Drew DeVault on the biggest threats to FOSS and some proposed solutions
Drew DeVault on the biggest threats to FOSS and some proposed solutions
🧵 Biggest threats to FOSS and some proposed solutions
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I don't agree with the whole list, but the CLA requirement and corpo projects pinky-promising they'd never do a bad thing and then going to do a bad thing as soon as their investors demand returns is certainly a major risk and harm. I've started self-hosting everything for my personal use, and if it's not AGPL, then I assume at some point I'm going to get fucked and shouldn't rely on it.
Also, the endless stupidity around everyone using Discord as their primary means of communication, discussion, issue reporting and whatnot. Politely, fuck Discord, and fuck anyone who thinks Discord is the right way to make anything accessible to the public.
There's lots of other alternatives, including ye olde IRC and forums and even simple mailing lists - and no, I don't mean 'sign up for our newsletter!' nonsense, but an actual real mailing list. And, if you want something a little more modern, there's always Matrix which is probably feature-complete enough to compete with whatever you'd want to use Discord for anyways.
I've been finding Zulip quite helpful. It's threading model is great and they overall focus quite a bit in the project coordination use-case. You can either self-host it or pay for their managed hosting (which is free for open-source projects), and you can add a plugin to make static HTML pages of streams (aka channels) in order to make stuff indexable and searchable (and iirc this is getting polished and built into Zulip's core).
If you care about accessibility, email is still the best choice — it's mostly text-focused, doesn't need an account (besides what is universally seen as the most basic Internet identity), truly decentralized and has mature tooling. I just haven't found a really good mailing list archive web UI. HyperKitty is good, but isn't quite there for me. lists.sr.ht is neat, but lacks a lot of features. Above all, indexability and searchability (from inside the UI itself) is key.
Oh that's nice. Hadn't seen their stuff before but that looks like a MUCH better option than Matrix, if you want a shiny gui app and that kind of experience. And can't argue with the pricing if you're running an open-source project with it, though I suppose you can make a comment that it's still got a vendor lock-in problem.
And 100% agree that email is the gold standard, still, and yeah, nobody has really come up with an amazing web UI for searching list archives.
Emails are nowhere near being competitive with discord. Sure, they're technically more accessible, but in practice they are much less usable by random people which in turn will just avoid interacting or contributing with your project.
I'm not sure how they are less usable than Discord. "Everyone" (using quotations here because it's not an absolute thing, but it's almost so) knows how to e-mail, it's one of the most fundamental Internet skills. Using Discord, however, is not, for a large amount of people. Sure, most developers either have had contact with Discord at some point or are capable of figuring it out just fine anyway. But seeing as FLOSS really shouldn't just be about developers (as Drew points out too) and as end users should also be accounted for, e-mail as a basis for coordination and support is a very valid choice.
It's pretty much account-less (in the sense that you don't need to create yet another account), it's easily indexable (there are plenty of web UIs for mailing lists), it's convenient and highly asynchronous, not to mention it's a mature and well established open standard and decentralized protocol, with lots of open tools that fit the spirit of FLOSS in general.
Discord, however, is closed, "unindexable", doesn't work offline at all (with e-mail you can read and compose e-mails totally offline, it's heavier (both in terms of computing resources and data transfer) and full of intrusive pop-ups and whatnot (and has arguably distracting money-seeking features). That's fine and maybe desirable for certain types of communities, specially the instant aspect of it, which is a strong and harmless difference between the two, but it's not fit for the base space for contact between developers, contributors and users.
In my opinion, of course.
Politely, fuck Discord, and fuck anyone who thinks Discord is the right way to make anything accessible to the public.
You had me at "politely".