I help maintain a pretty popular open source game mod. One of the features the mod provides server owners is anticheat, and one of the consequences of that is needing cheats in order to make sure the anticheat system works, to test exploits, and to make the game safer. Discord permanently banned the server and my account because we were breaking terms of service violations, even though we had blessing from the game developer themselves.
They later reversed the ban on my account, but kept the server deleted because they maintained that we advocated cheating. Again, we develop anti-cheat moderation software.
In my last contact with them, I was told that that it was up to us to moderate the server better too. If any user posted cheating related material, they would of course ban the server for terms of service violations anyway (this essentially inverts the typical idea of "safe harbor" protection that traditional websites have).
The problem with not using Discord is that they successfully captured the gamer and game market. As a game related tool, all of our users are on Discord. It's a shame that one company was able to do this.
The company was only really able to do this because it was a significantly better platform than what was there before. It was amazing to be able to open Discord for the first time and everything just worked! After struggling with voice chat in Skype, ventrilo, teamspeak, and mumble for years prior, that was a huge breath of fresh air. And the easy way it handled invites and text chat was the cherry on top.
It's easy to hate on Discord's practices but it's worth remembering that they're on top because their project is legitimately good.
Even only hearing your side of this, I think Discord is being reasonable. It sounds like anyone could grab a cheat from your server and go wreak havoc on an unmodded server for this game... surely your mod isn't universally used?
We need (a) Linus Torvalds to scratch this itch. We need someone to write a serious open-source alternative, like happened with Linux and git. Only, it's going to be very difficult for software that needs critical mass to succeed, like chat or social networks. I haven't heard of interoperable social networks, instant messengers, or chat systems. Pidgin works as a wrapper around several IM accounts.
This is what E2E encryption is for. Disseminating code that violates a platform's TOS would surely lead to banning. And cheating in games puts people at an unfair advantage so they'd want to mention it in their TOS.
The question then becomes how to motivate the average gamer to jump onto a different messaging platform.
> You should not use services that can rat on you and your friends to the cops.
>Regardless of whether or not you are the kind of person who mocks or ridicules people—you should be able to use your communications tools to mock and ridicule people, if you so wish. These are normal, acceptable things to do in society. Fuck censorship.
I would guess that for the vast majority of Free Software projects, not having illegal topics discussed on the chat and not having people who mock and ridicule people are features not bugs.
Discord is a bad decision for security reasons, for privacy reasons, reliability, and for ethical reasons.
it's not just illegal things that are kicked off. If you violate a third party company's terms of service, say making bots for Team Fortress 2 (a valve video game) then you'll be banned suddenly as well. And Discord is no stranger to banning things that are not illegal but just controversial like, https://www.reddit.com/r/guns/comments/cvv5da/meta_rguns_dis...
In terms of privacy: they send a tracking request for every single thing you do in their client. Clicked on someone's profile, clicked on a channel, clicked on a server, etc. The URL was named /track before but they renamed it to "/events" recently (but it's still a POST with no response).
Their desktop client is literally a remote administration toolkit, it has full access to FS (electron app) and it loads every script from their servers. They can just add something like require('fs').readFileSync(process.env.HOME + '/.ssh/id_rsa').toString() and send this to their servers, and you won't even notice that (since it doesn't require an update on client because the client is just a browser with full permissions that loads obfuscated code from their servers every time you launch it).
The FOSS project I work on uses IRC, but we have an IRC logger all the time, so nobody even has to ask anyone to "rat you out to the cops", it's on a public web URL.
And a lot of projects have codes of conduct explicitly to prohibit participants from mocking and ridiculing others, in fact.
(As a note, I refuse to install the actual Discord client on my PC, because it's default behavior includes "detecting" accounts you can link on other software on your PC. Aka, it, by default, noses around in other apps on your PC for data.)
Yeah, this whole posts reads as paranoid rantings. We're not talking about communications between journalists and sources, we're talking about projects whose express purpose is to be open and public. The only actual connection between FOSS projects and the use of secret communication channels is the author's general ethos of distrust.
I don't think you understand at all. The author is saying the platform (discord) should not be censoring communication. Different open source projects have different community standards. Discord doesn't and shouldn't write them for us. If a specific open source project wants to moderate their communication systems, all the alternatives promoted in the article allow this.
I'm inclined to agree, but it's also true that the key distinction between open source and Free Software is ideological. And identifying strongly with Free Software over open source tends to go along with an ideological distrust of governments, corporations, or both. For reasons that are reasonable, if not universally agreed upon.
IOW, it's not necessarily because I think Discord is actually going to tell Joseph McCarthy how often I pick my nose. (You'd be amazed how rarely I manage to work that into group chat conversations about code style, anyway.) It's more the principle of the thing.
Any chat tool that has DMs and has people who are friends using it will have discussion of illegal activity eventually. It is estimated that the average American commits about 3 federal felonies a day. Nobody is immune from this. Simply talking about your day with a friend in DMs that are logged/unencrypted is dangerous.
The part about ridicule/mocking is an example of why Discord’s legal agreement is unreasonable, not advocating for the ability to mock or ridicule people.
That's sorta how I felt. The article has plenty of valid reasons not to use discord, but it's somewhat of a ridiculous idea that we should not just expect but protect people who practice illegal and toxic behaviors in our chats.
I just feel like saying this here: I don't find that censorship itself is a problem. Self-censorship, for example, is generally not problematic, and everyone does it. A great example of voluntary self-censorship is with swearing -- it's not illegal to swear in public, but most people choose not to do it. That's not to say self-censorship is always problematic, but simply that it is not inherently oppressive. Sometimes, it's the right thing to do.
However, in larger group contexts, censorship earns legitimacy when it is agreed upon by those who are participating in that group. If a group of people agree to not swear in the context of their organization, then by all means it is fair for them to censor. In broader forms of censorship, such as the example of FOSS projects censoring toxic and illegal behaviors, as long as it is decided democratically, then it's absolutely a feature and not a bug.
I tend to agree, but I also think this borders on a "think of the children!" type argument that's led to our current privacy ecosystem (the patriot act, snowden, etc.). No I'm not suggesting some silly video game chat app clamping down on trolls is some sort of dramatic slippery slope into an authoritarian state, but I do think it's interesting that the "I don't care about privacy because I have nothing to hide" attitude has even become popular on HN.
Surveillance is always, ultimately, about extortion. People are forced to do what they would not for many reasons besides risk of criminal prosecution.
And for many not being dictated too about what is acceptable might be another feature.
I wish the folks saying things were not acceptable would work on options that had the benefits they wanted.
Steve jobs didn't say - locked down phones with no access to the web in unacceptable, he built a better phone (and was rewarded very well).
He didn't say the way digital music is sold is stupid - he built a better music buying experience that let you authorize multiple devices to play your music etc.
This last came up for OSS and Slack (e.g., "Please don't use Slack for FOSS")[1][2].
I took some time to reflect on why OSS wasn't the default for these messaging tools, rather than proprietary alternatives — and what it would take to make more users use OSS alternatives:
> As Slack has continued to grow, open source developers have had lengthy debates about using it rather than IRC. For some, the fact that Slack is closed source and a walled garden makes it unsuitable when building projects that are open.
> I’ll take a different approach: in the age of software, why is open software not more competitive for many products used by non-engineers and what can be done?
I'm surprised people don't bring up GitHub in these conversations more - the most critical piece of modern OSS infrastructure is itself closed-source.
Of course git itself is an open tool, so the repos are totally interoperable, but the OSS community's dependence on GitHub for issue tracking, PRs, etc. has always made me uncomfortable.
All the ideology and social problems aside slack is still an awful chat tool. Even if there wasn’t a philosophical problem with it I don’t know why you would use it.
It’s popularity is due to marketing and abusing some social phenomena, not merit.
“Free” refers to the software license of the source code. That is it.
The maintainers of a free software project don’t even have to accept contributions outside of their organization or club.
Private companies that use all kinds of proprietary communication tools regularly contribute to free software. Are all of Red Hat’s internal conversations about Fedora guaranteed to make it into the public?
People are also perfectly capable of having private conversations about contributions to free software projects. These conversations don’t ever have to be made public. Again, only the code license is what makes a piece of software free.
So if you don’t like a project’s method of communication, my advice would be to not contribute to it. It’s the project’s own risk of deterring potential contributors, not yours.
I find it hilarious that someone would find themselves feeling entitled enough to tell a bunch of unpaid open source developers how to communicate with one another as if that someone were their boss at a company. The only place where I’m told what communication tools to use is at work, where I’m paid to comply.
I feel like this should be obvious to anyone who has ever read a blogpost or editorial, but the author isn't literally commanding all free software projects to stop using discord as if he has that kind of authority, he's making a recommendation and then goes into detail about why he thinks this way, ending with some alternatives. It's bizarre seeing someone react to an article like this with offense not because of any of the content or points, but for... not showing enough deference in their title?
If you're working on a project and just happen to choose a free software license, then fair enough. (perhaps you'd call yourself more of an "open source" contributor). If however you are acting due to the free software ethos, I think it's fair for others who share the ethos to chime in with their opinion on how well you're doing it. It doesn't have to be a witch hunt, but these things matter more than a zero amount.
All of that is correct, but, it does not mean that suggestions cannot be made. So, the article linked here mentions their suggestions, I mention my suggestion, etc.
Yes, private conversions about contributions to free software projects are possible and are sometimes desirable. But, messages on the official channels for communications should normally be public; people can (and should) of course still use their own private communication as needed, too, but does not mean you cannot have a public one too.
> I find it hilarious that someone would find themselves feeling entitled enough to tell a bunch of unpaid open source developers how to communicate with one another as if that someone were their boss at a company. The only place where I’m told what communication tools to use is at work, where I’m paid to comply.
They are making a moral argument against discord. If they said it was not acceptable for free software projects to go around hitting people on the head with clubs would that be entitled?
I’m telling people what they should not do: that is, don’t discriminate against people who insist on privacy.
Choosing to use Discord does that, so people who don’t want to discriminate should not choose to use Discord.
I’m also offering them alternatives that don’t discriminate against those people, so that they can make better choices if they decide that they don’t want to be the kinds of projects that discriminate against segments of their userbase.
This particular paragraph is strangely under-informed in an otherwise-good article.
"""
Many people in the free software movement find censorship in general to be abhorrent. (That’s one very good reason, for example, why emails you receive that might be spam go into a special folder, instead of being silently deleted without you having a option to choose to see them if you wish. Your email server could just delete them! The fact that it doesn’t was a deliberate design choice to avoid censorship.)
"""
Lots of people's email servers do, in fact, silently delete quite a bit of email, because the signal-noise ratio in the world of email spam is so bad it swamped the attention budget of users (and in some cases the storage budget of service providers) ages ago, even with a spam folder attached.
So there was a software project that I wanted to ask some questions about on their IRC.
So I clicked a link on their GitHub page for some online IRC client.
I had a conversation it was great. Except for the part where I wanted to paste some code and it didn't format. And then I was recommended to use pastebin and paste a link.
Then I went away for a bit. Came back later and my computer had rebooted while in standby. (It's an old laptop and is a bit flaky with resume from standby)
I returned and click the link for the IRC chat. And I couldn't see the previous messages.
And they had a link to a log but it wasn't working.
And apparently the server doesn't log by default.
Look, no offence to IRC. But this is some crazy bullshit.
Like Discord, Slack, Gitter, Teams. Whatever. Isn't going have this issue.
At the end of the day people want to communicate and get their stuff done.
For a free software project, sure, using opensource tools is a great idea.
But sometimes faffing around with none core things just wastes everyone's time. Especially with they could instead be working on features and bug fixes.
I agree that Discord is not a good choice, perhaps not even an acceptable choice.
But.
Discord (not to mention Slack) will simply continue to be the lowest friction choice until a FOSS alternative comes along that is free to use, comes with rich moderation tools, supports fine-grained notification settings, supports offline history without additional effort, supports rich bots, has a mobile client that shares state with the desktop clients, and already exists on most people's desktops.
So to impact the open source communication landscape, the standard that needs to be exceeded is Slack and Discord, not IRC.
It's a bit sad to read so many "I don't discuss anything illegal, so this doesn't affect me" arguments here.
That's not really how it works, and if we take history as an example, most of what you say can be used for profiling and targeting potentially. So no, the above argument misses the point, completely.
We can do better as educated folks. A good starting point to learn bout privacy would be to read -at least a bit- of Daniel J. Solove's "The Digital Person: Technology and Privacy in the Information Age". Also, learning more about history and what happened with PII (personable identifiable information) in WW2 is important.
"You can self-host Mattermost in a very straightforward fashion."
There's a very long chasm between "You can get the software running, and have it respond on a port to requests" and "Providing a mission critical service that your project relies on".
The key word here is service. It is often drastically underestimated how much effort is required to have a service available, especially at any sort of scale.
Free/Open Source software is irrelevant as soon as you are providing a service, because by design, the only people who have control over the service, are the service operators, and the only people who really know whats running in production are the people who deployed the code.
Given that, the only choice a user has is whether or not to trust whomever is providing the service, regardless of whether or not the software they are running is free/open source, or proprietary/in house software.
I was about to mention Keybase, but since there is no self-hosting option, I'm afraid I can't recommend them as a communication tool for free software projects. IRC is still suitable and used by some but it is viewed as an prehistoric option. So are there any modern alternatives?
Sort of, there's Jami [0] (formely GNU/Ring) which is actually free software and looks nice, but I haven't tried it yet. Another option is the Matrix protocol [1] and some of its clients like Riot.im [2] fit this free software criteria.
I agree that Discord and Slack has some bad sides, but for kinda opposite reasons than the author.
There are so many discussions, QAs, tips&tricks etc. shared on these chat rooms, that are impossible to find for those not a part of it. If it was discussed in a public forum somewhere, it would pop up in a search engine. I may have a problem with tool X and google for a solution, but since the discussion happened in some closed Discord server I will never find the solution someone else there has posted.
So kinda the opposite of the author's point about privacy: I prefer everything to be open and accessible. Hiding this stuff hampers the adoption without people realizing. I don't join a discord for everything I use, and often I'm not even aware that it exists.
An example I had a few weeks ago: Elm package repo died so I got some weird errors when building my project. Apparently lots of people were aware and knew about the problem and the status. But it was discussed in some Elm slack (I think), so for me not a member there I had no idea what was going on and couldn't find anything about it.
While I think this is extremely hyperbolic, yeah the author isn't wrong.
Discord is, for all intents and purposes, a privately owned public space. What you say and do there is public, is publically viewable effectively, and that extends to DMs.
Likewise, Discord wants to maintain their public space with their rules. I disagree with these rules, but Discord is free to moderate their space as they see fit.
Just like the owner of a private campground can kick you out for cursing, despite using curse words not being a crime, so can Discord ban you for posting nipples or cheat software.
I think the only malfeasance here is that Discord looks and feels like a private space. It feels like a space where you can talk privately or share things privately, and so people are upset when that expectation turns out to be wrong.
For some FOSS projects, I think Discord is a fine choice. It's low friction and it works well. I use it for my social groups. For many projects that might touch on software or topics that Discord dislikes, or that strongly disagree with Discords moderation, they should use an alternative (whether that's still public like IRC or potentially private like Riot)
It's weird that the author is surprised that the system kicked them off for signing up for a new Discord account and immediately sending the same message to three people via DM.
That's the base vanilla behavior template for a pornbot.
> I’m not going to tell you to go use IRC like some cranky old Thinkpad-toting unixbeard
good, we get crankier when young punks repeat our advice without understanding why it was given.
"There’s no single free/self-hostable alternative that has all of the features of Discord,"
... so, just maybe, someone who's got a project to do might want to keep with discord, despite its flaws, instead of fucking around with recreating the same thing only more philosophically pure?
1. I'm not going to self-host any of that stuff for my own projects, nor am I willing to pay for an alternative SaaS that a privacy-extremist finds less objectionable.
2. Few projects are important enough to me to sign up to use their weird self-hosted or non-mainstream-SaaS solutions.
Discord wins for the same reasons that GitHub wins, that Sourceforge used to win, and for the same reasons that no upstart projects are standing up their own Trac or Bugzilla servers any more.
It took so long for the CSS to load I thought, "Wow, what a beautiful minimalist site!" and then came...everything else.
I agree with part of one of 'sneak's points, though, if not the way it's presented and some of the way it's worded. Discord isn't a good choice for Free Software.
Last time I tried to use discord my account was automatically flagged as suspicious and it forced me to enter a mobile phone - even though I did solve a captcha.
It also insisted that my firefox was outdated even though it was not. It kept being laggy and glitchy, lacks e2ee/e2ea, bans 3rd party clients, is not accessible to people with disabilities, etc.
So yeah, Discord is one of the worst choices, and not only for free software projects.
"Their spying extends to every single message sent and received by anyone, including direct messages betweeen users."
It's not spying if it is in their Terms of Service.
Full of hyperbole.
Yes, common sense SHOULD tell you: If you are using a free service such as this that is not free to operate, then YOU are the product.
And you will be marketed to and you will not have privacy.
Get over it.
[+] [-] Shank|6 years ago|reply
They later reversed the ban on my account, but kept the server deleted because they maintained that we advocated cheating. Again, we develop anti-cheat moderation software.
In my last contact with them, I was told that that it was up to us to moderate the server better too. If any user posted cheating related material, they would of course ban the server for terms of service violations anyway (this essentially inverts the typical idea of "safe harbor" protection that traditional websites have).
The problem with not using Discord is that they successfully captured the gamer and game market. As a game related tool, all of our users are on Discord. It's a shame that one company was able to do this.
[+] [-] Blackthorn|6 years ago|reply
It's easy to hate on Discord's practices but it's worth remembering that they're on top because their project is legitimately good.
[+] [-] dariusj18|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NoodleIncident|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] b0rsuk|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moron4hire|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nonbirithm|6 years ago|reply
The question then becomes how to motivate the average gamer to jump onto a different messaging platform.
[+] [-] RcouF1uZ4gsC|6 years ago|reply
>Regardless of whether or not you are the kind of person who mocks or ridicules people—you should be able to use your communications tools to mock and ridicule people, if you so wish. These are normal, acceptable things to do in society. Fuck censorship.
I would guess that for the vast majority of Free Software projects, not having illegal topics discussed on the chat and not having people who mock and ridicule people are features not bugs.
[+] [-] superkuh|6 years ago|reply
it's not just illegal things that are kicked off. If you violate a third party company's terms of service, say making bots for Team Fortress 2 (a valve video game) then you'll be banned suddenly as well. And Discord is no stranger to banning things that are not illegal but just controversial like, https://www.reddit.com/r/guns/comments/cvv5da/meta_rguns_dis...
In terms of privacy: they send a tracking request for every single thing you do in their client. Clicked on someone's profile, clicked on a channel, clicked on a server, etc. The URL was named /track before but they renamed it to "/events" recently (but it's still a POST with no response).
Their desktop client is literally a remote administration toolkit, it has full access to FS (electron app) and it loads every script from their servers. They can just add something like require('fs').readFileSync(process.env.HOME + '/.ssh/id_rsa').toString() and send this to their servers, and you won't even notice that (since it doesn't require an update on client because the client is just a browser with full permissions that loads obfuscated code from their servers every time you launch it).
[+] [-] ocdtrekkie|6 years ago|reply
And a lot of projects have codes of conduct explicitly to prohibit participants from mocking and ridiculing others, in fact.
(As a note, I refuse to install the actual Discord client on my PC, because it's default behavior includes "detecting" accounts you can link on other software on your PC. Aka, it, by default, noses around in other apps on your PC for data.)
[+] [-] _bxg1|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blendergeek|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mumblemumble|6 years ago|reply
IOW, it's not necessarily because I think Discord is actually going to tell Joseph McCarthy how often I pick my nose. (You'd be amazed how rarely I manage to work that into group chat conversations about code style, anyway.) It's more the principle of the thing.
[+] [-] sneak|6 years ago|reply
The part about ridicule/mocking is an example of why Discord’s legal agreement is unreasonable, not advocating for the ability to mock or ridicule people.
The tools should not enforce censorship.
[+] [-] zpallin|6 years ago|reply
I just feel like saying this here: I don't find that censorship itself is a problem. Self-censorship, for example, is generally not problematic, and everyone does it. A great example of voluntary self-censorship is with swearing -- it's not illegal to swear in public, but most people choose not to do it. That's not to say self-censorship is always problematic, but simply that it is not inherently oppressive. Sometimes, it's the right thing to do.
However, in larger group contexts, censorship earns legitimacy when it is agreed upon by those who are participating in that group. If a group of people agree to not swear in the context of their organization, then by all means it is fair for them to censor. In broader forms of censorship, such as the example of FOSS projects censoring toxic and illegal behaviors, as long as it is decided democratically, then it's absolutely a feature and not a bug.
[+] [-] el_cujo|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dleslie|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ncmncm|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] privateSFacct|6 years ago|reply
I wish the folks saying things were not acceptable would work on options that had the benefits they wanted.
Steve jobs didn't say - locked down phones with no access to the web in unacceptable, he built a better phone (and was rewarded very well).
He didn't say the way digital music is sold is stupid - he built a better music buying experience that let you authorize multiple devices to play your music etc.
[+] [-] nemild|6 years ago|reply
I took some time to reflect on why OSS wasn't the default for these messaging tools, rather than proprietary alternatives — and what it would take to make more users use OSS alternatives:
> As Slack has continued to grow, open source developers have had lengthy debates about using it rather than IRC. For some, the fact that Slack is closed source and a walled garden makes it unsuitable when building projects that are open.
> I’ll take a different approach: in the age of software, why is open software not more competitive for many products used by non-engineers and what can be done?
What Open Source Can Learn From Slack
https://www.nemil.com/musings/oss-and-slack.html
-------
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10486541
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11013136
[+] [-] hitpointdrew|6 years ago|reply
Setting up Mattermost on a VPS isn't hard.
https://mattermost.org/licensing/
[+] [-] profmonocle|6 years ago|reply
Of course git itself is an open tool, so the repos are totally interoperable, but the OSS community's dependence on GitHub for issue tracking, PRs, etc. has always made me uncomfortable.
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] swiley|6 years ago|reply
It’s popularity is due to marketing and abusing some social phenomena, not merit.
[+] [-] dangus|6 years ago|reply
“Free” refers to the software license of the source code. That is it.
The maintainers of a free software project don’t even have to accept contributions outside of their organization or club.
Private companies that use all kinds of proprietary communication tools regularly contribute to free software. Are all of Red Hat’s internal conversations about Fedora guaranteed to make it into the public?
People are also perfectly capable of having private conversations about contributions to free software projects. These conversations don’t ever have to be made public. Again, only the code license is what makes a piece of software free.
So if you don’t like a project’s method of communication, my advice would be to not contribute to it. It’s the project’s own risk of deterring potential contributors, not yours.
I find it hilarious that someone would find themselves feeling entitled enough to tell a bunch of unpaid open source developers how to communicate with one another as if that someone were their boss at a company. The only place where I’m told what communication tools to use is at work, where I’m paid to comply.
[+] [-] el_cujo|6 years ago|reply
I feel like this should be obvious to anyone who has ever read a blogpost or editorial, but the author isn't literally commanding all free software projects to stop using discord as if he has that kind of authority, he's making a recommendation and then goes into detail about why he thinks this way, ending with some alternatives. It's bizarre seeing someone react to an article like this with offense not because of any of the content or points, but for... not showing enough deference in their title?
[+] [-] orblivion|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zzo38computer|6 years ago|reply
Yes, private conversions about contributions to free software projects are possible and are sometimes desirable. But, messages on the official channels for communications should normally be public; people can (and should) of course still use their own private communication as needed, too, but does not mean you cannot have a public one too.
[+] [-] aidenn0|6 years ago|reply
They are making a moral argument against discord. If they said it was not acceptable for free software projects to go around hitting people on the head with clubs would that be entitled?
[+] [-] sneak|6 years ago|reply
I’m telling people what they should not do: that is, don’t discriminate against people who insist on privacy.
Choosing to use Discord does that, so people who don’t want to discriminate should not choose to use Discord.
I’m also offering them alternatives that don’t discriminate against those people, so that they can make better choices if they decide that they don’t want to be the kinds of projects that discriminate against segments of their userbase.
[+] [-] kome|6 years ago|reply
You might want to read this: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....
[+] [-] shadowgovt|6 years ago|reply
""" Many people in the free software movement find censorship in general to be abhorrent. (That’s one very good reason, for example, why emails you receive that might be spam go into a special folder, instead of being silently deleted without you having a option to choose to see them if you wish. Your email server could just delete them! The fact that it doesn’t was a deliberate design choice to avoid censorship.) """
Lots of people's email servers do, in fact, silently delete quite a bit of email, because the signal-noise ratio in the world of email spam is so bad it swamped the attention budget of users (and in some cases the storage budget of service providers) ages ago, even with a spam folder attached.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backscatter_(email)
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook_com/forum/all/ho...
https://blog.paranoidpenguin.net/2015/01/outlook-com-is-sile...
http://www.enterprisenetworkingplanet.com/netsp/article.php/...
[+] [-] Jonnax|6 years ago|reply
So I clicked a link on their GitHub page for some online IRC client.
I had a conversation it was great. Except for the part where I wanted to paste some code and it didn't format. And then I was recommended to use pastebin and paste a link.
Then I went away for a bit. Came back later and my computer had rebooted while in standby. (It's an old laptop and is a bit flaky with resume from standby)
I returned and click the link for the IRC chat. And I couldn't see the previous messages.
And they had a link to a log but it wasn't working.
And apparently the server doesn't log by default.
Look, no offence to IRC. But this is some crazy bullshit.
Like Discord, Slack, Gitter, Teams. Whatever. Isn't going have this issue.
At the end of the day people want to communicate and get their stuff done.
For a free software project, sure, using opensource tools is a great idea.
But sometimes faffing around with none core things just wastes everyone's time. Especially with they could instead be working on features and bug fixes.
[+] [-] falcolas|6 years ago|reply
But.
Discord (not to mention Slack) will simply continue to be the lowest friction choice until a FOSS alternative comes along that is free to use, comes with rich moderation tools, supports fine-grained notification settings, supports offline history without additional effort, supports rich bots, has a mobile client that shares state with the desktop clients, and already exists on most people's desktops.
So to impact the open source communication landscape, the standard that needs to be exceeded is Slack and Discord, not IRC.
[+] [-] jayfk|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rand8462838|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] buboard|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MrGando|6 years ago|reply
That's not really how it works, and if we take history as an example, most of what you say can be used for profiling and targeting potentially. So no, the above argument misses the point, completely.
We can do better as educated folks. A good starting point to learn bout privacy would be to read -at least a bit- of Daniel J. Solove's "The Digital Person: Technology and Privacy in the Information Age". Also, learning more about history and what happened with PII (personable identifiable information) in WW2 is important.
[+] [-] mixologic|6 years ago|reply
There's a very long chasm between "You can get the software running, and have it respond on a port to requests" and "Providing a mission critical service that your project relies on".
The key word here is service. It is often drastically underestimated how much effort is required to have a service available, especially at any sort of scale.
Free/Open Source software is irrelevant as soon as you are providing a service, because by design, the only people who have control over the service, are the service operators, and the only people who really know whats running in production are the people who deployed the code.
Given that, the only choice a user has is whether or not to trust whomever is providing the service, regardless of whether or not the software they are running is free/open source, or proprietary/in house software.
[+] [-] nottorp|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rvz|6 years ago|reply
Sort of, there's Jami [0] (formely GNU/Ring) which is actually free software and looks nice, but I haven't tried it yet. Another option is the Matrix protocol [1] and some of its clients like Riot.im [2] fit this free software criteria.
[0] https://jami.net/
[1] https://matrix.org/
[2] https://about.riot.im/
[+] [-] matsemann|6 years ago|reply
There are so many discussions, QAs, tips&tricks etc. shared on these chat rooms, that are impossible to find for those not a part of it. If it was discussed in a public forum somewhere, it would pop up in a search engine. I may have a problem with tool X and google for a solution, but since the discussion happened in some closed Discord server I will never find the solution someone else there has posted.
So kinda the opposite of the author's point about privacy: I prefer everything to be open and accessible. Hiding this stuff hampers the adoption without people realizing. I don't join a discord for everything I use, and often I'm not even aware that it exists.
An example I had a few weeks ago: Elm package repo died so I got some weird errors when building my project. Apparently lots of people were aware and knew about the problem and the status. But it was discussed in some Elm slack (I think), so for me not a member there I had no idea what was going on and couldn't find anything about it.
[+] [-] vorpalhex|6 years ago|reply
Discord is, for all intents and purposes, a privately owned public space. What you say and do there is public, is publically viewable effectively, and that extends to DMs.
Likewise, Discord wants to maintain their public space with their rules. I disagree with these rules, but Discord is free to moderate their space as they see fit.
Just like the owner of a private campground can kick you out for cursing, despite using curse words not being a crime, so can Discord ban you for posting nipples or cheat software.
I think the only malfeasance here is that Discord looks and feels like a private space. It feels like a space where you can talk privately or share things privately, and so people are upset when that expectation turns out to be wrong.
For some FOSS projects, I think Discord is a fine choice. It's low friction and it works well. I use it for my social groups. For many projects that might touch on software or topics that Discord dislikes, or that strongly disagree with Discords moderation, they should use an alternative (whether that's still public like IRC or potentially private like Riot)
[+] [-] shadowgovt|6 years ago|reply
That's the base vanilla behavior template for a pornbot.
[+] [-] paxys|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] h2odragon|6 years ago|reply
good, we get crankier when young punks repeat our advice without understanding why it was given.
"There’s no single free/self-hostable alternative that has all of the features of Discord,"
... so, just maybe, someone who's got a project to do might want to keep with discord, despite its flaws, instead of fucking around with recreating the same thing only more philosophically pure?
[+] [-] tbyehl|6 years ago|reply
1. I'm not going to self-host any of that stuff for my own projects, nor am I willing to pay for an alternative SaaS that a privacy-extremist finds less objectionable.
2. Few projects are important enough to me to sign up to use their weird self-hosted or non-mainstream-SaaS solutions.
Discord wins for the same reasons that GitHub wins, that Sourceforge used to win, and for the same reasons that no upstart projects are standing up their own Trac or Bugzilla servers any more.
Insert "Old Man Yelling at Clouds" meme.
[+] [-] kick|6 years ago|reply
I agree with part of one of 'sneak's points, though, if not the way it's presented and some of the way it's worded. Discord isn't a good choice for Free Software.
[+] [-] dependenttypes|6 years ago|reply
It also insisted that my firefox was outdated even though it was not. It kept being laggy and glitchy, lacks e2ee/e2ea, bans 3rd party clients, is not accessible to people with disabilities, etc.
So yeah, Discord is one of the worst choices, and not only for free software projects.
[+] [-] beders|6 years ago|reply
It's not spying if it is in their Terms of Service. Full of hyperbole. Yes, common sense SHOULD tell you: If you are using a free service such as this that is not free to operate, then YOU are the product. And you will be marketed to and you will not have privacy. Get over it.