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Comment by toastal | Hacker News Reader

Yet we should still continue to press against proprietary chat. Developers are the kind of folks wise enough about technology to know better than to support this. There are very good reasons to at a minimum support a bridge. If we have to teach new developers raised on Discord, then that’s a great opportunity for them.

> Choosing proprietary tools and services for your free software project ultimately sends a message to downstream developers and users of your project that freedom of all users—developers included—is not a priority.

— Matt Lee

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I see this issue so overblown.

Discord is just an added communication channel, mostly for the community.

Relevant discussions happen on GH.

I am part of numerous programming discords and I just see no issue with them being on discord, again, starting from the fact being there is far from being a requirement for anything really.

> I am part of numerous programming discords and I just see no issue with them being on discord

Has Discord ever asked you to provide and confirm your phone number to continue using it?

I’ve been there. I told the project manager to buy me a burner phone+SIM or I wasn’t using it. The admin disabled the SMS requirement as a result & for a brief project I used it in locked down container not tied to any of my personal info. I also was bombarded with CAPTCHAs any time I tried to use it despite keeping the cookies in that container. It was a bad experience, & I pray I won’t have to interact with it again.

Well if that’s your concern lets start with proprietary remote repositories such as github and all the CI providers. That’s a lot more critical to the development process than a chat app.

I prefer to compare apples to apples. Git is distributed. If you host your repo on Github, you can very well just push that same Git repo to Sourcehut or your private Git server.

But otherwise, yeah, I would warn against potential vendor lock-in, especially if that service is not open-source.

Yeah, the lock-in will come with CI & and the pull-request model that requires an account in this case. The former Microsoft GitHub largely ate all the competition with its own ‘free’ (gratis) offering in Actions, but you could seek out a different CI or self-host. The latter could be easily circumvent by offering a mailing list or maintainer email—or mirror elsewhere—but it’s rare to see this with projects on Microsoft GitHub.

Well, and joining most discussions require an account, and if your alternative communication platform is Discord, we see all the same issues of lock-in.

Matt Lee’s quote comes from an article about why you would want to leave the walls of Microsoft GitHub. I would agree that would be ideal too, but developers are even more reluctant with that one—if you think suggesting libre coms gets you a downvote here, try suggesting not Microsoft GitHub.

Hacker news is proprietary too

FOSS projects don't organize on HN, it's a public link aggregator.

I don't think anyone uses it for community chat / support. You can also content without logging in, its content is search indexed, and it doesn't try to convince you to spend money on it.

So HN wasn’t a perfect example. What about GitHub. You can’t use GitHub’s search feature unless you’re logged in, and it very much encourages you to spend money on it.

The Discord-hate is a double standard that is not applied to any service (to the extent that comments criticizing Discord appear with extreme regularity on threads that should be completely unrelated).

Github issues are indexed by google and searchable.

https://www.answeroverflow.com

And I think Deno uses it.

Definitely useful, but this should be a built-in feature of Discord at this point.

Git is distributed.

> Discord-hate is a double standard that is not applied to any service

What does this mean? Dropbox/Amazon/Google/Windows get criticism across the web and on HN regularly, some of those far more than Discord.

> to the extent that comments criticizing Discord appear with extreme regularity on threads that should be completely unrelated

I don't get it. Are you implying a conspiracy?

Discord _is_ particularly hostile to user privacy, that said.

No, but if your account at one of the big techs gets stuck in bureaucratic hell, the only way to get support is to make a fuss here.

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