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Please don't use Discord for FOSS projects (drewdevault.com)

submitted 9 months ago by starman to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Although I’m a firm supporter of free software,

Lies, according to the rest of your very own post.

it’s more important to use the right software for the job than to

Discord literally doesn't allow me to google (or DDG, or searx, or...) for solutions related to your software. How is that the right tool to use?

And yes, I regard most of the alternatives to Discord listed in the article to be inferior solely because they are unfamiliar to users.

Fallacy of popularity. If something is """inferior""" simply because people have not been trained on them already, then by your definition Windows is superior to everything else. Remember: big corpo trains you to depend on them since childhood in schools, which all use Office.

That’s the way it is sometimes; you can’t win every fight,

Not with that attitude. That is, the one of a loser.

If your goal is to foster a community of regular users and make it easy for normal users to interact with contributors, there is no choice that will hamper that goal more than using an obscure alternative software that nobody’s heard of.

That would be true f people were literally doing that. But no, the stack of software that includes stuff like IRC, goode olde web forums, Stack Overflow-like webpages or friggin' email has existed since the '80s and can be not by any reasonable metric be called "obscure" or "alternative" or "nobody's heard of".

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

Remember: big corpo trains you to depend on them since childhood in schools, which all use Office.

lmao I remember getting schooled by a math teacher when I tried to use libreoffice calc instead of excel on an assignment back in highschool

detail: all the school computers ran linux. fuck whoever didn't have a pc with windows at home

she brought her windows laptop and attached it to the projector and expected everyone to have the assignment files in a format excel could read

problem is, at least going 12 years back, not all calc functions and/or param names translate directly to excel ones

so when she opened the file, which I made sure was one excel could read, there was a bunch of gibberish on some cells

when I told her it worked as intended on libreoffice, she said something along the lines of: you don't go to church using the same clothes that you use when going to a nightclub

anyway, at least the school was trying not to depend on windows

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago

With due respect, you do not have the authority to dictate what it means for me to support free software. Nor anyone else.

When it comes to community-building and social networking, the popularity metric is absolutely an important consideration. If you are choosing where to start the official community for your software project, and you choose an obscure service, people will make unofficial communities in the more popular services, and you end up with all the supposed drawbacks anyway. Normal non-technical users who are looking to join a community won't prefer an official community on a service they've never used before to an unofficial community on a popular service. That's why people make unofficial user subreddits and community Discord servers. Those unofficial communities could and in many cases will outgrow the official community. This has happened many times before and will happen many times again. Then, new users, even if they see both, will see an unofficial community on, say, Reddit with many more users than the official one, and when this happens, developers either start participating in the unofficial community posting announcements and whatnot there, and if that happens, there becomes little reason to join the official community.