Gregory's Server|
37 comments
 @pbone Honestly, one of my biggest frustrations with Discord is their UI. It seems every time I open it it's trying to advertise some "fun" new feature targetting people using the platform for gaming or recreation, and I Just. Don't. Care. I just need to be able to interact with whatever community has roped me into using it, and don't want all this extra noise. @mattcen That's one of my criticisms also, and the "fun chat features" that go with it like the attention grabbing animated things and why does everyone need their own colour? OTOH I still find it easier to use (my particular a11y needs) than Matrix's Element interface. But now I want to try Revolt, I vaguely remember trying it before. @pbone That's fair too; Element are still refining their UI for usability and accessibility. @mounderfod Yes, I understand that, which is why it's frustrating that so many non-gamer communities have adopted it and its UI isn't really catering to those. @gnumdk @mattcen Yes. If you're so principled that you only ever use FOSS things then I am concerned that you may hold principals too tightly and miss practical considerations. I want to work with people who can find a balance. Principals are great, they show us what to aim for, what we're working/fighting for. But my video card still works best with a closed binary driver, my hard disk has closed firmware etc... @gnumdk @mattcen Actually, I wouldn't say "by design", it's circumstance that I haven't yet found a platform that's suitable and open, and I also wouldn't say that *I* exclude them. They exclude themselves by their choice. I feel worse that Discord doesn't work well with screen readers. People who need those often aren't choosing based on an ideology, and I would like to include them.   @mattcen @pbone I paused on that last sentence. People find IRC difficult? Certainly IRC is simpler than Discord. But upon a tiny amount of reflection, I think I see it. If you go with protocols rather than platforms, people have choices, and choice can be difficult. "How do I get on IRC?" is a question with many answers, and perhaps some flame wars between competing answers. Not necessarily the most digestible breakfast.
 @pbone @mattcen @mattcen if the community is asking for a particular platform, it would seem weird to not use it, surely? @rachel_norfolk Perhaps, but I would interrogate *why* that platform is being requested. Is it familiarity? Accessibility or other UX? peer-pressure? Lack of awareness of viable alternatives? @mattcen Is Matrix ok? I heard there were problems with the company that did most of the development for it. @tokyo_0 I personally am a Matrix fan, and think it's generally a good alternative (especially since it can be bridged to so many other platforms). @mattcen @mattcen agreed in principle, but that's not how it works in practice. A discord community *will* exist, and it *will* (probably) be the biggest. That's just where people are. You don't have a choice of having or not a discord community. Your choice is: do you want it to be unofficial, and not enforce your code of conduct, and have random people represent your software, or do you want to control the culture and quality of responses?  @mattcen IRC is my preferred. And with a fully-featured client it's barely distinguishable from these "richer" platforms. Embedded media? Textual says hello. Multiline paste, use a paste service. Tempted to use a paste service for your actual question? @alice@marrow.haus textual is only available to people who can afford macbooks. All other native IRC clients suck, and I've tried them all, from irssi to hexchat @bulbyvr I'm aware, but they are occasionally prone to message delivery issues, and require the admin of the Discord server to approve them. Which isn't to say "don't use them"; I'd love of more communities did; just need to be aware of the pitfalls. At least for #xmpp we have a real time blocklist across the network. and also we have proposals like this aimed at stopping people with new accounts to spam everywhere: https://matthewwild.co.uk/uploads/xeps-tmp/xep-reporting-account-affiliations.html The proposal above makes it possible to block people based on trust from other servers. For example if the account was created three minutes ago as you said. But we are missing more help of course :) @mattcen I can appreciate this sentiment, but these technologies can be hostile to new users, and most importantly beginner programmers. For these people ergonomics matter. This is why IRC and Matrix drop off quickly as options. Not sure the XXMP clients are that great either. @mattcen alas, once I moved from android to iOS, I found no usable irc client compatible with my bouncer. I stood up a matrix server and have been using that, but opening element on my phone it takes multiple *minutes* to sync enough to show me notifications it just received. It’s really not ready yet. @mattcen I've tried. Many times. I've run IRC channels, I have a Matrix gateway, I've set up XMPP, RocketChat, Mattermost, even a BBS with a teleconference! Nobody cares. Nobody uses them. But my Discord? 220+ users (and only one is on the Matrix gateway). It sucks. @mattcen I get where you're coming from with this. But unfortunately the reality is that neither of those things you mentioned are in any way a viable alternative to Discord simply due to missing features. Discord isn't just a chat. @mattcen literally none of these are easily possible with those "alternatives". IRC is simply too complicated for 99.9% of all people nowadays and doesn't even offer a proper chat history without the use of complicated external tools. XMPP and Matrix are mildly more easy to use and overall bettwr, but they still so far off from the features that discord offers that they are simply not a viable alternative to the average user. @mattcen To add to this, I'd say Matrix is by far the easiest to work with (both for the end user for self-hosting). Then comes IRC, which I like for its minimalism, although it feels like it's a bit overcomplicated to host for something that simple (I couldn't get it to work for now). Then comes XMPP which, although good on the client side, is very hard to set up on the server: I tried a lot of things, but ejabberd just won't accept my certs (blame the wacky docker permission handling). |
@mattcen I really think that Discord is one of the easiest platforms to use and choose it for my open source stuff.
I'm not worried about vendor lock-in because chat is ephemeral. I don't store documentation & code there it's just a way for people to get in touch. If it's a problem I can move elsewhere.
I also use IRC because I like IRC, but I understand that people find IRC difficult.