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> Local First

> "Join our Discord"

Yonz here, I run the community and can be blamed for the 20+ swipes at the discord choice. We started in February 2023, and it has been amazing to see the now ~1k developers coming together and building awesome collaborations like Tinybase + Cr-sqlite.

Yes, we need a community platform aligned with our mission, but it is already hard enough to get people together. Before the website or the discord, it was just a bunch of people following each other on Twitter and a few disparate talks. Starting from there and asking new joiners to set up a new platform adds prohibitive friction. 'There is a platform for that is not enough'; we need most interested folks to also be on it.

A matrix bridge makes perfect sense, but I haven't had the time to set it up.

The effectiveness of using Discord for your community is a fact that undermines the community's only purpose. You use Discord as a stepping stone because it works, but if you don't prioritize moving off of it to an effective replacement above any and all more costly efforts and issues, it's hard to believe in the authenticity of purpose.

I'm not implying here that you are not prioritizing moving on (how would I know), or planning to use that movement as an case study to sell local/P2P-first to others, but if you all are not that's going to be a permanent blot.

Aside, a related concept:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prefigurative_politics

"modes of organization and social relationships that strive to reflect the future society being sought by the group. According to Carl Boggs, who coined the term, the desire is to embody "within the ongoing political practice of a movement [...] those forms of social relations, decision-making, culture, and human experience that are the ultimate goal". Besides this definition, Leach also gave light to the definition of the concept stating that the term "refers to a political orientation based on the premise that the ends a social movement achieves are fundamentally shaped by the means it employs, and that movement should therefore do their best to choose means that embody or prefigure the kind of society they want to bring about". Prefigurativism is the attempt to [act] [prefigurativly]."

P.S. FWIW, as far as it stands, Zulip is the least annoying Discord alternative (and eventually Matrix might become better/non-slow).

I'd like to suggest that running wordpress with buddypress may fit the bill... and if you need chat (instead of the chat-similar groups messaging which is baked in) - you can also add wisechat to the mix.

This system is loads easier than matrix imho - although I love love love matrix and want it to continue to succeed and be used.

Blocking spam user signups and setting security plugins and auto-updates is not baked in.. but it's not hard and it's all open source - can run on a droplet or vps easily.

RocketChat does good with minimal resources. Red Hat used that internally for about 5 years in Consulting. Red Hat definitely fits the xkcd 1782 IRC meme, though.

Quite true there is some irony to that. There has been a little talk of building a local first community platform, sadly doesn't exist yet.

Isn't that what email and mailing lists are for?

They are hosting monthly meet-ups - mini conferences - with video chat and presentations. Not local first solution to that yet.

https://matrix.org/blog/2023/02/09/finally-a-hybrid-conferen...

This is interesting, been putting off setting up a discord <> Matrix bridge but will have to tackle this.

For the uploaded videos, perhaps PeerTube? For live presentations... could Jitsi suffice?

Discord's UX is miles ahead of Element, and I setup and maintain communities on that use both. For something like local-first, like a local principled makerspace, we are happy to deal with the friction and try and contribute back on Matrix/Element.

That said, infrastructure churn can be disruptive. Don't envy your position.

The problem of Discord is discoverability. Is you project known on the web? What about resources? In the end you might develop for a few other developers, but only those that happened to run into the correct invite links.

Everyone else will believe your project is dead.

Kind of like how the so-called decentralized development of the Bitcoin protocol all happens on GitHub and discussion takes place (primarily) over Slack. And the team collectively settled on the incredibly tone deaf (although, admittedly, accidentally honest) use of Bitcoin Core to refer to the project, there by making themselves the "Core" team.

https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/ vibes.

Discord is easy, and it is a good jumping off ground before you get a Matrix server up and running.

Use what ya gotta to get shit done.

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