At least, IRC had open-source servers and clients but in my opinion, it's too old nowadays.
A better term would be something like "Tied programmers" or "Dependent progammers". Maybe "sharecropper progammers"?
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?
So is much of the technology behind Discourse.[1]
[1] https://discord.com/open-source (click on "OS Libraries")
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.
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
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.
Does that include Hacker News?
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...)
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.
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.)
https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/12/20691957/mastodon-decentr...
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.
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.
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.