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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] 12 points 8 months ago (6 children)

not at all the same situation. Git itself is not proprietary so all the projects can survive without GitHub if the need arises. Additionally, you don’t need an account to view the repository or its discussions. There is of course a walled garden for participation and it is an issue, however it doesn’t compare to discord, which is much, much worse.

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

There is of course a walled garden for participation and it is an issue

And if you insist on using Microsoft GitHub, this contribution concern can be mitigated by offering an alternative mirror or a mailing list/email address to send patches. One way to help prevent lock-in would be to use MS GitHub’s repository settings & straight-up disable non-portable features like “Discussions”, “Sponsors” & maybe even the “Issues” tracker favoring a third-party option or the issue tracker of the mirror along with disabling “Actions” choosing a third-party CI option or the CI that comes with the mirror (or require checks ran locally before pushing).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Having a bug tracker in that walled garden is the biggest problem. It demonstrates what I’m talking about: digital rights being disregarded.

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