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Please don't use Discord for FOSS projects (drewdevault.com)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (14 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Same situation yet hardly anyone gives a shit.

I give a shit. Open source contributions shouldn’t require proprietary services if open alternatives (even if it requires more than a single service) suffice. In the case of Git forges, the alternatives are great--& the more you buy into the Microsoft GitHub-specific features the harder it will be to migrate which will lead to lock-in.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

I give a shit.

There are not enough of you. Evidenced by ~95%+ of noteworthy FOSS projects being jailed in Github’s walled garden.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

And certain projects I don’t deem it worth my time to contribute due to this fact. The unfortunate issue with that is usually there isn’t a good way to communicate that to the maintainers when they lock all coms to Microsoft GitHub & Slack/Discord. There are certain projects I have skipped on trying based on this too as to me it becomes an indicator of poor decision-making trying to capture hype/marketing rather than fostering goodwill of the free/ethical software movements. At least on Lemmy you get an upvote instead of harassed by asking for an open communication and/or contribution option 😅

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