FLOSS communities right now
4 pane comic of dolan on the left and spooderman on the right
pane 1 (dolan): cum join opensurce cummunity!
pane 2 (spooderman): shure! how joyn?
pane 3 (dolan): Here discord! (with discord logo)
pane 4 (spooderman with tears in eyes): y u do dis?
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IMO Discord is the best platform for this right now, which is unfortunate. The little I've tried Matrix has not been very impressive (single chatrooms, slow, bad self-hosting experience IMO), IRC is a bit better (though very dated in many regards, esp. user management) but still doesn't have the categories/channels that make discord nice. And most other chats are proprietary with discord just being the best one.
Which one would you like them to use?
I can count the number of projects where I wanted immediate feedback from random people on no hands. I do not think there are enough hands in my state to count the number of projects I’ve crawled docs and commentary from search engines. My use case for a community is an asynchronous repository of knowledge and issue tracker. Discord does none of those things.
I've been around open source for 20+ years and can tell you right now that it don't work that way. An issue tracker and a wiki is not a community.
Most older open source communities were built on irl connections and irc, with some mailing lists thrown in. Hell, we even funded conferences just around the software, not to sell a product but just because it's good for everyone to be talking to each other.
The issue tracker tracks the status of things, the wiki is generally user focused. It's not where development happens or thinks get built.
I agree with that. I think that there are people that want that deeper level. Most of your users are not going to fit into that, though. If you’re only supporting your power users, you will eventually wither and die as your power users leave.
I first bought a book with Red Hat Linux 6 or 7 in the early aughties (pre-RHEL/Fedora split). While I have actively participated in the technical improvements of project since then, I have typically stayed out of the social aspects.
My only complaint about discord is that it requires a mobile phone number for an account, and you can't use the same number for multiple accounts.
I want separate personal (with a silly account name) and professional (with my name) accounts, but only have one phone.
Is that new? I've definitely made multiple accounts and I only have one number.
I don't know if it is new, but it is in the help files when I tried to figure out why it required both confirming an email and the phone.
A phone number is not strictly required. They use it for some verifications, like suspicious activity. You can switch the number to whichever account needs it at the time, but only one login can have that phone number.
It's fairly new I think. I ran into it first time a week or two ago when going into a test account I haven't used for a while.
Shame really, having at least two users is very useful when building bots. Testing user-specific interactions and such.
Dial in BBS
Matrix is the best platform IMO, and actual dev communities agree. (See: Github, Mozilla, KDE, Nix, the list goes on)
This is in addition to forums, git, wiki, etc, which those communities also provide.