FRESH
Hacker News
Hacker News Hacker NewsHowever, I think that IRC can be useful. IRC is not the same as Slack and Discord like they mention, but often the other things are not needed, and IRC also is not too complicated to use and does not require a large web app or other stuff like that, which is a significant advantage of IRC. Also, another thing they did not mention, which can be helpful, is NNTP, which can be used both for announcements and for discussion, like email can be. This way, no web apps are needed, and email subscriptions are not needed; however, it can also be bridged with email if needed.
Discord hides everything from Google, and now from LLMs. So, the end-user asking "how do I __ with __" with their most common search tools cannot find the answer.
Why?
What zzo said though, IRC is simple and many free software projects already use it (eg Tor, gentoo) but I think there's a different barrier to entry since users may want old chat history (bouncers), IRC-specific spam and client choices (GUI, CLI, no mobile??) (& I'm pretty sure IRC networks used to be somewhat anti-Unicode? correct me if I'm wrong). Then again I should expect hackers to actually know how to use that, but probably less so of an enduser
Good old forums are much better. They are readable without even creating an account and they are also indexable by search engines.
using discord as the only way to reach a project and find documentation about it. the author mentions sending private messages right after joining. i would not have joined discord to do that, i'd have searched for their emails. if they or other ways to reach the developers can't be found then that is where the problem lies. the author doesn't mention if he tried that, and he doesn't point out the difference exclusive and optional use of discord.
but beyond that, communities form where the people are. many FOSS projects are on discord because the people are already there. there are lively communities for fedora, debian, javascript, golang, to mention just a few. they are not the central space of those projects but they reach a number of people that probably would not participate in those communities otherwise.
one community that is important to me has the core developers on a forum that is gated to a mailinglist, while the wider user community used to hang out on IRC, but eventually switched to discord. there are a few communities that did that because participation on IRC was dwindling and not getting new people. getting new people is a lot easier on discord.
bridging to discord is at least possible, even though not ideal, it does allow participation from people that don't want to use discord. we could for example create a bridge to the old IRC channel.
for some communities the choice is discord or no chat at all. github would have to integrate messaging for that to become a more attractive option than discord. but then github is not ideal for FOSS projects either. unfortunately the current reality is that the more aligned a communication platform is with FOSS ideals, the less attractive it becomes for most users. sometimes it is a tough choice.
side note: i don't appreciate that swipe against RMS. i don't care about your opinion of him. keep that to yourself please. backbiting is a vice that hurts us all.
Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month