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Please don't use Discord for FOSS projects
(drewdevault.com)
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this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2024
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If you're desperate for a discord-like experience (because lets face it, irc and mailing lists arent very flashy anymore!) you can try:
~~Yes you wont have voice/vodeo chat for these but IMO that's rarely useful anyway. And if you DO need it then you can use stuff like teamspeak or zoom***~~
~~***yes i know the issues with these options but for devs you dont really ever need to use meetings for very long and sometimes using a shitty free service with all you need is better than self hosting your own. Maybe Nextcloud talk can work?~~
Some good arguments made for FOSS voice/meeting apps, and why VC and meetings are more important to the FOSS workflow than I thought :)
Jitsi Meet for zoom replacement
Jitsi is amazing. Even during 2020 it always has worked way better than Zoom for me, and I haven't even tried hosting it myself.
I think that's actually what discord should be used for. It's one of the better platforms for voice/video/text chat. It's mostly just when people use discord for what should be a public forum or wiki that it becomes a problem.
And sure, it's not a great place for open source developers to do all their communication in, because being able to reference things in the future if a project lead closes the server is important. But it's probably fine for coding sprints and meetings here and there as long as someone is taking notes to be documented elsewhere. Discord is arguably better than zoom for that use case.
How about Revolt? It's open source and it's pretty much a Discord clone.
Stop recommending closed-source, paid solutions. It makes you look like a shill.
Matrix is the only suitable replacement for discord, as it is the only federated replacement.
irc and xmpp federate..xmpp is highly extensible.
No, stop recommending questionable open-source. Matrix is a metadata disaster and XMPP is the true and the OG federated and truly open solution that is very extensible.
Can you explain xmpp? I'd like a federated discord replacement buddy if you could show me the way I'd greatly appreciate it :)
XMPP is like email, a very open standard that was designed for interoperability even with more closed servers that included proprietary features and extensions. You can message anyone by email no matter what’s or where’s their server and can be configured to be secure and private. Here a quick overview of the architecture.
XMPP is the only solution that treats messaging and video like email: just provide an address and the servers and clients will cooperate with each other in order to maintain a conversation. Everything else is just an attempt at yet another vendor lock-in.
Matrix was built by Israeli intelligence & consumes so many resources that it’s not feasible to self-host on most budgets. As such it’s highly centralized & the community is still largely being ran by Matrix.org as the keeper of the implementation server, the most popular client, the specification, the largest server- which syncs back the metadata.
Mattermost is by-design centralized but it’s self-hostable & AGPL so I’m not sure where the closed-source accusation is coming from. At least it’s less wasteful than trying to be decentralized & if you wanted lightweight decentralization, you would reach for XMPP.
It get some resources from them at the start, but they do not fund it for a long time.
When you join large rooms like #matrix:matrix.org, it consumes a lot of space. But otherwise it is not that heavy. I hope they fix this, as this can be fixed with better resource planning, the biggest tables on the database are those like state_groups_state that does not hold bare information and just group information together for quick search. (I hosted a server and MatrixHQ room took 100GB..., 95% of the database).
Looking at server list it seems very healthy. Also (opinion alert) I think having thousands of public server running by a randoms like there is for big chunk of Fediverse will not be as healthy as dozens of well funded community servers.
Synapse is not the reference server, there is no one official implementation for a purpose. And old news, it is now hosted by Element under AGPL.
They could still be funding it in other ways. It’s a conspiracy, but one that would make some sense.
I gather you are saying there still are real storage issues. The bigger your server grows the more wildly this can get out of hand once just one of your users joins a big room. The whole model is about distributing the syncing of messages & no matter how they slice it to speed parts of it up, I feel it will remain an issue by design unlike other protocols that treat realtime chat as ephemeral & just give you enough history to get context of the current conversation. I’ve already witnessed 3 servers try to grow a following, then when users came, the bill inevitable shut them down--in the same way that Mastodon can skyrocket bills due to fundamental designs. Other protocols also handle decentralization better in ways that don’t require massive funding & empower users to host their own decentralized server--to which I think is healthy & desirable.
Synapse more or less acts as a reference server in the way that all Twitter-likes are basically required to be Mastodon-compatible.
The AGPL community edition of Mattermost lacks several crucial features for anything but very small private communities. It isn't closed source per se, but very much open-core.
I didn’t say it was good or perfect :P …I’ve also never administered it, but I know those that do self-host it. Open core isn’t the worst. Self-hosted GitLab’s aren’t my favorite, but I certainly prefer it to the Microsoft-owned alternative (that includes have to create an account too! *shock*).
Source?
Proposal: https://web.archive.org/web/20141003202858/http://www.amdocs.com/Products/digital-lifestyle-services/Pages/unified-communications.aspx Amdocs Wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdocs More on: https://hackea.org/notas/matrix.html#disturbing-history-or-maybe-just-fud
Thanks for the interesting rabbithole.
Well, that's something I didn't know, but it seems like they've been in the process of removing or giving the ability to remove the parts that communicate back to the main Matrix coordinators since 2019. And it's been 2017 since they had funding from Amdocs. I'd certainly listen if someone says they've recently analyzed that sort of data going back to the organizations servers. It doesn't look like it though.
At this point, the fact that it's all opensource and the self-hosting options/configurations let you keep things internal now would make the point of its origin moot. TOR is another example of something that may have suspicious origins but because it's public and OS, most people trust the privacy of its implementation.
There are ways do funding while being in the shadows. It’s absolutely conspiracy, but something I can see being of importance to spy agencies as Matrix is defacto centralized with all metadata & assets syncing back to the mothership. Signal also had their server code closed for a while, & I wouldn’t be surprised if something regarding US intelligence wasn‘t involved. I think you can trust these platforms more than most, but I’d prefer keeping an arm’s length until we are years removed & see open governance (something Matrix is slowly (finally) transitioning too, but other chat protocols have done for much longer).
Yah, I have my doubts about Signal as well, given the insistence, even now that the username function has been added, of needing a phone number to register. That doesn't seem to fit with an application that's supposed purpose is to be a private communications network and has been promoted for political change purposes in developing countries.