this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2024
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Not really. Something you can self-host, like irc, xmpp or matrix, has an infinite offramp.
Very true, but self-hosting isn't free either, so there are maintenance/moderation/etc costs that take away time from the project. Small projects often just cant justify selfhosting.
But if your service is hosted by a third party, you really do want to be sure they will be around in the near future. And its not just chat that this applies to, git hosting, web hosting, ci/cd etc.
You don't need to selfhost most of those. There's IRC and webpage providers everywhere (you can literally walk into a cpanel hosting and click the button that says "make me a Wordpress", for example). After all, I'm sure your product has an email account, yet you are not selfhosting your e-mail, do you? And you release your software via what, Github? Flatpak? Lemme see, are you selfhosting those too?
You've come full circle. Of course there are hosting providers everywhere, but there are no guarentees that they will still exist in the future. And if your not selfhosting, then you have to pay someone to host it for you, whereas Discord and Github are free.
And a small subsection of the "dont use discord" crowd are equally against using Github for many of the same reasons.
To be clear, I am completely okay with Discord, Github etc for foss projects.
So long as you don’t buy into a platform’s proprietary features, you should be able to easily migrate if the basis is on a open technology. For instance, if you are using Git as your VCS, you can rehost it elsewhere easily. If your chat is on IRC and Freenode goes down, it wasn’t difficult to move to another platform as communities did. If you buy into Discord, you’re SoL for porting data out or having an easy way to transition to I different room/server since you have to migrate to a different protocol. If you start relying on Microsoft GitHub’s Issues, Action, Sponsors, etc. then you will also feel equally as locked in even if the fundamental system, Git is trivial to migrate.
Could chat histories get transitioned from Freenode onwards? Because that is the major issue I see with using Discord, projects often use chat history as a "wiki" of sorts. If you did the same thing on IRC, wouldn't you be equally SOL? I dont think switching the protocol is the problem, its leaving behind the historical data?
I think a lot of the arguments in this thread are pointing out that for info worthy of holding onto, you should probably be using forums. Part of the Discord issues is using it to hold onto permanent info (which requires an account to try to search). If you keep chat with the idea that it should be ephemeral in, then migrating isn’t an issue. The folks that mean for their IRC rooms to be longer lived, have public logs in HTML to search & those that didn’t, well they didn’t care that that history was lost since it was never meant to live forever. Without IRCv3 there isn’t even the concept of history (which has usability consequences needing a bouncer or an always-on remote terminal), but for instance with XMPP many rooms just give you the last n number of messages which is enough to understand the current conversation to participate, not read the entire log since room inception.
Yeah, forums or wikis for long term data, chat for ephemeral data. Just never confluence :D
Idk about infinite, if they stop getting updates they will eventually get phased out and if you can't download the application it's also dead. All that aside the sun is going to go super nova eventually.
Also a lot of people don't want to self host. I doubt you self host your own Lemmy instance for instance.
IRC works since decades, same for XMPP. I think that is a pretty strong indication that it will continue to work just fine.
And not everyone needs to self host, like one in a thousand is more than sufficient for a community to have their own self-hosted chat system.
Decades is far from infinite
You are not infinite either 😅
I host my own matrix instance.
I wouldn't mind hosting my own lemmy instance either, but as it's a public platform anyway I don't have the same qualms about using an instance hosted by someone else. So I opted not to take on any more work on that.
Not everyone needs to self host, you might get away with knowing someone who does. And no, I wouldn't accept a nextcloud account hosted by just anyone, but my siblings and parents happily utilize ones provided by me.
And back when teamspeak, mumble, ventrilo, minecraft servers, cs servers, etc. all had to be "self-hosted" there were plenty of service providers who would do all the technical work for the layman, in exchange for direct payment. Making all those services quite accessible to anyone.
That was so much better than how today we "pay" by getting datamined.
I agree with you here but I wouldn't want to pay for a host for some FOSS project and I wouldn't host that on my own IP either.
Why not? How do you expect to realize a fair and good internet, controlled by its users instead of corporations driven by motives far removed from what is in the interest of users, or even humanity as a species?
You still don't have to, I'll do it. But someone has to. Would you donate to your own instance?