One thing Drew didn't say (but should have!) is that with FOSS you can actually change the software to help meet the needs of these people while for discord you're at their mercy.
Not everyone likes everything being flooded with inline images, super-long monologues, people being able to edit their messages after the fact, etc. Personally I find this all a major distraction.
So in addition to the divide between FOSS and walled garden, there is also the divide between minimalistic chat and "rich" chat.
But the point is matrix client app. Let's take element (usually it's a default choice) - it not very user-frindly and sharp on edges. Of course, it changes literally on your eyes (if you use nightly builds), but still cannot compete with Discord client in terms of UI/UX.
Matrix is awesome, but it needs more time to be polished and "slick" enough for average user.
Disclosure: I'm developer of https://etke.cc and have very huge interest in polished matrix clients. As part of my job I use nightly element clients on desktop and mobile platforms to be able to guide customers after features' releases
Why isn't it?
> If it was, we wouldn’t be having this discussion.
Are you suggesting things don't take time and luck (i.e. initial conditions) don't play a role, especially with phenomena such as market consolidation?
* We didn’t prioritise UX polish sooner.
* We burnt huge amounts of time on E2EE (which turns out to be really hard in a decentralised world).
* Building out decentralised comms in general requires about 10x more effort than centralised comms.
* Managing an open spec process and governance model burns huge amounts of time too.
* We built the flagship Element apps in triplicate on web/iOS/Android with no code reuse, in order to dogfood and provide native SDKs, burning >3x more time.
* We’ve also invested a lot of time in beyond-chat work, to try to inspire folks to use Matrix as a generic comms fabric.
Frankly, if we had been aiming purely to be a like-for-like FOSS Discord replacement, we would have done a lot of things very differently.
Hopefully we can shift that balance as the UX of apps matures on top of Matrix, and we focus exclusively on usability. The current situation is pretty depressing. You can see more about how we’re trying to fix it in https://matrix.org/blog/2021/12/22/the-mega-matrix-holiday-s...
Stuff like “Matrix is crap because they didn’t make it E2EE from day 1”, or “Because servers store metadata” or “Because it didn’t have a legally registered foundation at first” or “Because Element’s default config points to the Matrix.org server” or “Because Synapse supports shadowbans” or “Because the Element apps influence the direction of Matrix” or “Because it’s not XMPP” etc etc etc. It’s surprisingly hard to keep focused on building apps that optimise for mainstream users when the loudest voices are campaigning to optimise for their own crusades. I suspect the same effect has substantially negatively impacted Linux on the Desktop and other places where FOSS usability has failed to punch its weight against mainstream usability.
On the other hand, there are quite a few examples of FOSS apps which have successfully pulled themselves out of this hole of being “built by geeks for geeks” into being successful and even delightful to a more general mainstream audience: Firefox, GitLab, Blender, Audacity all spring to mind. And that’s the model we’re trying for at this point.
Sure it has tons of warts, but it’s way better than just a year ago, and now a truly usable replacement for many use cases. (We actually use it instead of Discord/Slack/etc and have been happy with it.)
FOSS is hard. Having good leadership makes all the difference. Linux had it, Apache had it, MySQL had it, and I think Matrix has it.
The key thing to remember, and it is easy to forget, is that FOSS is a momentum game - Blender is a fantastic example of people plugging away at something and then “all of a sudden”, they have a world class tool. The same will be true with Matrix, and probably a lot sooner than many people realize.
I currently pay for an Element subscription for my close friends and while there are some minor issues, we’re happier using it than Wire or SMS (one of my friends is Android, otherwise iMessage would suffice).
For whatever it's worth, I think Matrix's approach to E2EE and investment into trying to solve some of the really hard problems in that space was completely worthwhile, even though it's painful and even though it set Matrix back in other ways. It's the type of fundamental problem that would be hanging over Matrix indefinitely until all of that time was devoted to it, and I think doing it early was the right move.
My feeling is that what Matrix demonstrated was that decentralized E2EE is itself a giant UX problem (both for users and in some ways for developers who are building clients as well), and that solving it requires a ton of UX iteration and thoughtful iteration on how to share/encode keys, handle sessions, respond to unencrypted sessions, etc, etc... That is something that a lot of other platforms haven't really grappled with, and I think ignoring that problem would have risked imposing a hard limit on how effectively Matrix could roll out E2EE by default without it just staying as a really annoying option that most people avoided.
That being said, I do agree with the rest of your comment. I've noticed some faster improvement on UX lately from Element, and it's been getting steadily better (I love the direction spaces are going), but it's still not quite over the line for me.
I'm just not sure... I don't know that I would phrase that core work that's been happening as if it was the wrong focus, I think that stuff just takes a long time to build and the benefits aren't always immediately obvious to users, or that it takes a while to start paying out those benefits. A good E2EE UX isn't really about impressing users, it's more about being invisible, which can be frustrating because getting it right just means people complaining about it less, it doesn't mean having an advertisable feature. But it's still important though if you want people to actually use E2EE.
I am still excited about P2P chat, about taking server moderation seriously, etc... That all has a ton of potential that could pay out in really significant ways in the future, even if it's not user-facing right now. I don't think any of that is wasted effort or that it's not important. But I'm also happy that Matrix/Element is focusing more on general user-facing UX now, and I do agree that there's a lot of iteration and improvement to be done there.
It's infinitely easier than with Slack or Discord, where it's outright impossible.
> If it was, we wouldn’t be having this discussion.
We definitely could still be having this discussion even if Matrix provided better UX out of box, because that doesn't mean it would automatically win the fight with existing network effects.
Drew is honest enough to quote in the footnote one of his blind friends who points out that Discord has made a lot of accessibility improvements and lots of disabled folks use it.
And let's be real, which FOSS software is, generally speaking, more accessible for disabled folks than alternatives? This is an argument that is made because accessibility is in the spirit of FOSS, which is true, but in reality most FOSS software is often less accessible, simply because it is clunkier, than whatever is on the market, so it's not a real selling point, just a theoretical one.
The same goes for performance. Yes in theory people in FOSS tend to be more conscious towards low-end or old hardware, but what is the number of developers who have a computer powerful enough to build modern software but who can't run discord? Not to mention that most feature equivalent FOSS projects are no less hardware hungry.
In reality how many disjoint sets of community members you have depends on just one single thing, the quality of the software, that's it. The fact that you can change FOSS software to your needs practically only makes sense for small pieces of software. Nobody is going to roll their own Matrix client for their three person FOSS project.
You all get the idea of division of labor, right? We went into software development, not everyone else did.
Consider Discord has video and voice. You go ahead and patch that into IRC.
Every other chat service I have requested data export from gave me all the messages in conversations I was a part of (even if they were mangled somehow -- e.g. missing attachments in FB Messenger). I think this is an example of Discord applying motivated reasoning for the company's benefit (E: at the expense of their users).
If you read the ToS it also is very specific that it's not your data.
Check the ToS you don't own anything on Discord you even transfer copyright for every word you type. What even is your argument here? That it would be nice otherwise?
This is blatantly false. https://discord.com/terms under "your content" claims that I give Discord a forwardable and nonrevokable license to do anything with my content, not that I transfer copyright.
Do you know why Google Hangouts and FB Messenger provide a data export that includes others' messages? Do they base it on a different interpretation of the law, or is there some other reason for them to do so?
Citation for this? It seems pretty intuitive to me that messages sent to me are considered to be "my data", and your claim doesn't seem to be consistent with the overall theme of the GDPR...
At the very least, there's a distinction between personal information such as your name and address (which the GDPR regulates the collection of), and non-personal content like anonymous usernames and sent messages.
https://discord.com/terms under "Your Content"
or
https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/360004957991-Y...
They have a license on everything sent AND they can use it to reproduce, publish, etc. So they very much can create the functionality.
> When I request a copy of all data Discord "has on me" I get only the messages I've sent (which is borderline useless), and I am only allowed to do that once a month, with a days-long waiting period.
What he is trying to paint as a broken feature is just compliance to GDPR and with that you only get your data.
Full comment because context is important.
The first part of the comment is explaining that there's missing/broken functionality. They're trying to export data and that's missing. What Discord has, which could count be used as that feature, is requesting a copy of all your data and THAT is broken for the use case because it's missing the messages of others and, even then, it's once a month and there's days-long waits.
Discord isn’t ephemeral. Making a shitty UI that pretends it is doesn’t change that.
If you are not comfortable with that, then don't send the message in the first place.
In the context of FOSS project chat rooms that we’re discussing here, it is quite ironic that many FOSS community members will, predictably and with tacit or explicit support from their peers, openly break their legal contract with Discord in order to hoard chat logs for private or public use — while in the same breath demanding use of, and compliance with, legal contracts such as the GPL. Human beings certainly do excel at developing blind spots for cognitive dissonance when it’s to their benefit to do so.
Citation needed that messages intentionally sent to you are "other people's data" and regulated under the GDPR. They're certainly not personal information such as a real name or phone number.
> That's a feature to help stop doxxing.
This has nothing to do with doxxing. Doxxing is easily prevented by merely changing the takeout so that there's plausible deniability - e.g. if person A and B have a conversation and A uses the takeout feature, person B's username would be redacted or minimized such that they could reasonably claim that that person in the transcript could have been anyone.
"The terms of service raise very serious concerns." -- TOS;DR extension
Ah ok that makes sense....not
People are creatures of habit, and mass products are built with either heavy marketing or piggybacked on other systems' popularity. It's hard to break into a market, but if it's any consolation it's equally hard for non-free products.
It's obviously true because when you stat looking at, say, Jabber, it turns out that it only offers that for a single mobile client on Android that should connect to properly configured server with all the relevant XEPs enabled.
So yes. For practical purposes Jabber doesn't cut it. No idea about Matrix.
They have the habit to use a web service for everything, or at most a phone native "app" that they expect to be distributed by and integrated with some centralized service that exercises total control.
I've also encountered an IRC server that caches and rebroadcasts the last hour of messages.
But yeah with IRC you run into the problem that it wasn't originally designed for that use.
> Mastodon proved that you can actually build a usable app on a federated service
I don't see how anything needs to be "proved." Do we actually need proof that IRC could cache messages and repeat them for joining clients? It just wasn't originally designed that way.
XMPP also has an extension for caching the scroll.
I know i'm not the only one like that either.
Some people enjoy investing the time and energy into setting up something like this and maintaining it. I am one of those people.
However, it’s just not realistic to propose these things as solutions for the average user or even average developer. Cloud services like Discord are popular because you don’t have to think about it or invest time into maintaining anything. Click a few buttons and you’re in.
I think that fact is lost on a lot of devs who invested the days and days into setting up their own servers, learning things like Quassel, smoothing out all of the issues and so on. It’s easy to forget that every piece of that solution came with a lot of labor and learning spread out over years of time.
On the other hand, I suspect a lot of the people who propose these as alternatives actually like the barrier to entry that it all represents. If only the people dedicated enough to learn all of these steps and maintain their own infrastructure can fully participate, it represents a barrier to entry that makes the group feel more exclusive.
Again, going to highlight it's such a short-sided POV, this sort of thinking "today it's free, it's better, and thus it is the right choice for the investment of my time, my community's time, even my project's time." Such short sided thinking in favor of convenience right now is way too common leads to a lot of problems (in society generally but that's another discussion). I really want people to have a longer term view of utility for the sake of longevity and stability of things as important as our channels of communication.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29711001 this was just posted a few hours ago.
I'm not against people choosing discord for some projects, but there's nothing so terrible or oppressive about choosing IRC. It doesn't deserve the "considered harmful" treatment. Hopping on IRC is a very low bar for a potential contributor to clear.
Mosh is the only thing that actually works in those cases.
But using Mosh means having a server, seting it up and so on. Yeah, Mosh+IRC is better from a FOSS perspective. But it comes with usability drawbacks too.
It is, but the the average user's perspective is not that they'll set up an IRC bouncer (which odds are high they don't even know exists) so they can have message permanence and cross-device sharing.
Instead they'll say that IRC has no history / offline support (which is, technically, true) and will use discord because it does.
What we learned from the Freenode implosion is that for most IRC users the concept of different networks was entirely alien. IRC was Freenode for those people.
It doesn't help that the authentication story for IRC is a bloody mess. In Discord, I have one account and can join any server^Wguild and have a different nick in each (and the nicks support unicode, and emoji). If I want to have different nicks on different channels on an IRC network I need 2 separate logins.
I’m sorry that the new update for quassel and quasseldroid is taking so long :(
Please see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netsplit
netsplit is a disconnection between two servers
Is this now solvable? Okay.
I have limited time & limited yak-shaving energy. In the choice between something whose problems are solvable and something whose problems are adequately solved, I am going to conserve my time/energy by choosing the latter 95% of the time.
For you it's configuring email servers and compiling linux kernels. Why not dig trenches for power cables or build towers for wireless communications? If the answer is "but I don't care enough about those things, I just build on top of them", that's exactly what others think about compiling linux kernels, writing boot loader configs or configuring email servers.
A. I’m interested in the problems that the open source project focuses on.
B. I was in the middle of solving a different problem and see the project as a path to achieve that.
My disinterest in solving the problems of IRC is because I want to avoid context-switching from my problems or your project’s problems to IRC problems I encountered over 10 years ago. If I’m forced to kerp context-switching, I lose hope that I can stay focused and get my current problem solved. I would rather have a way to pay money and get support than to try to solve an ever-growing yakstak of problems all at the same time. Progress is better than futility or overwhelm.
The cool thing about technology is that there is progress. We can do more, we can do it faster, easier, better, etc. Twiddling with the same shoddy tools from decades past is the opposite of that. A long time ago IRC was a cool new capability that was worth putting effort into setting up and using. These days all the hacks and workarounds involved are still required, but all they get you is an inferior chat platform. So, no. The tech that excites me are the new ideas and inventions that people are coming up with today, not some chat platform that is older than I am.
Again. Even if 100% of people on HN are devs and sysadmins, why do you assume that your particular interests are a must for everyone on HN?
Or that everyone on HN would be interested in spending time to set up a Raspberry Pi with a media server and IRC bouncer?
I'm a dev. I have far more interesting things to do in my spare time than that. Far more interesting to me.
I feel like to have something in common with my coworkers I should have to watch unlimited amount of netflix and marvel movies.. which of course every one lives the way it wants, but I am more frustrated because loneliness is bad and not being able to find common passions feed that, I guess I gone OT ^^, but yeah I got your point, you're right I guess this argument is saturated now
> I've noticed this pattern about tech people today
> I am not sure how old are you or what is your background, but I feel that today people
> I feel like to have something in common with my coworkers I should have to watch unlimited amount of netflix and marvel movies..
Step 1: stop being condescending and assuming moral superiority just because you have an interest in a random list of things you assume everyone shold be interested in.
Your approach is the classical "kids these days" that is so classical even Aristotle and Horace have said the same things.
Step 2: Accept that people are free to do in their spare time whatever the hell they want to. Watching unlimited Netlfix? Good for them. Setting up IRC bouncers? Couldn't be happier for them.
Step 3: if truly interested, you could try and figure out what exactly interests people in tech, and why they do it. Could be it's just because it pays more than the alternatives and they are much hapier carving out wooden dolls on the weekends.
If that's not your cup of tea, there are now communities around any and all things any person could be intersetd in, no matter how bizarre or "out of fashion".
> loneliness is bad
You can say that again.
I've set up bouncers, ran my own email for years, and at some point I just became immensely bored of doing those things. There's an ungratifying sameness to having to fiddle with self-hosted email or hunt down why my irc bouncer crashed/went offline. This kind of friction extends up and down the stack, too, which irc client works on my phone? There are a few I might choose from, do I spend time trying them out over a period of days to see which is a decent one? Oh, well I still don't have threads, even if one client or another will auto-preview image URLs. And on and on.
I am disinterested, as you say, not because I don't want to learn it, but because I have.
disclaimer: i have 80 buffers in my irssi session, but i know why most people aren't me
The way I see the tech space today is that everybody likes pizza. Except back in the days, you'd have to go to the grocery store, buy your ingredients then cook it at home.
Today you have to drive for a 1-2 hours to find those ingredients, as people are simply not interested anymore in cooking, stores started just selling ready made pizzas.
In a few years you'd probably need to build a farm and start raising cattle. Or you could chose one of the five most popular pizzas from the supermarket. That's it, only five. It was deemed, by popular vote, or maybe "data shows", that those five pizzas are good, every other recipe is cancerous so it's outlawed.
Most of the stuff is broken in known ways to a terrible degree. Usability sucks. You can literally see the brokenness. Most of the stuff does not work properly, is slow, insecure and just stupid. It does not do what it is supposed to do, at least not without risking you harm.
Some stuff is a little bit better and only broken in more subtle ways. Some edge cases might not work. Some obscure security holes might be in there.
Then there is some very rare stuff, which has exceptional quality. But even then, we all know it probably is still technically broken. On the unlikely chance that the thing actually works and no mistakes were made, there is certainly a bug deep down in the Kernel or somewhere in the CPU.
You take some of the very rare stuff of exceptional quality. Does it do all the things you want it to do? Probably not. So at best it somewhat works, does most of the things you want it to do and only has unkown brokenness, hopefully very deep down and hidden away as far as possible.
Now comes the biggest problem: Even if you choose the least broken stuff, you know have to start maintaining it. Things below it will start changing and reintroduce more brokenness. By using it, you sign up to fight it.
Now I have this superpower to actually fight it. I make things less broken. But I am fighting an ongoing avalanche of brokenness. My day has 24 hours, I need to sleep some of them and the avalanche just keeps coming. Some days I like the amount I have shovelled away. Some days are ending with me still up to me neck inside it.
I am not like Sisyphos, other people are using the space where I shovelled most of the brokenness away. So it does make sense and is fullfilling. I have fun, when I look at a small area, where the brokenness will stay away for some time, even though I know, it will come back at some point.
I am not immortal. I can probably do this for another 50 years. So 50 more years of shovelling but vast mountain chains all around me.
So I have to be very careful to only pick the most precious areas to clear.
Why should "I don't want to spend time on stuff that's not interesting to me" be concerning?
> I feel that today people don't enjoy stuff as much as my cohort, I go at work,
Your "cohort" is apparently hardcore computer people who are fine doing computer-related stuff both at work and in spare time. Well, tech people toda is a much bigger "cohort" than that.
> but do you people have a passion for tech related stuff
Yes. Yes we do. And tech-related stuff is often emphatically not fiddling with Raspberry Pis to set up obscure servers to maintain chat history.
Part of the problem is that I've been burned by enough hours spent on 30-second tasks.
I can't believe how delusional some people are. And sorry for being so rude.
In 2021 everyone expects history and other things. You can't realisticaly expect everyone to "just have a fully set up always-on raspberry pi and install some server on it". That's why IRC and XMPP are mostly dead.
> I have a dedicated server running my email and media server where I also put
Good for you. The absolute vast majority of users, however, don't.
The general idea of group chats was to facilitate ad hoc real time communication. People were not assumed to be always online and messages were only of interest for the discussion happening in the moment. There are much better options for sharing information that might have a longer lived scope of relevance anyway. Plus remembering some chats that I hung out with friends, it had a sense of intimacy, sometimes I wanted to share the information exactly with those online at the moment, so no history was a feature. Popular open source IRC channels have archives that one could look up if need be anyway.
Of course there is also the modern idea of work-oriented chats like slack that have a powerful search function and are mostly about async communication, being a bit of everything, a way to share information with lots of people, a documentation system, discussion and so on.
I really don’t understand how people can think that having everyone self-host and maintain things like Quassel on a Raspberry Pi is a perfectly reasonable solution to the UX shortcomings of IRC, but then also insist that having to spend 30 seconds adjusting the basic settings in Discord is an unacceptably difficult task.
At some point, this conversation isn’t actually about UX or functionality. It’s about hating the new thing and clinging to the old ways.
I would argue that those Raspberry Pi based solutions are nice to have but not needed. In fact I argued you don't need history most of the time and that not offering central storage of history can be reasonable.
That's the big value of mailing lists over most of these chat solutions.
People are more thoughtful about email only because it's slow and relatively low volume. You see the same on stack exchange.
You freely chose to post the insult, so you are not.
> In 2021 everyone expects history and other things.
I should hope I am included in "everyone" and I do not expect that. I think IRC rules and I think chats are better when they are ephemeral. I know people disagree with me; that is the point of discussing it. It's strange (a cheap rhetorical trick, really) to point out the expectations of a group of people in the current year as if that was an inevitability and that is how things always shall be unto the ages.
IRC is still used by countless open source projects and there are many public XMPP servers everyone can use. I switched my family and most of my friends to XMPP this year and no-one runs an XMPP server at home.
See - it's "solvable" versus "solved". People seek solutions, not possibilities.
Ask ten people and they’ll likely tell you ten different solutions (not to mention the feasibility of such solutions). Most people just want to set up a chat space for their project, or ask a question and get an answer; they don’t want to make a million choices about something they don’t understand before they are allowed to do what they set out to do.
It's still consuming your time and energy and that's a running cost by itself. I'm also a long-time Quassel user in addition to be a long-time IRC user, but I have no more energy to manage my own Quassel server and my current instance has been long neglected.
> Mail and mailgroups face a similar UX challenge. Not everyone is willing to endure the pain of learning and using mailgroups and IRC just because they're FOSS.
I'm seriously not sure if you are being sarcastic. Learning mailinglists is an obstacle compared to learning discord??
I think it's not as much a statement about ease of use but rather about comfort and playing into UX tropes everyone is used to now.
Personally, I like forums for the same reason you like mailing lists.
I still don't know how to reply to an old discussion started before I joined the mailing list, and I've been using them for 15 years.
I think most people choose platforms because of their popularity. Everyone uses foo, let's just use foo.
The "popularity" reason does not explain the cause & effect timeline.
Discord was started 2015. But Matrix, XMPP/Jabber, IRC were older than that and thus by definition back in 2015, they were already more popular and well known.
Thus, the original first reason can't be popularity -- because there was a point when Discord was not popular and it was still chosen over Matrix & IRC. The reason is that it's easier for project maintainers to create new Discord servers + channels. E.g. : https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/204849977-How-...
Put a different way... What caused Discord to become more popular than Matrix? The obvious answer is that a few clicks on a web page is easier than installing and configuring a Matrix server. Is there really a better explanation than "ease of use"?
EDIT reply to: >Discord was first popular with gamers because it offered _good voice chat_; and this popularity drew in other communities.
I emphasized "good voice chat" because in that sentence, it's the more explanatory reason than just "popular". So the other and older alternatives like IRC did not have good voice chat. And this drives decisions of gamers that prioritize a desirable feature such as seamless VoIP over the need to use an open protocol (IRC) that's not owned by a corporation.
In other words, whenever the proposed reason for product dominance is "popularity" or "network effects", we always want to dissect that further and look for the reason that caused the rising popularity. If we don't, we just end up with infinite recursive reasoning such as "it's popular because of its popularity" -- which is not a satisfactory nor helpful analysis.
Click the link, choose a nick and you are thrown into the chat. That way you could checkout a new community and discord in general with a really low barrier to entry.
The community that drew me to discord made the jump when their self-hosted IRC network became increasingly unstable. The multimedia features like easy picture sending ware also very nice, as was the mobile client.
Still dislike the condecending tone they have towards the users tho.
And I still use IRC on other networks. Both with a shell running irssi in screen and hexchat on my desktop that starts up with windows. That's for more ephemeral communities.
Matrix did not have "servers" (in the Discord sense) until very recently. It's also much harder to produce an open, federated protocol than a proprietary one so Matrix has been less featureful than Discord for a long time, but the gap is closing quickly.
There's also the matter of marketing: Discord is a product, Matrix is not, thus it's harder to market. Yes, now there's Element, which is a product, but given above, Discord has had an effective head start of several years.
Give it a bit more time.
Its focus on gaming communities.
Joining from federated networks to some larger rooms takes hours or even days.
Tried it a few months ago, was not impressed. I spent a couple days debugging it and asking for some support, but it turns out the official server software is by design incapable of joining large rooms instantly. It literally took 2 days for the room to appear in my chat client. And the message delivery was also delayed and far from instant.
To me personally IRC is way better than Matrix, when it comes to basic instant text messaging. For more advanced features I would rather use Discord, than spend days trying to get Matrix work.
Performance is going to be a major focus in 2022, with [fast federation room joins](https://matrix.org/blog/2021/12/22/the-mega-matrix-holiday-s...) and a new version of [the sync part of protocol](https://matrix.org/blog/2021/12/22/the-mega-matrix-holiday-s...).
In my opinion, there's no way Matrix can be a valid alternative, until it's as usable as the competitors.
On login, I was asked to validate from two devices. This is novel in this type of apps (at least, the mainstream ones), and it took me a while to figure it out.
Part of the confusion was also the fact that notifications about validations started to pile up, and I wasn't sure about I was doing.
I still don't know how I got the validation key (or however it's called) in this workflow.
Another novel concept is that, as far as I've understood, sessions are associated to keys, so, I suppose, if I lose a key, all the (encrypted) communications are gone. This would be acceptable, but the warning is very pushy; it's not clear to a new user if it's very strongly advised to enable encryption or not (will the other people trust me without?).
Communicating with other people is also confusing - I had two channels open with another user, and didn't know if any of it was valid.
Joining groups was confusing as well. I had a name (which was also strange; I still don't know if it's normal for the names to be "strange"), and again, couldn't figure out if I joined it or not (until I joined via other means).
This may be all necessary for a safe design, but definitely, it's a huge barrier to entry for somebody who expects a Slack-like experience.
Unless one wants to stick with synchronous voice chatting, I failed to see any reason to use Discord apart from its popularity.
Some people, valuable open source contributors in particular, choose to use software exactly based on its licensing status.
I don't mind paying for software but I do mind running binary blob that I have no idea what it does. I also mind being unable to fix an irritating issue which, with open source, I at least have a potential to be able to fix myself.
I choose software based on the freedom behind their licenses and always will. I value my relationships with others over mere technical differences.
I hope you at least learn something of our existence, besides that without people who think and act this way, there'd be no Wikipedia, Linux, Wordpress, or alternative to Windows.
imagine an alternate universe where wikipedia was a ghost town devoid of information, but hey, it's open!
Yeah, it's really hard to use. I can't seem to find definitive documentation about mailing lists anywhere. I've found documentation for the software itself but actual use seems to be some kind of arcane knowledge. Last time I tried to participate in one I ended up emailing someone directly by mistake.
Licensing status is part of "functionality".
If 3rd parties cannot deploy their own instance and federate/mirror contents the whole community is in lock-in.
Closed source walled gardens are not eternal. The change policies, start charging money or shut down.
This endlessly fragments the user community. This bad functionality.
I'm someone who likes the idea of IRC being impermanent, available only if I was online at the time.
However, I also want people to be able to @mention me so that I can see it later, even if I was offline, overriding the default. AND, when that happens, I also want to be able to read the context before the message and probably some conversation after. In other words, I want "@smichel17 ^" to be a thing.
I don't see any way to combine those features. I can approximate this experience in Discord and its ilk by having all history about l available; muting conversations, except for notifications; and relying on willpower not to read the backlog unless I was mentioned. So that's what I do. Maybe the closest thing would be Snapchat, where messages can be "saved" by any of the participants so the whole group can read them later.
There's no way to approximate this experience in IRC. So although I still use IRC, it's mostly over a matrix bridge; matrix becomes my bouncer.
Yes, there is.
<bmn__> !tell smichel17 crowdmatch me, see HN frontpage
<reminder`bot> 1 message stored. will deliver when smichel17 rejoins or unaways.
⋮
* smichel17 is no longer marked as being away, gone 04:30:55
<reminder`bot> smichel17, bmn__ wants you to know: "crowdmatch me, see HN frontpage" (2021-12-28 13:12)> In other words, I want "@smichel17 ^" to be a thing.
I've been doing this with IRC for about 3-4 years now, and it means that I'm "always online" as far as IRC is concerned (except for server maintainance stuff). To a reasonably approximation, I never miss anything.
From this perspective, the "always online" approach just makes IRC like Discord et al, where you receive everything and have to choose what to read when you get back.
Snapchat is the closest, with its "messages disappear after 24h by default, but can be saved by members of the group".
With Quassel at least, private messages show up elsewhere, tagged messages will generally be color-coded for easy identification. I suppose that people who participate in busier messaging systems than #ardour on libera.chat may need the sort of thing you're referring to, but it is so foreign to me that it's beyond my imagination.
What was being described was more like saving a highlight; with much less friction. On Discord, I can @someone even if they're a nickname-only user with no account.
I've been more enthralled by dusty mailing list threads. Oh and to illustrate my point, good old c2 wiki had infinitely more value than discord ever had, even though it provided near nothing beside text edits.
* tomasklaen has quit IRC (*.net *.split)
In a world where open source didn't exist? Well I paid €129 for Windows 10 Pro recently, if there was no open source *nix I guess I'd pay that for one.
If we consider this statistic to be meaningful in this case, then 97% of people don't care. That's enough to be able to generalize.
> What I really fail to understand is why people don't hedge. They are collectively willing to pay millions of dollars every year in perpetuity for a product, but never realize they can help fund an open alternative for a much lower cost, and that once the product does what they want, they won't lose access to it?
Discord is not a paid application. I've never paid them a cent in my years of using it.
Since Ubuntu is arguably the most proprietary-software-friendly distro and also the most popular, I'd say a good portion of those 3% seem to be on Linux for the same reasons as me, and not for its "licensing status".
How much would you pay for Ubuntu if it was proprietary?
We don't know how much of that 3% is there for the FOSS aspect.
I suspect most are because of the free aspect and being better than Windows for their use case, the open source is just a bonus.
> They are collectively willing to pay millions of dollars every year in perpetuity for a product
People love free stuff and will prefer it if its good enough, that's why Discord and Google Docs are so popular.
Funding open source would be cool though. Specially if we started hiring UX people
> Funding open source would be cool though. Specially if we started hiring UX people
If I hadn't promised my wife that I would take a real break during the holidays, I'd be working on the landing page to gauge interest on this idea that I have on to create a (non-crypto) "DAO" for curating/funding/promoting Open Source development. Can I ping you once I have something more concrete to show?
I switched to Linux this year, after three decades as a happy Windows power user since 3.1, because I was finally sick of having to fight the OS to stop it from showing me ads, tracking my activity, and trying to push unwanted products and updates on me.
This may or may not count as "I switched for the FOSS". Of course its FOSS nature is ultimately the reason why Linux does not treat me as a data cow.
But if Linux were a fully closed-source, commercial OS, but still showed the same basic respect to me that older Windows version did, I would still be a happy user. Said respect need be as little as (1) don't put stuff on my machine without my permission, (2) let me do whatever the fuck I want on my machine.
No, I use Linux because I need a *nix system, Linux provides a better one out-of-the-box, and I very much dislike Apple's UI/UX.
That said, there were more than a few occasions that made me aware that this choice was not free of downsides:
- When I gave up on having a reliable bluetooth connection
- When I got so sick of looking for ways to improve battery life and just started assuming that it will last a third of what is claimed to last with Windows.
- After I tried to connect my guitar to my computer via an usb interface and realized that I had to choose between running the sound effects application or running any other sound app that depended on Pulseaudio.
- When I browsed through Steam and realized that I still can not find a good car-racing game that runs on Linux.
So, yes, Linux is great and can do a lot. But if you are not having any kind of periodic frustration with it you are either resignated or playing within a very small sandbox.
Please avoid putting words in my mouth, particularly when you are blatently wrong.
"Have you?" doesn't make sense, as we're not in that reality.
Imho, the question about donation comes across as implying the person is dishonest about being willing to pay if it was proprietary, unless they have donated when it's free.
But it's perfectly consistent for a person to be willing to pay for something if it has a price and happy to take it for free when it's offered for free.
Someone that says "I would pay if it were not free" is a much weaker signal that says "I paid even knowing I could have it for free"
Problem is, there's no way to have a price tag on it and have all else be the same. The reduction in users this would bring would impact many of the reasons I like Arch, not to mention the perverse incentives it creates for the maintainers.
You can also share files through urls...
Unless you were not connected when the message was sent.
> You can also share files through urls...
You could also share them by mailing a usb drive. Both are a lot more annoying than just copy pasting them into a chat.
Also, people need to be a little more precise regarding sharing files. OP just said "share file" they didn't say host files or whatever. Often times the file I want to share isn't hosted or can be embedded (in the past I had to pass around multi-GB binary dumps and you can't embed that in slack and I definitely think you can't do that in discord).
Or, you know, just use a product that has all that built-in freeing you to do other things
1) Impractical. You have to upload files to third party services that usually require an account. So you have to leave the chat, upload the file, and then get back to paste the link.
2) Bad integration. Some sites work better on mobile than others. Some barely work on slow internet connections. Some required logins, or show ads. And you have to leave the client just to see a GIF.
2) Clients can auto integrate URLs, like IRCCloud. It works just as well as server side integration.
Regarding IRC, Drew is kind of famous with his ascetism, claiming that the impossibility to share GIFs, videos, files, use threads, have internal chat history, are all features rather than limitations[1]. The thing is, people don't care about it, they'll simply vote with their own legs. Mail and mailgroups face a similar UX challenge. Not everyone is willing to endure the pain of learning and using mailgroups and IRC just because they're FOSS.
[1] https://drewdevault.com/2019/07/01/Absence-of-features-in-IR...