This is just for a brief period during polishing/debugging since this is the first time third-party PDS hosts have been added to the network.

The goal is just to help PDS operators join the network and make sure that if there's a problem we have a channel of communication open.

Bluesky has a Matrix dev group (afaik it’s an official one) why not use that too in addition to Discord (or other comms channels)?

Unfortunately they declared they didn't have moderation bandwidth to maintain it as an official channel, and then apparently moved to Discord :(

I'm a little confused by this, how did switching to Discord reduce the load on their moderators?

i assume it didn’t. unfortunately, decentralised web projects don’t always do that well at having each others’ backs. (Matrix maintains a presence on Bluesky tho: https://bsky.app/profile/matrix.org)

Discord has better moderation tools than matrix

Welp, that’s unfortunate indeed.

P.S. Fantastic project (Matrix/Element)!

Is that a direct quote? I don't see it anywhere. What I do see is

> Because the PDS distribution is not totally settled, we want to have a line of communication with PDS admins in the network, so we’re asking any developer that plans to run a PDS to join the PDS Admins Discord.

https://docs.bsky.app/blog/self-host-federation

This is much more reasonable than an actual gate on the feature.

Not a direct quote. But Discord is the only means of communication.

What would you like to see instead for groupchat-style quick low-threshold discussion?

Maybe Zulip.

Maybe some kind of federated option?