We are launching our open source product, and someone from the open source community warned us because we use Discord for communication and encourage our community to join us there.
How popular is this perception? Where do you prefer to hang out as closed online communities?
Here are my reasons to use alternatives (of course, I have no say in what you should use).
1. A centralized platform like discord can kill your community engagement plan whenever they want (you own nothing, and they don't owe you anything).
2. You don't really get a "closed community" as they collect your messages in plain text[1]
3. There are better alternatives that won't spy on you and has better accessibility[2][3][4]
If the alternatives make one think that no one uses them, it is because the projects are promoting discord in the first place.
If more FOSS projects start using an alternative (matrix, for example), more users will be hesitant to use discord.
I have more reasons, like Discord community usually end up in less meaningful discussion, have significantly less searchability, and visibility than a forum has -- but they are not really a big problem in a closed community.
And if the project wants a place to have civilized discussion, engagement, and visibility, it is far easier and better to host a forum like discourse[5] than using a chat based system.
[1] https://discord.com/privacy#3
[2] https://sourcehut.org/blog/2021-11-29-announcing-the-chat.sr...
[3] https://matrix.org/ (is much more reliable than in the past)
[5] https://www.discourse.org/ (a forum)
It's not even solely the spyware and proprietary aspect of it, though that counts for a lot. It's also the fact that I can use any IRC client I desire and I am not forced to use either an Electron app, or a web browser tab. Also the quality of people seems to be significantly higher. But hey, at least Discord is not Slack! That I really won't use, due to the fact that I have to install the Electron app.
Matrix is extremely unreliable so I gave up on it a long time ago.
Why closed community if the community is about an open source product?
Since you asked, my personal preference is that you stop trying to get me to sign up to another instance of another heavy-weight, bloated, proprietary IRC In A Browser. Create a forum board instead, and own it.
It may be my age showing, but I don't get how people handle it. One of the main reasons I don't hang out anymore with communities for my favorite programming languages, OSS products and videogames, is precisely that everyone has switched to Slack or Discord. It's not just that I don't like those platforms. Group chats are ill-suited for this purpose.
I don't have time to pay attention to 20 different communities in real-time. I don't have time to catch up with 100 to 10k new messages per community that appeared while I was at work, especially as most of those messages are noise. There's no way I can keep track of 20 different ongoing discussions times 20 different communities. The medium is just way too noisy, way too diffuse.
And then the platforms themselves are not optimizing for this use case either. Neither Slack nor Discord are usable alone for maintaining a community, because their functionality is geared towards ephemeral shitposting, and thus severely lacks in the organization, searching and retrieval departments. And, of course, you (the community creator) don't own the data anyway, so there's not much you can do to fix this.
The obvious solution, and one that I've tried before from the community management side, is to run both a mailing group or a threaded[0] discussion forum, and a group chat (IRC, Slack, Discord, Telegram groups, whatever) - and then, critically, institute the rule that group IM discussions are non-binding - anything that matters, and especially every proposal and decision, must be made on the mailing group/forum. If you don't do that, your community will end up being run by teenagers and students[1], as adults with jobs or better things to do than following your IM chat 24/7 won't be able to keep up with the sheer volume of messages the teens and students generate.
From experience, though, I'd say that if you can skip the group IM, just skip it, and stick to mailing group/forum. The instant chat is a powerful attractor. It's the lowest-effort way of participating. If it's available, people will use it. The more it's used, the more people will try, and eventually you will have a clique of always-on, always-talking people that will form a community within community.
Enforcing the "only mail group is binding" rule is a hard, uphill battle. I've spent years fighting it somewhat successfully, yet the feeling of being excluded from the community just because you can't keep up with the group IM always remained.
This feeling is why I eventually gave up, and no longer participate in the very community I helped build and run early on. As I started to work full-time, I eventually lost the ability to keep up with the volume.
And that's one community of less than 100 people. No way I'm ever joining your Discord.
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[0] - I strongly prefer tree-threaded over linear-threaded, i.e. HN/Reddit-style instead of phpBB style, but that's a discussion for another day.
[1] - And procrastinators. And sysadmins so good at their jobs that they can get away monitoring community IRC/Telegram for 90% of their work day. And 3D asset modellers in gamedev. OK, that last one is still a mystery to me - I have no idea how the person I have in mind manages to shitpost all day, every day, and still deliver quality work.
I wish there was an open alternative to Discord and Slack, but they usually lack features or are less convenient, making it very hard to get people on board, which is really unfortunate because that's the whole point of using something like Discord or Slack in the first place.
There's lots of reasons not to use Discord (no data export, random bans, can't safely use 3rd party clients, etc.), but i don't believe the perspective from there post is a popular one. They want to make a point so badly, they stretch the definition of spyware to absurd levels.
This opinion seems to be part of the HN zeitgeist, similar to those who think RSS is going to make a comeback any day now. People who have this opinion form a very loud, yet very small, minority.
Does it really? I mostly see comments about how a list of facts and a spyware rating is "extreme" or "emotional" (which I presume to be mansplaining dismissal). And those things seem very HN to me.