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Comment by toastal | Hacker News Reader

Now that Discord will start showing ads, is there any chance Bun will support a communication platform that is open & ad-free like IRC, XMPP, or Matrix?

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What kind of question is this? He is working on a JavaScript/TypeScript runtime not building a communication product. Why would you run to him to solve your pet grievance with Discord?

I'm assuming it is because Bun uses Discord? There are Discord links on their site and on Github, though the links don't seem to work.

I imagine the complaint is around Bun's use of Discord as community coordination tooling -- linked in the site's header. The post isn't implying Bun should be involved in the creation of an alternative.

(I'm not here to throw shade at using Discord for OSS "communities" - I do as well - And am concerned about the path forward. Just want to clarify the question's intent.)

If open source, free software is a good enough ethos for your code base, it should be good enough for your community communications. Supporting only a proprietary locks out a swath of users & Discord in particular is an information blackhole—and now with ads!

Which users are unable to use Discord? Note that unable is different from unwilling, and "locked out" is not an accurate description of the latter.

Me! Discord does not consider me a real person if I don't have a phone number it approves of.

Users that need special clients (accessibility, hardware, etc.). Users blocked by US sanctions. Users that have been moderated off the platform for something not in your community (account bans even happen accidentally). Users with privacy/anonymity concerns about the data collection (& now ads)—especially the chat rooms that require a SIM card. Users that take their FOSS or otherwise ethical software views or anti-corporate views to heart & want something built on those principle—from wanting to use free software to make free software, to wanting to outright avoid what some now call enshitification where a free (gratis) account clashes with the idea of freedoms, etc.

I think they used the word "support" to mean "use", rather than "build". That is - they weren't asking Bun developers to _build_ an alternative to Discord, but rather to stop _using_ Discord.

Ship an open-source Discord alternative that more people want to use than Discord and we’ll happily switch.

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