Please don't use Discord for FOSS projects

starman@programming.dev to Open Source@lemmy.ml – 1270 points –
drewdevault.com
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I have all the issues with Discord that you mention, but struggle to find a better alternative. Do you have any recommendations?

Forums. Phpbb, Mybb, hell even discourse is better than discord. If you're specifically dealing with a coding project, most git repositories offer an issues page and wiki you can use.

And if you want something realtime, IRC & XMPP are low-resource chat options—with the latter being federated & can offer encryption for private rooms.

Sure, but those options solve literally none of the issues discussed above

There’s still been a time & place for realtime communications where the history preservation doesn’t quite matter… it can be some general recon of a problem to know what to even ask so as to not clog up the signal-noise for SEO or even if it’s mostly off-topic banter to relate to community members.

I'm thinking of a rapid alert on a problem in the project using IRC/XMPP/Matrix and then the project managers posting it in a forum about problems in the project.

I could see a bot that could escalate a post with a 🐛 reaction from a maintainer & post an issue. I do feel sometimes tho it is nice to get chat to help the one in need shape the question in a way that folks can help as often they may not know what they are looking for or the root cause. The issues tho is that often those in chat & the asker don’t like the context switch of going to the forum later rather than just answering it here & now--even tho this comes at a detriment to the community as the answer slips into the void.

Forums used to be a lot more common before Reddit kind of ate most public forums.

I guess that the Threadiverse is a substitute, but I dunno how long a given server will stay up.

What about a lemmy community ? I noticed the Github «discussion» tab also.