Re:Please don't use Discord for FOSS projects
by grey_earthling on Wednesday December 29, 2021 @09:55AM
(#29725312)
The difference here is not that any particular client is FOSS, but that Matrix is a protocol. There can be multiple compatible general-purpose clients already in existence, and hopefully one of those is accessible enough.
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.