don't think running a server costs anything.