Ask HN: Why are so many OSS communities on Discord?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37624554

by square_usual • 3 years ago

61 65 3 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I'm honestly tired of seeing OSS tools/products like Gitea rely on centralized, proprietary tools like Discord and Slack for their communities. I could understand less technical communities staying on Discord, but for OSS tools - especially those that focus on self-hosted like Gitea! - to not run their own chat server seems weird. Why is this the case? Is self-hosting just too inconvenient/expensive/pointless?

catlover76• 3 years ago

Yeah that sounds like a huge pain in the ass, and even for us technical users, why would I want to join someone's self-hosted chat server as opposed to just joining their Discord server?

I don't see any harm in using Discord or Slack, but I can think of benefits.

Now, why use a chat server at all over a forum where information can be persisted and more easily searchable, and where people put more thought into their messages--that's the real question. Too many things are on Discord and other chat platforms that shouldn't be. The information loss/question repetition problem is huge, and various bots that mitigate the problem are arguably just band-aids for a problem that needn't exist.

lionkor• 3 years ago

Because it works, its easy to appoint anyone to help with moderation without risking much, and a large part of the tech community has an account

catiopatio5• 3 years ago

a large part of the tech community has an account

Is that true? I don’t, and was under the impression that Discord was a “gamer” thing.

Klonoar3• 3 years ago

Discord stopped being “Gamers-only” quite some time ago.

mad182• 3 years ago

Not really, I have a Discord account for at least 5 years, I'm a member of several Discord communities and none of them are related to gaming. For me it's kind of a replacement for IRC.

jlokier• 3 years ago

It"s also a work thing. Discord was required for my job in 2021, so I had to join it then. It's used in a similar way to how Slack is used in some companies, though I've never worked anywhere that uses Slack.

Since then I've joined many other Discord "servers", and have it installed on my phone. I find this very useful to keep track of what's going on in some fields, though I don't have time to participate much. At least two of those servers are essential to my current research software project. I couldn't do it without the information there.

It's a great pity that public Discord channels are not generally archived on the web for search and reading, the way public mailing lists are.

bitwize• 3 years ago

Discord has largely displaced IRC as the chat platform of choice among open-source developer types, especially younger than a certain age.

somethingor• 3 years ago

Yeah, it works and people like using it. One example:

The SerenityOS Discord server is now 5000 members strong!
Less than a year ago, we were an IRC channel with ~160 peak concurrent users.
Super happy that we made the move, as it allowed us to scale both our processes and the community itself!

https://twitter.com/awesomekling/status/1491005663509884929

entitleddragoon• 3 years ago

Overwhelming weight. If you're trying to manage a community and you want volunteers, you want to minimize the "hassle-hurdle". You can either go entirely against the grain, or use something that everyone already has. And even if begrudgingly, everyone has discord.

I wish it wasn't proprietary products that won out in this regard, but they did, and there's little point shooting yourself in the foot on principle.

LinuxBender• 3 years ago

I've tried to make this argument in the past and gained no traction. What I did instead was to create self hosted chat things as a fallback for the times when Discord or Slack have a green status page but their applications fail to operate. Even light-weight daemons like uMurmur [1] or devzat [2] ssh-chat can be handy in a time of need if a quorum know to fall back to it, especially how simple they are to deploy. Self hosted tools are also handy when one wants to share links or text that should not be on 3rd party sites forever and for eternity. Such things may also be handy if some day the internet censorium gets a little bit out of hand.

[1] https://github.com/umurmur/umurmur/wiki/Configuration

[2] https://github.com/quackduck/devzat

snvzz• 3 years ago

Matrix, please!

duskwuff• 3 years ago

Why pick just one? There are a number of excellent Discord/Matrix bridges available which make it possible for users on both sides to seamlessly participate with users on the other services.

If you want to get extra spicy, there are even bridges from Matrix to IRC, Telegram, or Slack. And they work transitively -- if you've got Matrix/IRC and Matrix/Discord bridges running, users on Discord can see and communicate with the IRC users, for example.

kazinator4• 3 years ago

Why is this the case?

In a sentence: because doing FOSS is just a way for some people to enhance their careers.

Anything not related to the code is extraneous to that.

Running a mailing list (for example) isn't resume-stuffing material for someone who isn't a sysadmin.

A popular, well-known FOSS project enhances your career better than one that is unpopular and obscure. From that perspective, that forum system is best which facilitates popularity.

Then there is the youth factor. I think that mostly older developers care about this issue. Younger developers who didn't live through the Unix wars and the rise of GNU/Linux and all that are deaf to the issues. They take an Internet full of wall-gardened social networks to be the norm; it's what they were already born into. Asking the kids not to gather in some Discord group is like asking kids of yesteryear not to hang around at the mall. (The mall is proprietary, so what?)

tredre3• 3 years ago

because doing FOSS is just a way for some people to enhance their careers.

That's a very cynical view. Perhaps it is somewhat more true when it comes to the HN audience, but outside of here "enhancing career" is probably not even in the top 5 motivations behind FOSS work...

kazinator4• 3 years ago

I am positing that in fact self promotion is the motivation if we restrict ourselves to those decision makers at the top of the FOSS project who decide matters such as that the associated forum is going to be on Discord or Slack. They are not the only contributors to the actual project, of course, and not everyone is in their Discord or Slack because they like Discord or Slack.

If you want to promote yourself as a developer by means of having your name on a lot of source code out there that people are using the only way that's going to happen is if it is open source. If that's all you care about, open source is just a means to that end. Your name is still in a bunch of code that people are using if the documentation happens to be in Microsoft Word.

Open source has been promoted that way to a bunch of young people are starting out in software. "Oh don't have much industry experience? Show that you can code by starting a free software project or contributing to one. Anyone who's anyone has half a dozen or more Github repositories."

soulofmischief• 3 years ago

That doesn't line up with my own experiences at all. Many of the hardcore FOSS devs I know focus on their passions, at a detriment to their career.

A popular, well-known FOSS project enhances your career better than one that is unpopular and obscure

I just don't think any of us care about that when choosing FOSS products. You're talking about an entirely different class of developer and massively generalizing.

Younger developers who didn't live through the Unix wars and the rise of GNU/Linux and all that are deaf to the issues.

Again, incredibly generalized. Many young people today express the exact same hardcore stances toward privacy and security, and are the reason why we have things like Matrix bridges.

Asking the kids not to gather in some Discord group is like asking kids of yesteryear not to hang around at the mall

You got close, but still missed it. The reason so many FOSS products choose Discord is the ease at which they can build large and successful communities, due to the networking effect Discord provides. If a FOSS tool could match that level of discovery, that would be a step up, but it still doesn't solve the other big issue: Discord is where many passionate, creative people are.

You can provide a product that is better in every way, and FLOSS, but without a successful marketing campaign and a bit of luck, no one will ever show up.

_lvbh• 3 years ago

In a sentence: because doing FOSS is just a way for some people to enhance their careers.

Doubt

It’s just that most people are on discord. I tried running a matrix space/room for support but people would keep asking if I could use discord instead. Kept the matrix room running for a while but nobody ever showed up while the discord server was at over a 1000 people. Left both after the project was archived.

shrimp_emoji• 3 years ago

They take an Internet full of wall-gardened social networks to be the norm; it's what they were already born into.

And it's the older developers' fault for letting that happen!

lucideer3• 3 years ago

This is a rather absurd comment.

Running a mailing list (for example) isn't resume-stuffing material for someone who isn't a sysadmin.

The assumption here is that an open-source maintainer has the time, energy & expertise to run a mailing list, but chooses not to for cynical career-related reasons. This completely dodges the very obvious oft-discussed point that most FOSS maintainers are under-resourced & overstretched.

People use Discord because Discord does the work for you, so you have more time to make the thing you're making.

kazinator4• 3 years ago

Career-related reasons are not cynical; they're perfectly legitimate, and that person's prerogative.

I mean there are situations in in which prioritizing your career objective over something else may be immoral. Like say if you choose a path whereby you get a promotion but large numbers of people suffer. But if you're making something free you don't owe anybody anything. If people don't like it that you're using Discord or whatever else, too bad.

ssivark• 3 years ago

Self-hosting is definitely not easy, but it’s the indirection more so. You’re excited about X and want to gather a community around that, and you definitely don’t want to spend a lot of time on Y (mechanics of running a forum).

It’s good that Matrix is catching up in UX… we’ll hopefully soon be at a point where it will be good enough to serve as the default choice. All it would take at that point (for example) is one SNAFU from Discord.

SCSIfloppy2• 3 years ago

Mailing lists will always be king. I don't get it either, Discord is proprietary, hosting your OSS project's infrastructure there just seems... idiotic.

kyawzazaw2• 3 years ago

It's for the community discussion.

SCSIfloppy2• 3 years ago

Private nntp server could handle this quite easily, and today mailing list managers have web views with threading.

andrew_shay• 3 years ago

It's super easy, no maintenance, and free.

Every minute spent dealing with a chat server is one less minute working on your project, or spending time with your family.

epolanski• 3 years ago

This.

And it saves all the history, which slack puts behind paywall.

Also, it has neat features like conferencing.

Some of the OSS I follow do nice QAs, presentations, etc on Discord, that just didn't happen or was unfriendly.

I've been on Zulip, Matrix, Libera and Freenode before, discord is simply easier for users and admins.

animeshz• 3 years ago

This is best answer ever, I've always struggled to set up matrix/irc clients, and it always lived on cliff of the edge, I barely was able to use subset of the features.

With discord, I could use those time working on the project!!!

jrm4• 3 years ago

Longtime free open source guy here.

Right now, it's simple; it's because Discord is THAT GOOD. I kind of love and hate that about it. Discord's just infinity better than anything in its class.

realPubkey• 3 years ago

I did a user journey and most users wanted to switch from gitter to discord.

sontek• 3 years ago

Its because there is no free/OSS alternative that is as good.

- Good RBAC controls for managing your community and making sure there aren't bots - Nice API access for building bots - Free without any necessary system administration overhead

Discord is just an easy to get into system to start a community without any large commitment on hosting.

rg111• 3 years ago

Let me go through it like this-

What I like the most is Discourse. But I need to self-host it or pay for it. I don't want to do either for a quick study group or a side project.

Zulip offers free hosting. I opened an account and spent the better part of 2 hours setting it up. I announced it. Exactly two people joined in. One of them wasn’t regular.

Then I created a Discord, and 10+ people joined in every day.

I don't want to use Discord, because I can't have direct contact with the users (discord doesn't share email with server admind/creators), Discord is bloated, it has poor search functionality.

But what can I do? It's where the people are. It's what they want.

Reddit was another option, but had criticsl mass problem there, too for some servers related to foss/group I admined.

em-bee• 3 years ago

discord doesn't share email with server admind/creators

on some game discord servers a bot requires users to register with their playername in the game.

you could have your own registration where people sign up with an email and username, and then let the discord bot ask for that name or for github/gitlab etc usernames.

api2• 3 years ago

So many OSS communities are on Discord because so many OSS communities are on discord.

It got that way in part because things like Matrix were not ready yet years ago and things like IRC were too moribund. Individual forums require that everyone make a new account and have no network effect.

It also helped that Discord had a ton of users already via its original niche in gaming.

Now it has network effect, which means people will use it even if they hate it. Network effects are awesomely powerful.

quickthrower2• 3 years ago

Discord doesn’t provide any discoverability though. There are no network effects, only brand effects. It isn’t Twitter or Facebook.

I think the reason is it’s pretty good for a free beer offering. Feels “lighter” than Slack.

api2• 3 years ago

The network effect is looser. Everyone has the client, has accounts, already knows how to use it.

lucideer3• 3 years ago

Is self-hosting just too inconvenient/expensive/pointless?

The answer is in the question: it's the first two. Self-hosting is inconvenient & expensive in comparison to Discord. That's all there is to it.

If you can run a SaaS competitor that is: (1) built on an open-source stack, (2) close to being as easy to use as Discord, (3) free to use, you will steal marketshare. Guaranteed.

However, bullet-point #3 tends to contravene the first 2.

bruce511• 3 years ago

Yeah, free to use will give you market share. It'll also cost you a lot of money :)

kanbara• 3 years ago

oss tools are just annoying to use or bad ui. also, every time i have to use a mailing list i want to cry

graypegg• 3 years ago

Honestly… I don’t mind discord. I’ve seen their “forums” feature actually work pretty well, and the roles system is just customizable enough to be useful, with about being annoying to configure.

Yeah, there’s obvious problems with it being a closed community, gated by Discord the company. I do wish content was exposed to the wider internet, like how forums (phpBB etc) work.

But I get it, if your passion is a FOSS project, you want to think as little about the “other stuff” that only takes away precious free hours you’d rather put into your FOSS project. Discord handles most of that for free/close to free/with donations collected for you from your “server” members.

There’s a space for a FOSS project to fill, and matrix is SO close. It needs a push, but I think the dominoes could totally fall in its favour given some critical mass of projects using it.

badrabbit• 3 years ago

The only real alternative is Matrix. Others are saying how discord has managed hosting and it's free but there is matrix.org and managed matrix hosting: https://matrix.org/ecosystem/hosting/

In my opinion Matrix sucks as does lemmy and mastodon. However just saying that alone is such a taboo on HN and anywhere in the tech bubble. On top if everything else, discord is very usable and pleasant to use. It does not intimidate new comers either.

Even Slack doesn't hold up to discord on performance.

Let me give you a first hand empircal evidence on performance. I am on like 4-6 Slack workspaces and I had to download the desktop app because any browser I tried it with just chokes itself and thr system to death. It is managable now but still a hog. Element is so bad, even after upgrading to 32G ram and nvme it is still unusable with the number of rooms I am in, just doesn't scale. I tried Cinny which doesn't even work at all and all the clients are playing catch up with the messed up rapidly changing api to the point they are all buggy or lacking major features that make it hard to talk to people who use the full featured element. Discord on the other hand, I am on 4 spaces like Slack but I have it all on one tab and I even forget that it is open. And companies have provider me good support on discord.

So long as you don't use freaking email I am happy but it looks like discord or telegram are the only usable alternatives. Oh, and signal is crap too for a whole other host of reasons.

The whole making a cult out if these products/platforms thing isn't working out imho.

seabass-labrax3• 3 years ago

...all the [Matrix] clients are playing catch up with the messed up rapidly changing api...

This to me is the crux of the issue! The core data model of Matrix is clean, elegant and simple. I can summarise it in a sentence: a series of Events modifies resources in a Room.

The full Matrix API is anything but clean, elegant and simple, however. Sadly, the extent of the API's idiosyncrasies means there is no real alternative to Element, and this is from someone who has on multiple occasions tried a two-digit number of Matrix clients on a a variety of devices. Nonetheless, I will continue to use it while I wait for an ActivityPub-based chat program to be made! :)

Arathorn• 3 years ago

The Matrix CS API is super simple (although i’m biased having helped design it), and the fact that there are a large range of clients these days which frankly outperform historical Element while having feature parity - eg FluffyChat, Cinny, Nheko, NeoChat etc while using entirely independent stacks (flutter/dart, c++/qt, KMP etc) suggests the API’s ok. Meanwhile Element X shows concretely that Element’s problems are getting fixed too: https://element.io/blog/element-x-ignition

apitman• 3 years ago

Because Discord is currently great. It will get worse once it gets acquired or investors start making demands, but that's not now.

slotrans• 3 years ago

Because it's free and easy. No complicated story here.

throwawys932• 3 years ago

Because the alterative (mostly Matrix) sucks.

stodor89• 3 years ago

Because they grew up on Discord, and because it's easier. It's easier to make the discord server, keep it running, and get people to join it.

I'd also prefer that people used Matrix, but hey, at least it's better than Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn.

oliwarner• 3 years ago

FWIW: It's not new.

It used to be IRC until the Freenode takeover trashed two decades of established chat-support. That fiasco should have highlighted the risk of third party infrastructure, but oh well.

I think people rather like the community aspect. If the project is a significant portion of your life, a little realtime interaction feels good. And it is —in a few ways— better than IRC.

I'm not really defending it. I don't like it either. But we're not their parents. Let them do them.

Gigachad• 3 years ago

What’s the risk? They received a good service for decades and then spent an afternoon migrating to a new one.

Seems like some foss fans have an almost doomsday prepper mindset where they have to spend more resources prepping than would be risked in the worst case scenario.

sircastor• 3 years ago

I think the largest contributing reason is that Discord is where a lot of people are these days. It's convenient, well understood, easy to add another channel. Every time you ask someone to use a solution they don't already have, you're adding friction to connection process. If they've already got a Discord account, and the client, and just have to press the button, it's easy.

On the other hand, if you ask someone to install another special piece of software to get involved, and they have to setup an account, and then verify the account - it might just be too much.

solarkraft• 3 years ago

Because there's no alternative.

The UX of Matrix isn't there yet, as much as I wish it was. With Cinny the chat experience is pretty good, but you still don't have voice channels (the protocol is in the process of getting them, at least!).

Ask HN: Why are so many OSS communities on Discord?

Related Stories