this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2024
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Forums are not the same as real-time. And yes for most of the people using discord, forums wouldn't cover the same niche.
I think you might just be blinded by Discord for some reason. I'm not sure what "niche" you're referring to with Discord that can't be provided with forums (unless you're worried about cosmetics I guess?). There are forums with real-time communications like chat, notifications, direct-messaging. I'm not trying to argue, getting your perspective is always helpful and might show something I'm missing, but your responses seem vague and not really a counter-point.
My perspective is of a FOSS developer with multiple communities of thousands. If you can't grasp it, that's on you. It's also why purity moralizing isn't useful. I have only so much mental bandwidth to spend on organizing and self-hosting. If people are not stepping up to do the community management and infrastructure work, I will go with the past of least resistance.
oh ok, thanks for the clarification.
That's basically it in a nut shell, path of least resistance. Doesn't refute any claims made in the article or arguments presented here. Just a shame another company has a stranglehold on a whole category of services that have to be used to participate in society ... while developing FOSS.
Nothing to refute. I never said otherwise. Discord is just more convenient for people already overworked.
Yes, it is a shame. I hope you're doing something practical about it instead of moralizing towards FOSS devs.
Building communities and stuff that bring value to users is what really matters at the end of the day. Too many folks in the FOSS world like to stand on soap boxes.
My time is valuable, if I can have someone else run a service, then that's time I can spend doing things I enjoy. Self host when it makes sense, either from a cost perspective or a data privacy perspective. Everything is a balance.
Nothing will ever be as convenient as letting someone else handle your infrastructure headaches. You don't win by complaining, you win by providing a better user value.
It's why Steam beats Torrents and Torrents are coming back over streaming. My time is precious man.
Exactly this.
Thank you for your work
💙
I don't want real time. Does me no good in my time zone.
That's what lemmy is for.
Discourse has somewhat decent chat built in these days.
Great, use Matrix
I've used matrix. I am still using matrix. Just not for anything with a significant community
NixOS uses it, and it has the biggest repo out of any distro, so I'd consider it a significant community
Great. Which means NixOS has enough volunteers to handle that part. I don't.
Servers & clients use too many resources. Because of this, most have centralized around Matrix.org which kind defeats the purpose.
Didn't XMPP solve that in, like, 1999?
(Really, what is with devs and nu-protocols these days? Back in my days you could run a webhost on a potato)
The did, but Matrix is coming to reinvent that while but by wasting resources trying to duplicate the state of everything at massive storage costs & without the extensibility because JSON.
There's a Mozilla home server as well, so federation is working.
That server is under the Matrix.org fleet. It’s like saying Edge isn’t Chrome.
The server itself doesn't matter, you can migrate it to AWS or your own physical server if you oenn the domain
The server does matter when it comes to who is collecting all of the metadata, data, attachments. …And having that all that data centralized around a single entity is a problem.
In this case that would be Mozilla, not the host
Matrix.org hosts Mozilla’s Matrix server. Further, the way all data is synced to all servers means if someone with a Matrix.org ID joins your room (which is most users), all data is synced to the home server. Almost all of the data is in Matrix.org’s possession & with the servers being as expensive as they are to run, more orgs shutdown when popular causing users to flock to the mother instance.
Hosting the server doesn't mean you get to access the data. My server is hosted on Oracle, but that doesn't mean they can access it