Recently I accidentally made a Fediverse post which went viral:
stop using discord for your open source communities
That post is short, punchy, opinionated, and prescriptive, which I suspect is the cause for its virality.
Unfortunately, like many micro-blog posts, it lacks nuance, which many replies highlighted. I made the post to vent my frustration at needing to join a Discord server to interact with a community, so it is far from a measured critique of the subject.
This blog post is an attempt to address those nuances in greater detail. This is not an exhaustive analysis, and I’ve resolved to not let “perfect” be the enemy of “done”.
This is aptly timed for me—I spent some time this weekend trying to decide what chat service to use for a project of mine. I’m just starting to try building the community, so it feels like I should have a chat ready if/when people start showing up.
I didn’t consider Discord because I wanted to stick with free software, for the reasons outlined in this post and other similar ones. In the end, I settled on Zulip, but would be happy to reconsider (so far, the chat is just me talking to myself!) if anyone wants to suggest an alternative or has experience in a similar situation.
I would use Matrix, because it’s completely open and distributed (like the fediverse). I’m not sure whether I would use a public server or host my own.
Matrix is also good for private chats, offers end-to-end encryption, and is gaining on Discord in terms of features, so anyone creating an account would likely end up finding it useful for more than just my little community.
Thanks! I did consider Matrix as well, and in fact just set up a personal server yesterday. I was worried about it being too high of a barrier to entry (the reason I stayed away from my first instinct, IRC…). At least Zulip is intuitively just a chat app, even though it might turn people away who don’t want to register for yet another account. One option could be to add Matrix and IRC bridges for Zulip, in the hopes of keeping everyone happy?
I’m still not sure what the best way forward is. It’s a tricky balance between promoting FOSS and remaining widely familiar.
Eh, I have a serious love-hate relationship with Matrix. For groups its fine. But trying to communicate with individuals on matrix is a major PITA, because of its end-to-end encryption which causes constant issues, IME. It’s great, in theory. But, in practice is just far more of a PITA than its worth.
I’ve been considering switching to Matrix for individual texting. What makes it a PITA in your experience? Is it hard to create conversations, do messages not get delivered, or is it something else?
