Free and Open Source Software

17901 readers

14 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

[email protected]

Discord’s secret weapon against open source competitors (it’s PluralKit) (medium.com)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

47 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Why are FOSS platforms like Matrix having such a hard time getting users to migrate from Discord? Because of PluralKit.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I don't see the point of PluralKit, you can just use multiple accounts.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago

I don't know shit about plural systems and have no idea about PluralKit but I can already forsee two issues that regular user accounts would have:

There may be systems who switch operators frequently; having to switch between multiple accounts could be a major hurdle for fluent conversation
Some systems may have too many operators to reasonably manage accounts for

As far as I understand it, PluralKit is more of a hack for acting as multiple pseudo-accounts with the convenience of a single (platform-) account. Given that Matrix, Element and the like are FOSS, it ought to be possible to build such a convenient single-"user" multi-account mechanisms into the clients or even protocol themselves rather than relying on hacky 3rd party add-ons.
Especially given that the user base of Matrix is far more likely to come into contact with plural systems than the general population is. (In the communities I frequent, I know of at least one and would not be surprised if there were quite a few more.)