4 pane comic of dolan on the left and spooderman on the right
pane 1 (dolan): cum join opensurce cummunity!
pane 2 (spooderman): shure! how joyn?
pane 3 (dolan): Here discord! (with discord logo)
pane 4 (spooderman with tears in eyes): y u do dis?
Matrix is the protocol. Element is one of the (many) clients. Setting up an account on a server is as easy or easier than discord. Try it https://app.element.io
Matrix has video and voice rooms, screen-sharing, direct calls, threads, and very little fluff. An entire conference (FOSDEM) was hosted on a matrix server and people from any homeserver could connect. Admittedly, I don’t use other features, but those are all that I need. What other features are essential for an opensource community that only discord provides?
As for forums, they are for async. Are you going to seriously tell me discord is a good forum replacement?
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To me it looks like the features are about 80% there, can’t find the screen sharing, login with QR doesn’t exist. Not really sure how to even search for some features because the naming is so extremely bad. “matrix automation” “element bot”. E.g. this is a very poor collection: https://element.io/integrations Looks like custom emotes are still missing.
But let’s say all of that exists and works.
I think we’re talking about different things then. I don’t need something for an opensource community. I need something for ALL communities I’m a part of. Because I’m already in 40 of them and 5 of them are FOSS projects. So switching those over increases friction, if it’s not a total replacement.
This is inverted. I don’t need to defend why the platform I’m on is good, (it’s not), you need to explain why forums are supposed to be better (they are significantly worse).
Documentation belongs on a dedicated website, Issues belong on some gitlab or something instance. If I have a question, I want the answer reasonably quickly or I’m just not going to use the software you’re providing. If I’m nice, I’ll leave a post on the bug tracker that the install/getting started documentation didn’t work.
Forums serve no purpose anymore.
Right now, I’m going to stop using element/matrix again for the forseeable future because there are no communities with public rooms I’m interested in.
You are in a comment thread with the title “FLOSS communities right now”. I don’t know what you were expecting…
So programming.dev is useless and serves no purpose? A budding community must be online 24/7 to provide support because “I want the answer reasonably quickly”? Not even a budding community, imagine a community with many people and the chat moving forward quickly enough for your question to be out of scrolling view within minutes due to other discussions going on. Even in that scenario there is “no purpose” for a forum?
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We’re talking about discord and why people use that and not other technology. 99% of the people on discord are not involved with FOSS, but they are what make the platform attractive.
No, this instance is federated and not a traditional forum.
No, it’s fine if that support is given via the git platform, and it’s also fine if it takes a while. And it’s also fine if the question goes unanswered.
Yes. Because it is functionally no different than a forum main page where so many new topics get created that questions people don’t get to get buried. And also, I’ve never seen that happen with chats. What I have seen is that people didn’t have time or interest to answer my question. Which is fine because they owe me nothing. But a forum would not have “solved” that.
Dunno what to tell you, but I made meme about FLOSS communities using discord and you’re talking to me about the other “99%”. Not my problem if you go off-topic.
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