In a sentence: because doing FOSS is just a way for some people to enhance their careers.

Anything not related to the code is extraneous to that.

Running a mailing list (for example) isn't resume-stuffing material for someone who isn't a sysadmin.

A popular, well-known FOSS project enhances your career better than one that is unpopular and obscure. From that perspective, that forum system is best which facilitates popularity.

Then there is the youth factor. I think that mostly older developers care about this issue. Younger developers who didn't live through the Unix wars and the rise of GNU/Linux and all that are deaf to the issues. They take an Internet full of wall-gardened social networks to be the norm; it's what they were already born into. Asking the kids not to gather in some Discord group is like asking kids of yesteryear not to hang around at the mall. (The mall is proprietary, so what?)

> A popular, well-known FOSS project enhances your career better than one that is unpopular and obscure

I just don't think any of us care about that when choosing FOSS products. You're talking about an entirely different class of developer and massively generalizing.

> Younger developers who didn't live through the Unix wars and the rise of GNU/Linux and all that are deaf to the issues.

Again, incredibly generalized. Many young people today express the exact same hardcore stances toward privacy and security, and are the reason why we have things like Matrix bridges.

> Asking the kids not to gather in some Discord group is like asking kids of yesteryear not to hang around at the mall

You got close, but still missed it. The reason so many FOSS products choose Discord is the ease at which they can build large and successful communities, due to the networking effect Discord provides. If a FOSS tool could match that level of discovery, that would be a step up, but it still doesn't solve the other big issue: Discord is where many passionate, creative people are.

You can provide a product that is better in every way, and FLOSS, but without a successful marketing campaign and a bit of luck, no one will ever show up.

Doubt

It’s just that most people are on discord. I tried running a matrix space/room for support but people would keep asking if I could use discord instead. Kept the matrix room running for a while but nobody ever showed up while the discord server was at over a 1000 people. Left both after the project was archived.

> Running a mailing list (for example) isn't resume-stuffing material for someone who isn't a sysadmin.

The assumption here is that an open-source maintainer has the time, energy & expertise to run a mailing list, but chooses not to for cynical career-related reasons. This completely dodges the very obvious oft-discussed point that most FOSS maintainers are under-resourced & overstretched.

People use Discord because Discord does the work for you, so you have more time to make the thing you're making.

I mean there are situations in in which prioritizing your career objective over something else may be immoral. Like say if you choose a path whereby you get a promotion but large numbers of people suffer. But if you're making something free you don't owe anybody anything. If people don't like it that you're using Discord or whatever else, too bad.

That's a very cynical view. Perhaps it is somewhat more true when it comes to the HN audience, but outside of here "enhancing career" is probably not even in the top 5 motivations behind FOSS work...

If you want to promote yourself as a developer by means of having your name on a lot of source code out there that people are using the only way that's going to happen is if it is open source. If that's all you care about, open source is just a means to that end. Your name is still in a bunch of code that people are using if the documentation happens to be in Microsoft Word.

Open source has been promoted that way to a bunch of young people are starting out in software. "Oh don't have much industry experience? Show that you can code by starting a free software project or contributing to one. Anyone who's anyone has half a dozen or more Github repositories."

And it's the older developers' fault for letting that happen!

Every minute spent dealing with a chat server is one less minute working on your project, or spending time with your family.

With discord, I could use those time working on the project!!!

And it saves all the history, which slack puts behind paywall.

Also, it has neat features like conferencing.

Some of the OSS I follow do nice QAs, presentations, etc on Discord, that just didn't happen or was unfriendly.

I've been on Zulip, Matrix, Libera and Freenode before, discord is simply easier for users and admins.

> The SerenityOS Discord server is now 5000 members strong!

> Less than a year ago, we were an IRC channel with ~160 peak concurrent users.

> Super happy that we made the move, as it allowed us to scale both our processes and the community itself!

https://twitter.com/awesomekling/status/1491005663509884929

Since then I've joined many other Discord "servers", and have it installed on my phone. I find this very useful to keep track of what's going on in some fields, though I don't have time to participate much. At least two of those servers are essential to my current research software project. I couldn't do it without the information there.

It's a great pity that public Discord channels are not generally archived on the web for search and reading, the way public mailing lists are.

Multiple people here are pointing out reality to you but you're seemingly insistent that your view is the only valid one. shrug

This conversation reminds me of the when people built Facebook-only communities because “everyone is on Facebook”.

Look, you can make that point all you want but it's not particularly relevant here. All we're clearing up is your idea that Discord is "for nerds" only, which it's not.

> This conversation reminds me of the when people built Facebook-only communities because “everyone is on Facebook”.

Note that I am not saying that people should de-facto build on Discord, and I'd appreciate it if you could read my earlier comments where I noted my opinion of Discord rather than trying to puts words in my mouth.

The answer is in the question: it's the first two. Self-hosting is inconvenient & expensive in comparison to Discord. That's all there is to it.

If you can run a SaaS competitor that is: (1) built on an open-source stack, (2) close to being as easy to use as Discord, (3) free to use, you will steal marketshare. Guaranteed.

However, bullet-point #3 tends to contravene the first 2.

I wish it wasn't proprietary products that won out in this regard, but they did, and there's little point shooting yourself in the foot on principle.

It’s good that Matrix is catching up in UX… we’ll hopefully soon be at a point where it will be good enough to serve as the default choice. All it would take at that point (for example) is one SNAFU from Discord.

What I like the most is Discourse. But I need to self-host it or pay for it. I don't want to do either for a quick study group or a side project.

Zulip offers free hosting. I opened an account and spent the better part of 2 hours setting it up. I announced it. Exactly two people joined in. One of them wasn’t regular.

Then I created a Discord, and 10+ people joined in every day.

I don't want to use Discord, because I can't have direct contact with the users (discord doesn't share email with server admind/creators), Discord is bloated, it has poor search functionality.

But what can I do? It's where the people are. It's what they want.

Reddit was another option, but had criticsl mass problem there, too for some servers related to foss/group I admined.

on some game discord servers a bot requires users to register with their playername in the game.

you could have your own registration where people sign up with an email and username, and then let the discord bot ask for that name or for github/gitlab etc usernames.

It got that way in part because things like Matrix were not ready yet years ago and things like IRC were too moribund. Individual forums require that everyone make a new account and have no network effect.

It also helped that Discord had a ton of users already via its original niche in gaming.

Now it has network effect, which means people will use it even if they hate it. Network effects are awesomely powerful.

I think the reason is it’s pretty good for a free beer offering. Feels “lighter” than Slack.

In my opinion Matrix sucks as does lemmy and mastodon. However just saying that alone is such a taboo on HN and anywhere in the tech bubble. On top if everything else, discord is very usable and pleasant to use. It does not intimidate new comers either.

Even Slack doesn't hold up to discord on performance.

Let me give you a first hand empircal evidence on performance. I am on like 4-6 Slack workspaces and I had to download the desktop app because any browser I tried it with just chokes itself and thr system to death. It is managable now but still a hog. Element is so bad, even after upgrading to 32G ram and nvme it is still unusable with the number of rooms I am in, just doesn't scale. I tried Cinny which doesn't even work at all and all the clients are playing catch up with the messed up rapidly changing api to the point they are all buggy or lacking major features that make it hard to talk to people who use the full featured element. Discord on the other hand, I am on 4 spaces like Slack but I have it all on one tab and I even forget that it is open. And companies have provider me good support on discord.

So long as you don't use freaking email I am happy but it looks like discord or telegram are the only usable alternatives. Oh, and signal is crap too for a whole other host of reasons.

The whole making a cult out if these products/platforms thing isn't working out imho.

This to me is the crux of the issue! The core data model of Matrix is clean, elegant and simple. I can summarise it in a sentence: a series of Events modifies resources in a Room.

The full Matrix API is anything but clean, elegant and simple, however. Sadly, the extent of the API's idiosyncrasies means there is no real alternative to Element, and this is from someone who has on multiple occasions tried a two-digit number of Matrix clients on a a variety of devices. Nonetheless, I will continue to use it while I wait for an ActivityPub-based chat program to be made! :)

Even though Matrix is an open protocol, it doesn't even do particularly well for availability of client applications - there are better third-party apps available for various social networks and chat platforms, held to ransom though they are by their centralised overlords. Ironically, after seeing some of the amazing GNOME clients for Reddit and Twitter, for a brief moment I even found myself tempted to register for them just to use the GNOME app! Fractal, for instance, does not elicit a feeling nearly as positive for me, and I've tried multiple times to set it up.

I'm indeed excited about Element X - but it's only available for proprietary operating systems. That's not particularly friendly for OSS communities either, although admittedly miles ahead of Discord.

If there's one thing I would suggest that Matrix does differently, it would be to apply the same philosophy to the whole Matrix ecosystem as Element X: slow down for a year, focus on the polishing the basic functionality of federated chat, and let the third-party clients catch up. I'm proud to have a Matrix ID (@seabass:fosdem.org) and will use Matrix in favour of any other chat system, but it has a long way to go before I will be able to persuade my 'normal' friends and family to join me.

Right now, it's simple; it's because Discord is THAT GOOD. I kind of love and hate that about it. Discord's just infinity better than anything in its class.

- Good RBAC controls for managing your community and making sure there aren't bots - Nice API access for building bots - Free without any necessary system administration overhead

Discord is just an easy to get into system to start a community without any large commitment on hosting.

Yeah, there’s obvious problems with it being a closed community, gated by Discord the company. I do wish content was exposed to the wider internet, like how forums (phpBB etc) work.

But I get it, if your passion is a FOSS project, you want to think as little about the “other stuff” that only takes away precious free hours you’d rather put into your FOSS project. Discord handles most of that for free/close to free/with donations collected for you from your “server” members.

There’s a space for a FOSS project to fill, and matrix is SO close. It needs a push, but I think the dominoes could totally fall in its favour given some critical mass of projects using it.

I don't see any harm in using Discord or Slack, but I can think of benefits.

Now, why use a chat server at all over a forum where information can be persisted and more easily searchable, and where people put more thought into their messages--that's the real question. Too many things are on Discord and other chat platforms that shouldn't be. The information loss/question repetition problem is huge, and various bots that mitigate the problem are arguably just band-aids for a problem that needn't exist.

On the other hand, if you ask someone to install another special piece of software to get involved, and they have to setup an account, and then verify the account - it might just be too much.

It used to be IRC until the Freenode takeover trashed two decades of established chat-support. That fiasco should have highlighted the risk of third party infrastructure, but oh well.

I think people rather like the community aspect. If the project is a significant portion of your life, a little realtime interaction feels good. And it is —in a few ways— better than IRC.

I'm not really defending it. I don't like it either. But we're not their parents. Let them do them.

Seems like some foss fans have an almost doomsday prepper mindset where they have to spend more resources prepping than would be risked in the worst case scenario.

[1] - https://github.com/umurmur/umurmur/wiki/Configuration

[2] - https://github.com/quackduck/devzat

The UX of Matrix isn't there yet, as much as I wish it was. With Cinny the chat experience is pretty good, but you still don't have voice channels (the protocol is in the process of getting them, at least!).

I'd also prefer that people used Matrix, but hey, at least it's better than Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn.

If you want to get extra spicy, there are even bridges from Matrix to IRC, Telegram, or Slack. And they work transitively -- if you've got Matrix/IRC and Matrix/Discord bridges running, users on Discord can see and communicate with the IRC users, for example.

If it's important for me to follow a discussion in detail, I will try to download the emails to open with Mutt, which can be easily configured to use a threaded view.