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Comment by unicornporn | Hacker News Reader

> Using a third party client is considered self botting and against the TOS. This part of the TOS are enforced.

And this is what open source projcts use as their official means of communication and coordination... When did programmers become so gullible?

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The worst part is that this is what many end-users want. We every so often get some strong pushback on the KMK (mechanical keyboard) Firmware project over my admittedly-dogmatic insistence on using Matrix (and otherwise trying to move further towards the Free Software Needs Free Tools [1] ideal world). Roughly paraphrased, "Well relatively few people have a Matrix account but a ton of folks are already on Discord, why do you make the Matrix only officially supported platform and have a flakey-and-maybe-five-8s-uptime bridge to Discord as an olive branch?" Because it's a GPL project with no corporate backing and no need to add dependence on another corporate tool (using GitHub for VCS and CI was, IMO with retrospect, a mistake too).

I've personally started taking a "if your project only offers me Slack and Discord as first-class avenues to get help, I consider it unsupported" stance on FOSS projects lately. It's bad enough that I have to use Slack for work and will never really have a say in that, don't make me also use it for my hobbies.

Maybe spending my adolescence in the era of IRC, of numerous IM protocols all accessible via libpurple+Pidgin/Adium, and of somewhat-open XMPP federation spoiled me. I clearly wasn't meant for this hyper-corporate modern flavor of the internet.

[1] https://mako.cc/writing/hill-free_tools.html

The interface of the popular matrix clients like Element is pretty good, certainly better than IRC, but a step down from Discord imo. I’ve submitted multiple bug reports for really basic stuff, like editing a message with a link in it (at the time the message could only be edited up until the link).

I’m sure it’s improved now but I don’t blame people for going to discord. If we want people to want to use open source software it would be nice if it was at least as good as commercial software

The great thing about Matrix over Discord is that you have the option of using or building a client that better suits your needs. With Discord, I'm stuck with the myriad of UX decisions they've made that I disagree with, unless I want to risk a ToS ban for self-botting (Ripcord, which I do generally enjoy).

...and if there's still anyone wondering what the alternative is: https://matrix.org/

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