Yes, this is really sad to see that much people in the OSS scene using nonfree ways to communicate.

At least, IRC had open-source servers and clients but in my opinion, it's too old nowadays.

OSS primarily uses a non-free way to host source code (GitHub), so it's not much different to use Discord.

So what if Github itself is not OSS? The technology behind is already open source and decentralized. You can switch to a Gitlab instance with just a few mouse clicks while also migrating your issues and pull requests.

I don't believe issues or pull requests are part of the Git repo. If there is a way to migrate them it would involve some GitHub API which could be shut down.

The commits in pull requests are part of the git repo, in that they can be fetched from the repo's remote. The comments are not.

as said; the issues are not part of the repo.

as much as many projects could use a clean slate here, i dont think the burden of migranting them manually or the act of just dumping them is realistic.

> So what if Github itself is not OSS? The technology behind is already open source…

So is much of the technology behind Discourse.[1]

[1] https://discord.com/open-source (click on "OS Libraries")

And it's sad to see.

There are at least a few different "OSS scenes" that have different priorities. More principled, idealistic developers fall under a different category than more pragmatic ones, so it should be no surprise that they use different tools.

Using non-Free tools has been shown to be distinctly non-pragmatic under a wide variety of considerations.

A better term would be something like "Tied programmers" or "Dependent progammers". Maybe "sharecropper progammers"?

"Sharecropper programmers" might be an accurate way of describing developers for Apple platforms, but that's not what is happening when people use GitHub and Discord to work on open-source software. They can easily move their Git hosting and chat to another platform—they just choose to use the popular, coincidentally non-OSS, platform for its pragmatism.

A large base of existing users, easy onboarding, and good visibility makes a big difference for many OSS projects. Using a self-hosted Git hosting system and mailing list is a lot of work—and it adds a not-insignificant barrier to entry for potential contributors. What issues exist with popular, proprietary Git and chat tools that make them unsuitable for OSS development?

What are some of the considerations you're thinking of where using a popular option is not pragmatic?

> nonfree ways to communicate

Does that include Hacker News?

It does, currently waiting to be either invited to lobsters or for the registrations to open again.

Check out federating reddit -like service lemmy.ml: https://dev.lemmy.ml/

> Yes, this is really sad to see that much people in the OSS scene using nonfree ways to communicate.

And the reasons are entirely understandable:

- you don't have to run your own infrastructure

- you don't have to run your own protections against fraudulent activity, DDOSes, bots etc.

- you don't have to worry about availability on any number of platforms, including mobile

free software as a hosted service is a thing.

It is a thing, is there enough of this thing? Is it free? Do these hosted services provide the infra and protection? Do these hosted services solve the issue of the dearth of clients for these services?

And if you look at hosted services like IRCCloud, it turns out they are not that different from Slack/Discord: closed source, for full range of capabilities you need to use their apps.

Sadly, they are a few years too late, it's going to be extremely hard to beat Discord now for anything that doesn't consider libre software and/ or privacy as critical.

And by the point when Discord is going to get complacent (probably in a decade or so), Matrix is likely to be seen as kind of obsolete (like XMPP is now).

(Not that I'm not going to use Matrix as much as I can...)

>Sadly, they are a few years too late, it's going to be extremely hard to beat Discord now for anything that doesn't consider libre software and/ or privacy as critical.

Can't we just wait till they run out of money for all the free services they are currently giving away ?

Next they will try to agressively monetize their user base, which will make people migrate to something else - ideally self hosted or federated & based on open protocols this time.

Their business model will increasingly be data. They will most likely start monitoring content to look for your preference of Doritos they can advertise you.

People won't abandon Discord until all your private chat/call logs are hacked and dumped. When that happens, only a fraction say 10-15% of the userbase will look for a permanent solution (i.e. something that has always-on E2EE). My guess is about 40% will change to another service with better track record, but that isn't architecturally any more secure (i.e. that's still TLS-only). The remaining 50% will stay on the service because 1) they don't care, 2) their peers don't care or, 3) because they consider the incident response and related PR good enough.

To get people to switch from discord you need something that's faster, that just works better, that fixes some issues faster than Discord staff can fix them, and that adds something the users didn't even know they needed, say, in-game HUD for discord that fits the theme of the game or something, more intuitive management like push-to-talk management commands for the client via secondary button.

As long as it's about decentralization (value/belief system stuff) or about privacy (It's just in-game talk I don't care), and not about helping the user focus on head-shots and kill-streaks, it's not going to be adopted.

Sure, this might not be enough to make gamers move to a more open solution, but might be enough of an impulse for some open source projects that moved to Discord out of convenience.

I remember people saying this about YouTube and Twitter. Yet it doesn't seem to have worked out despite both having several competent alternatives.

Yeah Discord is not going to go away anytime soon. If they ever start to actually struggle for money they'll just be bought up by some tech giant.

commercial content distribution platforms _will_ fall victim to copyright and censorship in general. its already underway and most progressive ideas have to be expressed elsewhere.

Just learned about Gab 'invading' Mastodon :

https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/12/20691957/mastodon-decentr...

Capitalism has no trouble accommodating / subverting progressive ideas. It's the conservative ideas that tend to be silenced.

EDIT : Also, interesting that the American right has moved from Twitter to not Mastodon, but to Parler instead :

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25097145

I wonder why ? Mastodon presenting itself as being too left-wing ?

(Though make no mistake, a lot of the American right is 'conservative' only in name, and is instead wildly anti-conservative both in their speech as well as in their deeds.)

If Linux can beat Solaris/IRIX/HP-UX/AIX etc, so can Matrix beat Discord.

I'm sure you've thought about this, but haven't seen it said by anyone involved with matrix:

IP, the Internet Protocol, was originally created for connecting networks (inter-network) using other protocols together (IPX, AppleTalk etc.). Once everyone supported IP and their own protocol everyone started using IP and the other protocols fell out of use.

I'm hoping Matrix & bridging will have the same effect. Matrix used to bridge. Then matrix used with bridging declining until nobody needs to bridge.

Take my opinion with a pinch of salt but any projects that use Discord as their platform for anything (chat, support, whatever) are not worth a dime, or should not worth a dime.

I am pretty sure we all know Discord. Read the Privacy Policy, read the Terms of Service. See their business model. I mean, it is against everything I, as a FOSS developer stand for. Plus, one might say Discord is generic by now, but it still revolves around gaming quite a lot.

just joined it, I was looking for something like this. Hope it take off as The modern IRC too :)

and riot