I understand that people like shiny new things which are convenient and have more features,and I named some solutions for it.
Look at Matrix or Nertivia,or I’m sure you’ll find even more things like that,for example RocketChat or Mattermost.
Matrix is convenient because it integrates nicely with the existing IRC channels,others maybe not,but still,in the end it’s all free software and I can live with it.
I’m personally a big fan of Matrix because it’s a real alternative to proprietary platforms which can compete feature-wise but offer even more security.
If my comment about leaving the chat doesn’t make any sense to you,then you should probably read more about what Discord does wrong,and about privacy in general.
I don’t accept that my word is analyzed by some big data bullshit.
There’s a reason I don’t use Discord directly.
And if my messages are transferred to it using a bridge,that’s no better and therefore I would leave,in order to protect myself and my privacy.
Is Haiku about quality or quantity now?
Yes,we have way less than 5000 members in the chat,but we have a helpful and friendly community with deep insights into the technology which can help you with nearly every problem and that’s great.
We have much activity in the chat,even if it’s mostly the same people.
What’s wrong with that?
And if you want additional chat options,there are dozens of alternatives,like Matrix or Nertivia or RocketChat or Mattermost,but please,just don’t use Discord.
Or if you do,at least leave our great IRC/Matrix channel alone.
Also I think the activity of SerenityOS has many reasons and Discord is only a rather small one.
It’s a shiny new project which gathered much interest in a short time,while Haiku is old and many people don’t care about it anymore,we won’t catch them by using a proprietary chat platform either.
Yes,evil things stay evil,even if it’s for a good cause.
In Germany we say: “Der Zweck heiligt nicht die Mittel.”
I am aware of all those alternatives, but none of them are easy to use as Discord, (and compared to Discord, no one uses them except a niche minority).
What security are you talking about? Security does not matter if you are sharing data on a public forum, it’s being saved and monitored almost certainly somewhere. You ought to assume that what you type on a public forum is never private.
I am decently versed about privacy in general and Discord’s practices. I also would like to remind you that you are okay with an open platform which almost exclusively uses plain text communication and most definitely monitored by god-knows-who. Also I see that you have no problem sharing your photograph and okay with sharing your name on a public forum. I don’t know, something looks off here.
No, it is still evil. Discord is one of the companies that promote NFTs (yay, cooking the planet so we all soon die!). Not to mention their service is entirely closed source, they may go out of business at anytime, etc.
Haiku is a nice project but it is not worth supporting that kind of company.
If you want to create an unofficial Discord channel, yes, fine, go ahead. But I don’t think Haiku should support it or make it official.
Also, who will be moderating it? The current developer team does not use Discord a lot, so it won’t be us. So it can’t be an official thing.
Why do you think they’re not as easy to use?
It’s been years since I used Discord,but in my opinions a lot of the alternatives are as easy.
Especially Nertivia which I only discovered a few days ago and is basically an exact clone,but open-source.
Why would you call that not as easy?
I really want to know,because that’s something which could probably be improved if you open the right Issues with those projects.
Yes,security doesn’t matter for public chats,that’s absolutely correct.
I was talking about the platforms in general,where Matrix offers end-to-end encryption for private chats and groups,while Discord is actively spying on them,pretending to protect you from spam.
Apart from severall people just quiting the irc? What is the point of using irc in the first place if you have to talk through that awfull bridge to discord users?
First I think there is some culture of “dogfeeding” here, that is, using the OS we develop for ourselves to see if it is any good. So, why would we advertise a chat platform that we don’t even use ourselves?
Should we also focus our efforts on porting our apps to Windows and MacOS to reach out to more users? To me it is exactly the same logic.
Also, you are throwing a random idea and not thinking about the amount of work it takes to set up and run a Discord community. You can’t just register it, create a few channels, and leave. You need to have a moderation team, who can be trusted in applying the same rules as in our other official channels. You completely ignore this, and assume that we just need to register an account on some service and suddenly there will be 5 thousand people who will start submitting high-quality patches to Haiku, port applications, or whatever. It doesn’t work this way.
It’s moderated by myself and @jt15s. I agree that it should remain unofficial, as it’s not open source, and we don’t need a zillion places to communicate (it dilutes the messages and potentially confuses newcomers I think). IRC, the mailing lists, and this forum should be sufficient.
E2E is largely useless. Yes it might prevent outsiders from reading your DM’s directly, but who is going to bring what you say to their attention in the first place? The person you’re DM’ing, most likely. And that person can leak your IP in most end-to-end encrypted services, can screenshot your conversations and post them on social media, etc
The whole premise around E2E is flawed and assumes a very specific scenario where everyone in the conversation knows each other and trusts each other 100% and nobody will betray you. In the vast majority of cases online, if someone is going to attack you, that person has already DM’ed you before
We’re talking about a public community that anyone can join. There is no need for a CIA agent to talk to the Discord team at all when he or she can simply make an account and click on the public invite link. Once the agent has joined the community, E2E will do nothing
About IRC, it really is not comparable. Long messages, images, videos and voice calls are all problematic or outright missing on IRC. If you ask a question on IRC and then log out, you can’t go back and see any replies. Also, a “server” on modern platforms can have a variety of channels for specific things, such as bug reports, flexing your PC specs, recommending new applications, etc. On IRC, everything goes into one channel
Now with all of that said, I am not recommending Discord at all, in fact I hope the project stays away from it for a variety of reasons, such as:
Discord is closed-source. Why would an open-source community want to be there if there are alternatives?
There is no Haiku port and there likely never will be. It does work in Falkon though (at least on Linux), so there’s that
Fake anti-spam that doesn’t do anything about spam and is more likely to lock a legitimate user out of his or her account. Once that happens, you need to give them your phone number
Discord sells user data to other companies
Discord TOS
Now, what do I think that the Haiku community should do? Look at alternatives to Discord. Revolt is getting quite good. Nertivia as nipos mentioned might be an option. There is also Fosscord, an open-source reimplementation of Discord. I would not recommend any of them for privacy, but they are all open-source and could be ported to Haiku. Also, because they are open-source, there is the possibility of forking or self-hosting, so that the “server” can’t just be taken away by some external force.
Discord is also an appealing solution because anyone with a pulse can make a Discord “server” (I hate that they call it a server). No resources, financial or technical, are required. And because of that, people flock to it.
Is there some problem that some people are trying to solve? What’s wrong with this forum? Some people like the new fangled stuff and gravitate to things like Discord first, and we get a lot of newbies to Haiku there, and we mostly point them to this forum. So it’s good for that I’d say. But the real manic is here.
Deciding on where an OSS community should be is often really about the balance between idealism and practicality. On the former end, sticking to fully free platforms helps preserve the culture of a community; the downside is that the community generally remains small and some people who might be interested in the project may be unable to join. On the latter end, going to any platform where folks are without regard for their underlying ethics does make the community very accessible to those interesting in the project; however, it does run the risk of the internal culture being diluted or changed significantly.
Personally, I’m fine with the current setup as-is. Official channels are on IRC, XMPP, and Matrix through bridges (bridge quality notwithstanding); they’re both free and decently accessible especially with federated Matrix in the mix. Meanwhile, there is an unofficial so-called Discord community server (misleading term from Discord) for those who are interested in the project but can’t join the official channels. Besides, the forum is easy enough to find and use as another official community place.
I don’t really buy into these open-source Discord alternatives that aren’t federated, anymore. For what they do, Matrix Spaces could do as well for a similar experience and having people join yet another online chat platform that they likely aren’t on already is not much better than directing them into the current official channels that already exist.
I am working on an XMPP client and I used the server from my friends at jabberfr.org to host the channel related to this client. We are also using their IRC bridge. They would be happy to set up a haiku-branded “server”, all it takes is setting up some DNS records so xmpp.haiku-os.org (or whatever address we want) points to them. They already do this for a few other domain names.
However, it if becomes a serious things with more than a handful of users, probably we should consider donating some money to their non-profit in compensation.
Yes, that’s why I cringe a little when people say we should just use IRC instead. However, there are real alternatives (Revolt, Nertivia, Fosscord) popping up now where - like on Discord - you can just click a button and create a “server”, and that’s something that I think should be looked into more.
It boils down to unwillingness to read a bit, and instead pay for a clickycolour toy with your data?
You can have channels on IRC that are under your control. With invite-only behavior and a way to let registered user have a permanent invite. That would be what others call “server”?
Ok, a clickycolour front end to setup all this without sending commands to chanserv would help to take IRC into the 3rd millennium without breaking it for the fans of its simplicity and its classic “workflow”.
Stored history already is a feature in some IRC servers too. Others will adapt or vanish. Clients need to catch up and searchable public channel logs may be a workaround too.
The lack of features of IRC should not be fought. Having too much markup, ultra long lines and maybe even images would kill it. I think it is less distraction and mimicking speech (it still is called chatting) breaks if too much blingbling gets added.
From the user experience side, a discord “server” is really like an IRC “server” (I put the term in quotes also there because what people usually call a “server” in IRC is in fact a network of multiple federated servers).
Anyway, the idea is that you create a “server”, which can contain multiple channels. You can configure permissions and roles to control who can talk in some channels, and the roles are managed at the server level. You can do none of this on IRC if you are just a regular user.
And that’s not even mentionning the fact that Discord keeps the logs for you so you don’t need a bouncer, you can ready the backlog easily without having to set up anything. There is vocal chat. And screen sharing. And you can copy and paste images too. Or just even, you know, copypaste a bit of code you’re talking about, instead of having to host it on a 3rd party pastebin service. Or also create private chats with a few people and it will keep logs of these forever too. You can easily block people in a way that they can’t workaround just by using a different IP address.
You can pretend that IRC is perfect, but I don’t think you’re going to convince anyone. It is an old and very simple protocol with many quirks, and its user experience is also in the same style: old and quirky. However, it reamins because it is lightweight, and there are clients for every computer system out there. But not really for smartphones. So it may be time to look into something else. And no, “you can workaround this” and “just learn these magic chanserv commands” won’t cut it.
But why Discord? Haiku has quite active communities on Matrix, Telegram and XMPP. If we consider retiring IRC (which we currently don’t), it would be very strange to pick the one system that is closed source and no one in the devteam actually uses.