Ladybird looks amazing. Just as I was losing faith that building a browser from scratch today was an almost impossible task that only a big company could pull off, they proved otherwise.
I compiled it and added packages to install on openSUSE for this in the readme... which was easy because you don't need much to build this browser! And it builds in a few minutes.
I wish Discord was not mandatory to interact with the community (because I strongly believe in [1]). I will not use Discord so interacting with the community might be complicated if I ever want to work on it.
I resisted starting a Discord for my open source projects for years.
With hindsight that was a mistake. I finally created one a year ago and it had a huge impact on the velocity of the project - I now have active engagement with users and a growing pool of contributors and collaborators, all thanks to that group.
I think often it's important to prioritize reducing friction to getting involved over (very rational) reservations about the platforms themselves.
How do you feel about the fact that all your institutional knowledge is now not visible outside of Discord, not indexed and barely searchable?
How do you feel about the fact that the long-term survival of this knowledge is at the whim of a company that is mostly focused on the gaming community and has no vested interest in preservation over longer time periods?
When was the last time you found an answer to a question from an ancient newsgroup or mailing list that's archived on the open web? It happens to me fairly regularly.
(for context, I help maintain a Discord for an open source project and I feel like I'm betraying the web as an ideal - and constanty wish we had chosen differently)
EDIT - I didn't look to see who I was replying to. Simon -not you of all people! I'm less concerned about your specific community than I am about the example you're setting and the the fact you're lending your voice to support a worrying trend that affects the long-term health of open source.
My experience with semi-private chats in modern times is that it encourages more conversation that are visible to more people since everything people say is not going to be trivially searchable for all time by anyone. In the age where the media and those with an axe to grind (and frankly the person interviewing you for a job in 10 years) have figured out how to dig up anything you ever said in under 10 minutes the web ideal is less than ideal. Part of learning is saying stupid things and semi-private forums makes that easier I feel.
> it encourages more conversation that are visible to more people since everything people say is not going to be trivially searchable for all time by anyone.
It also encourages more people to be assholes in my experience. I'm sure there are well moderated chats out there associated with open source projects, but I had several such abysmal experiences with Discord in the past that I'm completely done with it.
That depends. Would you take a public forum where no one ever answers questions and fixes are never implemented and the contributors feel burned out, or a Discord where questions do get answered? The OP clearly said their project got significantly more involvement since moving to Discord. The problem with lack of community involvement is that it puts more work on the contributors which means less questions are answered and burnout is much more likely.
> Would you take a public forum where no one ever answers questions and fixes are never implemented and the contributors feel burned out, or a Discord where questions do get answered?
I don't understand why these are the only choices offered. In fact - they feel fairly orthogonal. There's nothing about Discord that makes supporting a community easier - in fact I would argue it's demonstrably worse than many alternatives. It feels like an accident of history that's led to it's ascendency.
As someone that does maintain a community. I'd much prefer to have something Reddit-like (structured around topics, asynchronous). I find chat-style to be good for... well... chatting. And worse for everything else.
> There's nothing about Discord that makes supporting a community easier
It exists, it requires minimal competence or attention to technically administer, and it provides adequate (though not great) tooling for moderation (which is then significantly improved at scale with third-party tools). It also provides a unifying umbrella with a single set of affordances where everything is, from shitposting friend groups to technical projects.
IRC exists, at least in a technically-correct-is-the-best-kind-of-correct sense. It requires nontrivial competence and attention to technically administer (and like, I wrote an IRC server once and still don't ask me to tell you, or to give a damn, what the alphabet soup of flags does). Moderation is actively bad, helped only by it being sufficiently annoying to get onto IRC that you probably are putting up a "you must be this tall to ride" gate.
It also just sucks to use. Phones exist and supporting them adequately is not optional in 2023. Bouncers are not a solution, they are an additional problem.
There's also limited space in people's brains for all the alternatives. Most people seem to find that That One Friend Who Uses Telegram (or Signal, or WhatsApp) when everybody else you know is on the Signal (or Telegram, or WhatsApp) island to be drifting away--it's not dissimilar. This also ejects Zulip--which is quite nice, IMO--and Mattermost-- which is not--and similar because when you've already got Slack and Discord fighting for cognitive space, a third option had better be step-change better, and they're not.
> It feels like an accident of history that's led to it's ascendency.
Sure? It was good enough, soon enough. Other things weren't good enough or soon enough.
> I'd much prefer to have something Reddit-like (structured around topics, asynchronous). I find chat-style to be good for... well... chatting. And worse for everything else.
Great, but most people...don't, and it's not hard to understand why. Chat has won because the world is an increasingly frustrating place and people have steadily decreasing ability to care about fucking with stuff. Forums are, for the most part, fucking with stuff. And worse: it's fucking with stuff for an unclear payout with regards to the thing that the prospective visitor cares about.
Other people don't care about your stuff as much as you care about your stuff, and that's not a dig, that's just how people's brains work. You can go stand alone, and appeal to the sliver who want to deal with creating an account and validating an email address and figuring out where the reply button is (oops it was the post button, now I created a new thread and people think I'm a rude jerk)...or you can use the thing everybody already does use, understands, and at least is willing to tolerate.
Unless you have a forum that has a genuine raison d'etre to stand alone as a thing, and are willing to consider a low-cut filter a feature of your community, it's a bad choice. And if you do qualify for those maybe it's a great choice, but most things simply do not.
Something Awful provides a real reason to be a distinct thing. Most other attempts at forums don't, regardless of topic.
That's a helluva false dichotomy you've got going on there. How about a forum that shows up in the search results in Google when I ask it about my problem? Without me needing to bother or wait for someone else to respond, especially if it's the middle of the night.
My kingdom for a Discord bot to slurp up all the messages and LLM me an FAQ.
Discord servers aren’t fully private. Messages can be extracted. Neither Google nor Discord need to officially do anything. The people of Discord servers can decide how info can be publicly shared. There are nuances to care about like people’s privacy and comfort.
It's worth repeating the maxim "Defaults Matter". It's a fair bit of effort to mirror Discord to the web, and it's unclear whether it's officially frowned upon. Add to that the nuances you refer to and the end result is lots of valuable knowledge that will never be preserved, will rarely be found and will one day disappear.
Those all seem like good things to me. Not the loss of knowledge being mainstreamed but the trade offs. An ultimate goal for knowledge doesn’t usually go well from my limited experience.
Running a discord server for an open source project, I very much echo this feeling. I came after the discord server's creation, and the best I can do is help keep the IRC open and advocate that we keep the server on the lowest security level so people without accounts can join (in the odd case that feature actually works - it's very strictly behind captchas and IP rangebans, and desktop-only). Getting people off the platform and moving elsewhere is not an option, even if I had full decision-making power.
But it's a question that constantly weighs on my mind. There's a lot of knowledge and information archived in the server, and it's really not easily findable without knowing to look in the discord server. Opening a second Q&A site would mean nobody would ask there, as the barrier to entry and use would be too high (even if it had a discord login). Using github discussions binds us even closer to github (they can't be exported), and I'm not comfortable with that either.
I would love to see a service appear that allows us to publish discord forums on the net. I feel this is the closest thing we can do to something that would actually spark change. Discord's forum system is absolutely rancid compared to everything else, but my biggest priority is getting the information out there and at least slightly ordered. I feel this would encourage the most people to actually use it.
> I would love to see a service appear that allows us to publish discord forums on the net.
Check out https://linen.dev. See https://www.linen.dev/d/tfos for an example (that's my own Discord community). Before discovering Linen I also made a proof-of-concept for something similar (https://discord.tfos.co); I might try to make some updates to that at some point so I can change the design.
That makes me think, has anyone created a Discord bot that automatically archives chats? Preferably as HTML files similar to Pidgin? That would be great.
I've thought about this in the past, it's not difficult to do. I've used the Discord API in the past, you can listen to literally all messages that happen in the server. Streaming those into a DB and displaying them in a web-based UI (with Pidgin-like HTML export) would be straightforward. Maybe that'll be my next weekend's project.
Edit: My sibling mentions the appropriateness of such a thing, and I do think letting users know that their messages will be posted on the web is important, but either way, if it's a public channel of a FOSS project's Discord server, surely people understand that those messages aren't private to begin with, right?
> surely people understand that those messages aren't private to begin with, right?
For some reason, this is really hard for people to get. The discord company is super paranoid about scraper bots joining through public links, and people themselves are continuously in awe when someone digs up an old message about whatever, asking the mods to ban them for doxing.
I completely agree with the sentiment, however, and I think it should become more socially acceptable for some chats to be viewable online, like forums used to be back in the day. Even then, people would close certain subforums off from appearing for people without an account (e.g. in public searches). As it stands, however, people are not comfortable with this because nobody is doing it.
It would be wise to disclose that messages are archived publicly. But you also don't need to archive the identity of everyone in the chats, you can replace their usernames with generic identifiers in the public archive.
Well, yeah. I wouldn't do it behind people's backs, but I'm pretty sure people would protest, and new people would miss the message no matter how big you make it in the introduction channel.
I suspect it's against the Discord TOS - but even if it's not there's a bunch of community expectations to manage. For recent forums we've added a disclaimer to the channel discription notifying people that we might make the contents web public at some point.
Discord also encourages certain usage patterns that are unhealthy. Threads are rarely used and have poor discoverability, search is incredibly limited etc.
Someone stirred up a bit of drama doing something similar a few years ago. The biggest difference is that they were selling it and harvesting it without any consent from users or server admins.
I certainly worry about that - it's one of the reasons I held out for so long.
My solution to this is a cultural one. Any time a question comes up on Discord that should be in the documentation, I add it to the docs.
If it's a bug report, I open a GitHub issue.
I often copy and paste messages out of Discord and into the relevant issues to keep them searchable and available in the most useful context.
It's a bit of extra admin work for me, but the stronger community I get from having a social space for people to hang out with each other is more than worth it.
Pretty sure that COVID showed the exact opposite. Our brains evolved in the meatspace and won't be happy anywhere else.
Even the success of remote work shows this. People want to avoid the office (and the commute) to get more time with friends, family, and their hobbies. The internet is most successful when it helps people live the life they want in the meatspace, not when it tries to replace it.
In my experience, there is usually some percentage of people that archive whatever channels they use. Sometimes they will put them up on a website.
There's also nothing stopping anyone from doing that, and it's quite easy. I've always just had irssi running on some server that archives everything and I ssh into the server when I want to chat.
While it is true that many public IRC channels publish logs on the web, I cannot remember the last time such a log ever showed up in my google results. It virtually never happens. If somebody's primary concern with discord is search engine indexing (rather than discord being a for-profit company, not a federated service? rather than the discord desktop app spying on the other programs you run? rather than discord requiring most people to hand over their phone number to use the service?) then surely they have the precise same beef with IRC if they stop to think about it.
Honestly, not being indexed by google is the least offensive aspect of discord. For most people these days I think it is actually a benefit. Tides are changing, common people are becoming apprehensive about their words being immortalized in some ledger easily accessible to the public which future employers will be able to trawl through for disqualifying out-of-context remarks. The objective in such chat rooms like discord and IRC is to make ephemeral connections to other people and discuss things in the moment, not to build up a semi-permanent corpus of information for the benefit of people googling things in the future.
In case you're not aware, as an operator/mod/admin it's fairly straight-forward to bridge a Discord channel to Matrix (and, if one so desires, from there to IRC), allowing users not on Discord to participate. Conservative mods concerned about spam can start with an allowlist for which servers can join.
In addition, it's also easy to use something like Matterbridge[0] to bridge Discord to other apps!
I do this for one of my projects as I find that Discord is where a lot of people are, and people find it accessible. But for those of us who do not love the closed ecosystem, it's nice to have alternatives.
Very strong agree re Discord. Quite apart from Drew's ideological reasons to oppose Discord, with which I quite agree, I also tend to find that (a) busy group chats are not a great way to coordinate software development, and (b) the kinds of communities Discord is structurally designed to foster really don't tend to be communities I wish to be part of.
I am a big fan of kling and his work on Ladybird though, and I wish the project the absolute best.
Andreas seems like a guy that is more interesting in building stuff than ceremony/principles around how to build stuff. Which is probably why he has founded a highly productive community.
>Just as I lost faith that building a browser from scratch today was an almost impossible task that only a big company could pull off, they proved otherwise.
I feel like just intersection of people who know how web / webbrowser works and know how to write compilers is relatively low
I compiled it and added packages to install on openSUSE for this in the readme... which was easy because you don't need much to build this browser! And it builds in a few minutes.
Did you also make this post from it?
I wish Discord was not mandatory to interact with the community
Agreed. My preference is IRC or even mailing lists.
> I wish Discord was not mandatory to interact with the community (because I strongly believe in [1]).
While I understand this preference and am sympathetic to it, I hope this means that you're doing the (heavy, thankless) work to make IRC or mailing lists more reasonably usable for a modern audience on modern devices.
Email's problem is mostly just that email has been rendered almost useless by bad affordances across the board and the general disregard for signal-to-noise, but IRC manages to even be worse. I have a phone in my pocket; I expect continuous connection and history. No, I'm not going to start a bouncer. No, I'm not going to pay somebody else to do it. And no, I'm not going to start a history-archive bot so I can see what I missed.
People moved because these tools are inadequate. Maybe somebody wants to make those tools better, but I don't see it happening at the scales necessary to make these more than but-for complaints.
As I mentioned in a sibling, I quite like Zulip. But its problem is pretty simply that people have limited attention span, willingness to change, and most people in the tech space already have Slack on the brain and Discord is probably at least passingly familiar.
Asking people to put up with a third thing--a third set of ways to do things, a third app on the taskbar or on the phone--is asking a lot of people in the current hellscape. (It's a lot like how most groups just quietly let that one person who only uses Telegram and won't use Signal/WhatsApp/the group preference du jour...drift away.) That's not Zulip's fault, but also kind of disqualifying unless you consider that filter a feature. And if that's a feature to you, your desire for a community is probably nontrivially smaller and stubbier than that of folks who are using Discord in the first place.
The reason is that I'm trying to keep my messages effective. If I complain against everything at the same time, I risk being ignored.
I don't like the closed nature of GitHub neither. I hope the free software world move away at some point.
The open source world can't seem to avoid locking itself in those closed tools, I would really like if we stopped doing this.
I chose Discord because I see it as a bigger issue than GitHub, with which one can interact with standard tools like emails and git, and basic stuff work without JS. So one can both refuse to run non-free code and interact with GitHub. Still not ideal and concerning.
Try to go back to the early 2000s and tell someone that the open source world is going to trust MS to host all their stuff. You would probably have difficulties to be taken seriously.
(Although it is to be noted that back then many people used SourceForge which was also proprietary)
Absolutely fair to call out both on similar grounds on openness and privacy being proprietary (publicly-traded megacorp vs. VC funded). One difference would be at least GitHub results can be found with a search engine and without authentication (though you cannot use the search for “Code” without an account).
I compiled it and added packages to install on openSUSE for this in the readme... which was easy because you don't need much to build this browser! And it builds in a few minutes.
I wish Discord was not mandatory to interact with the community (because I strongly believe in [1]). I will not use Discord so interacting with the community might be complicated if I ever want to work on it.
Anyway, may Ladybird thrive.
[1] https://drewdevault.com/2022/03/29/free-software-free-infras...