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Comment by toastal | Hacker News Reader

I'm so tired of programming communities using Discord in an official capacity. We are the folks that know better and what it means to lose this information and what it means to require sign-ups and giving private conversations to proprietary entities. If you're choosing it as the sole community of your project, you've alienated folks that value their digital privacy—and it was just as easy to set up an IRC room, Matrix channel, or XMPP MUC on a public server which offer broader platform support and a wider array of clients, and some are even decentralized. Do we not believe in FOSS software for our FOSS software?

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For a better explanation from someone more eloquent than myself: https://drewdevault.com/2021/12/28/Dont-use-Discord-for-FOSS...

Maybe we do, but the mass of people who are just learning is enormous. The idea of keeping this information open and searchable is a cultural thing, and big companies actively undermined this culture with their walled gardens. They became the norm for a vast part of the population. The question is: Can this be reversed?

The mess with Twitter moved a lot of people to Mastodon, we need more events like that.

Note how it took a decade for most people to realize that Twitter is harmful after the 2013 APIpocalypse (when Mastodon got started).

And in the mean time we even had Trump showing every day just how bad it is !

I think it is purely a technology problem. Discord software is good and for text/voice chat nothing really compares to the ease of use, features and ecosystem around it.

Is it though? Is it exceptional? There are plenty of alternatives with feature parity, and the tech like Opus for low-latency audio and overlays for video games was freely available and good in Mumble ages ago (and still good though). Discord isn't particularly lightweight or cross platform compared open options which limits accessibility.

Discord is surprisingly lightweight and snappy considering it's Electron.

I don't know about the voice and video features, but it's the best chat program... that I know of - also note that libre software typically doesn't have half a billion dollars in investment money nor 600 full-time jobs !

But I now have to boycott it because of all the other issues (though I got advanced warning considering it's a platform, it's still a shame...)

> considering it's Electron

It runs in a browser just in general (considering browsers have better access to ad/tracking blocking and other features to its sandbox, it likely wiser to skip the Electron bit) which helps get access to a broader range of devices (like Linux and BSD) in some cases, but there a a wealth of underpowered devices that can't run something this heavy. It seems all attempts at alternative clients for TUIs or native ETD up with cease and desists. Compare to Matrix and XMPP who both offer browser-based clients (both heavy and lightweight) as well as native clients, TUIs and you have a recipe for greater accessibility. Throw in that you can get E2EE and it's decentralized (and by proxy self-hostable) that you'd have to have literally the best UX to compete with that… and to me it's just meh (granted I only used it briefly, containerized, and for a specific client that that Discord without bridging was a good idea).

Yes, my point is that it's much more snappy than any (somewhat complex) software that I've used that uses Electron (that I know of) : Element (though it's getting better) and Atom (vs Spyder running on Qt) specifically come to mind.

I disagree, the network effect is its only draw. For text with images in, Element is just as good, as are Discord's competitors. For voice calls, it's pretty good, but not the best. Can't comment on video calls as I've only used Zoom recently, which sucked.

edit: I've got to learn to reload the page before commenting :P

What do you mean by Zoom doesn't let you comment on video calls? There's an in-meeting chat.

I think he meant that he didn't have an opinion. But speaking of that feature, last time I used Zoom (at height of Covid lockdown), that chat was ridiculously lacking in features, IIRC there were various issues with text not showing up / disappearing on window resizing ? (Ideally one would use a different chat program anyway.)

Totally this. When a project decides to go down this route I start questioning their whole decision making and feel alienated as you say.

I can't even tell how often I stopped looking into something because it was too discord based.

"If you're choosing it as the sole community of your project, you've alienated folks that value their digital privacy"

so basically no one? cause almost nobody actually cares about digital privacy

I do. Hence why my discord persona is essentially made up and used as a marketing tool for my artsy hobbies, same way as my instagram profile is carefully curated to be something I'm not.

When you see the number of people that are still using Github after Microsoft bought them : I guess not ?

Yes, but also no. Each time Microsoft slips, you do see the waves of folks migrating and a lot of big projects—like KDE, GNOME, Freedesktop—have moved elsewhere since ’16. My concern is more on the education side where schools are starting kids on the proprietary service and YouTube ‘gurus’ saying you need it which might make its growth outpace folks leaving after all these the outages, or some new EEE initiative, etc. that have historically caused migrations. The other concern is communities that have used Microsoft GitHub IDs for identity in the community (i.e. Elm requires all public packages are published to Microsoft GitHub and your user ID is the an identifier, Nixpkgs requires the ID for its maintainers.nix, Unison Share accounts requires sign-ins via Microsoft GitHub, etc.).

While I totally disagree with the forced proprietary collaboration (need an account & can’t contribute without, nor can you self-host or fork to fix the platform) of Microsoft GitHub, at least unlike the Discord situation it is search indexable, reading doesn’t require an account or JavaScript, and is strictly public communication (no DMs floating around). Once you start buying into the larger platform though, the corner for yourself has been painted in—but that’s not to say you couldn’t have mirror that accepts merge requests without an account or still have a mailing list/inbox to mail patches to. (But, like, just set up your project elsewhere in the first place and stop playing into a social media platform masquerading as a code forge—as well as let folks sign up with email or WebFinger)

(agreed about the still better "readability")

Yeah, schools/universities using platforms is particularly bad. At least the EU is starting to wake up (for somewhat related reasons) :

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Schrems#Schrems_I (2015)

> Under EU law, data-sharing with countries deemed to have lower privacy standards, including the US, are prohibited.

"German state of Hesse has banned the use of Microsoft 365 in its schools (techgenix.com)" (2022) :

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33741537

"France directs schools to stop using Microsoft Office and Google Workspace" (2022) :

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33725018

Yep—and Codeberg is right there if you need a EU non-profit for FOSS code hosting which is especially good for students without the money for servers. When given the choice, I’ve been suggesting EU tech of US tech recently knowing they’ll need to follow better data retention and user privacy by law. It’s good to see the indoctrination go down at least in some places.

Alienate privacy? How?

You are requiring users sign up for an account on a proprietary, closed-source, for-profit server. All metadata will flow through this entity and whoever they choose to share or sell this data to. Many rooms demand SMS verification which will often leak who you are and prevent anonymity. Chat platforms also include DMs and smaller group chats for private conversations around projects and there is no E2E so you’re making all of these message be read by Discord. Users must also agree to the ToS set by Discord—not your community—which can change and go against the community wishes. They also have the maximum authority to just axe your community by shutting down its chatroom (it’s not a “server”) if a bad apple breaks those ToS.

Tldr: unless you give them your phone number, then it is no different from the rest of the internet.

It is like acting that hair dresser violates your privacy because s/he wrote your last name and date of visit.

>so you’re making all of these message be read by Discord.

They may, but unless you have proof that they do (except law enforcement cases) then you cannot simply state that they violate your privacy.

Also what kind of privacy informations would you share in OSS community (which should be transparent after all, right?) chat that youre worried about?

Also how IRC server owner doesnt violate your privacy too?

> Also what kind of privacy informations would you share in OSS community

If you are building a community, then people chatter around the common area (this chatroom or server) about work and real life stuff just like they do at the water cooler and at conferences because we’re humans and not code monkeys who want to connect to one another. That’s normal, but letting corporations read that data should not be normalized considering we already have the technology, E2EE. With E2EE law enforcement and the government couldn’t read it either. The public side should be public and search indexable, but the private messages should be private. Without good support of third-party clients (which corps like Discord like to shut down), implementing something like OTR is much more difficult and I doubt many folks would bother going through the effort to exchange PGP keys and, I dunno like, using some browser add-on to seamlessly do the encryption/decryption in the browser for you.

With a technology like XMPP or Matrix, users could self-host a server behind a proxy or Tor and join the discussion anonymously without having to create an account or sacrifice that anonymity if they didn’t want to, and that should be allowed and acceptable.

With IRC, it’s flawed but most of the big servers are at least ran by foundations and non-profits which have different motives with how they would collect and treat that data.

Do you like eavesdroppers when you’re in chatting to a friend in a public space? Would you be happy to be constantly recorded while in such a space behind a closed door too? And then those recordings sold or given to the cops when they requested? Because that’s what you’re signing everyone up for when Discord is chosen, and you have the option of not doing that.

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