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> Discord's accessibility has improved quite a bit. Even a screenreader user in the article's source section agrees:

Yes, but this ignores the others issues the post brings up: Users who cannot afford new enough hardware to make the resource-intensive client pleasant to use are also left by the wayside.

Or: Discord also declines service to users in countries under US sanctions, such as Iran.

> Discord is honestly a great place for FOSS to house their communications ... Discord does not take value away from FOSS communication platforms.

The blog's author, and others such as myself disagree. Discord chats are not indexible by search engines, so solutions are harder to find. You need a Discord account, and you need to join the channel to even see chat and use the search feature. Discord is proprietary and non-extensible because of it. Lastly, Discord is also profit-motivated, so they can shut things down or add limitations because they need to maintain a profit, and there would be nothing we can do about it. "Enshittification" as HN users love to say, is practically inevitable.

> It isn't IRC which is very inaccessible to lots of people new to computers and software in general.

Which client are you speaking of? :) The beauty of IRC, Matrix, XMPP, etc is that you have the choice and freedom (without being legally threatened by Discord Inc.) to build your own client.

But discord is a better experience than IRC or any other chat I know of, and I say it as someone who pioneered #quakenet, #freenode and #libera on IRC.

Instead of bashing library authors that have already so much to think, why don't you propose a discord replacement and pay for it, while providing the same ease of use for the users and the same features from channels, threads, third party apps/plugins, video conferencing, etc?

> But discord is a better experience than IRC or any other chat I know of, and I say it as someone who pioneered #quakenet, #freenode and #libera on IRC.

I'm glad you enjoy Discord! And thanks for your hard work. But I disagree, and all of the issues with Discord I pointed out above still persist despite your love for the UX.

> Instead of bashing library authors that have already so much to think

I never bashed library authors.

> why don't you propose a discord replacement and pay for it

I engage in communities that use Zulip and Matrix. Zulip is free for open-source projects [1], and I donate to a small community that hosts its own Matrix server.

> while providing the same ease of use for the users and the same features from channels, threads, third party apps/plugins, video conferencing, etc?

We're kinda getting away from the point here. No one is suggesting that there is a FOSS alternative to Discord that has 100% feature parity.

[1] https://zulip.com/for/open-source/

> Users who cannot afford new enough hardware to make the resource-intensive client pleasant to use are also left by the wayside.

Wait… people can’t run web browsers?

By "client", they mean the web application that is Discord, which is CPU and RAM intensive especially for folks with older hardware.

Not everyone lives in the West & has access to the fastest hardware or fastest networks. Some folks are living mostly off-grid using solar power & each heavy application is chewing thru their limited batteries.

> choosing Discord does not take value away from FOSS communication platforms.

it does though. it's the same vicious cycle that allowed microsoft to gain control of the OS market: developers write programs for windows (because that's where the users are) and users run windows (because that's where the programs run). the more people agree to use discord, the more it becomes "the place where the <x> community is", the harder it becomes for any community to not use it.

9/10 discord users don't understand or care about this at all. which is why it's of utmost importance that developers - especially open source developers, presumably developing open source software for a reason - encourage discussion on other platforms.

Requiring stakeholders (users, contributors, whatever) in a free software project to use non-free software to fully participate in the community is a disservice to the movement, the users, and software freedom generally.

There's some room for debate about offering Discord as a bridged option. But having the official community chat only on Discord? How is there even a question?

This argument also applies to GitHub, yet I’ve never seen an open source project criticized for hosting issues on GitHub.

Both are proprietary websites owned by for-profit companies. Both require you to create an account in order to participate in discussion.

A couple points:

1. Git is distributed by design. Hosting on Github tends to not be controversial because that code can also live on Gitea/Sourcehut/your private git server at the same time. If Github goes down, it does not really matter. Very different from Discord, where there is no way to actually backup server/channel data, and attempting to do so may be a violation of the ToS and get you IP banned.

2. Your argument hinges on the fact that you have never seen an open-source project criticized, but it does happen. The blogpost in the parent comment even suggests not hosting on Github.

Most sizeable F/OSS organizations track bugs somewhere other than GitHub for exactly that reason!

Don't get me wrong. I get small developers defaulting to infrastructure they don't have to set up and maintain themselves, and I understand wanting to meet people where they're at. But it's definitely a problem that GitHub plays such a central role in F/OSS development, too.

Non free software? Either this seems misleading or Im confused. You don’t need to pay to participate in the discord. The server owners may have costs but thats not a burden on the community and is always going to be the case.

You may be unfamiliar with the term "free software". See the Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software

They (Discord team) seem to not know what Free Software means too.

Some time ago I asked them whether they planned to ever become Free Software so it could be actually safe and have a community around it, and after a couple of messages they went (not verbatim, but in spirit) "oh, open source? lolno", missing the point entirely in multiple ways.

Taking into account their massive teen-focused PR campaign - which is a particularly social phase of human growth and FOMO reigns supreme, their predecessor OpenFeint's demise including a privacy lawsuit, the amounts of data and metadata implicitly and explicitly collected, it's at least _likely enough to distrust it_. The doors in the back are bound to be giving that sweet personal data to whomever has a big enough money stick, and/or other non-trustable agencies.

Accessibility also refers to the hardware & network speeds of the users machine. Discord is a heavy web app (that also pings back a lot of analytics) with users actively using ‘heavy’ features like sending videos. It’s also subject to US sanctions or internal bans where entire countries can be blocked or do the blocking. Speaking of blocking, Discord could block a community member for a non-community-related reason (or by mistake) & there will be no way to resolve it since the community is not in control of the server.

Free as in gratis, sure. But as in libre? No, it’s definitely proprietary & it’s free because users are the product (data collected and upselling Nitro); not every user wants to give up their privacy freedoms to participate. Discord’s not federated so users will be required to create an account & agree to the ToS & CoC of Discord, not the community running it. Discord has also been hostile towards folks trying to make alternative clients to meet usability needs & certain kind of bots.

Without IRCV3 & bouncer it would be a difficult/unexpected experience for a new user. Luckily IRC isn’t the only libre option. If you want to keep the system requirements low XMPP MUCs are good & allow federation. If you want newer bells & whistles at the cost of system requirements federated Matrix can be considered (tho centralization concerns around Matrix.org having the most users, most used server, most used client, & controls the spec). There are bridges between all of these that you can choose as many or as few as meets the community needs such as a community-hosted XMPP main server in a neutral country with bridges to IRC & Discord.

> He also told me about a group of young blind programmers who are using Discord to discuss the development of a new open-source screen reader to replace the current Orca screen reader for GNOME

Could you link to the program they are working on? Nothing appears when searching for "orca screen reader for gnome replacement."