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points by lrvick 2 days ago | 0 comments

Hey, I am that guy that founded that one obscure Linux distro. And yes, it is better than whatever one you use at supply chain security if nothing else. ;)

Really though, I do think people often equate popularity with being a healthy default solution for society.

A lot of people enjoy mcdonalds, and hell even I cave and buy it once in a while, but popular does not mean it is a healthy default for society.

The corpos are incentivized to addict you and trap you. Not to give you the best solution.

If one actually does research beyond "but all my friends use it" they would see Discord is objectively one of the worst things to happen to sovereign and privacy preserving communication on the internet in a long time. Tech communities using it should know better.

Whenever I see an open source project that says "Join my Discord" without any alternatives, I close the tab. If a technical project cannot find an hour to figure out how to setup a chat with their community without mandating use of a surveillance capitalism product, our goals are already too far apart.

[–] esseph 2 days ago

> [chat]... without mandating use of a surveillance capitalism product

Sooooooo what is your solution?

You just described every single, non-E2E communication product, because they are all indexed and used by surveillance capitalism, including governments and corporations.

Your problem isn't the tools, it's the internet.

[–] lrvick 2 days ago

IRC and Matrix are self hostable and end to end encrypted. There is no good reason for tech communities to lock themselves into Discord and exclude anyone that does not agree to their corporate terms of service.

[–] rcxdude 2 days ago

IRC definitely is not E2E in practice. Matrix hasn't reached feature parity with discord at all, unfortunately (and the main server has a big spam problem for any public chat. not to mention a publicly accessible chat and E2E are kind of a contradiction in goals).

[–] lrvick 2 days ago

I am sure popular public Discord servers get their own share of spam, but with Matrix you can host your own, or join one of a friend you trust. That is what freedom looks like. E2EE is optional.

OTR supports IRC, but in practice either solution beats the privacy of Discord, which requires all traffic to be sent in plain text to their corporate owned databases.

[–] rcxdude 2 days ago

Sure, I'm just pointing out that you're going to be losing a lot of functionality that way and it seems most people would prefer the functionality.

[–] lrvick 1 day ago

What functionality? Someone technical can do literally anything Discord can do with FOSS tools.

The functionality that should matter to free software projects is... freedom. I can forgive laypeople for not knowing any better, but it is pretty hard to overlook FOSS devs that should know better that -still- endorse Discord for FOSS development.

[–] rcxdude 1 day ago

You _can_, but if you're running a FOSS project you probably already have a significant shortage of spare time. Most FOSS devs are not that idealistic: they want something that works and works reliably and not to be building their own platform just to be able to work on the project they actually want to work on.

[–] esseph 1 day ago

You have a misunderstanding of the value the service provides for the larger market.

They want a service, not software.

If you'd like to build a clone or even a better version? I'd love to see it! I might use it!

[–] esseph 1 day ago

> OTR supports IRC, but in practice either solution beats the privacy of Discord, which requires all traffic to be sent in plain text to their corporate owned databases.

As someone who was an irc operator, I can assure you, everything from IRC was funneled into ever place it was ordered to be...

[–] lrvick 1 day ago

I have been an IRC operator for over 25 years, and never funneled any data to any third parties.

That is the beauty of open systems. One can choose an operator that reflects their values.

[–] esseph 20 hours ago

Ah, I see you never worked for US network providers, then.

[–] esseph 1 day ago

> Matrix

Is a piece of shit with awful UX.

[–] lrvick 1 day ago

What a detailed and thoughtful point. It is "shit" so we should all use corpotools?

You do realize there are like a dozen clients for Matrix right? You can literally have any UX you want or even ask your favorite LLM to make a Discord UX clone that uses matrix protocol under the hood. That is how open networks work.

[–] rcxdude 1 day ago

I'll echo the general impression. Even just using Matrix for direct messaging it's not something I am going to be able to pull any of my friends onto unless they already put the privacy and openness advantages very highly. It's just a pain to use, a pain to debug, and flaky enough you often have to debug it. It certainly seems like there's a lot of effort going into it but it seems to have resulted in a lot of churn but not much polish at any level.

[–] esseph 1 day ago

Matrix sucks. The ecosystem.

The design sucks. The clients suck.

I'm sure a lot of very well meaning people worked very hard at it! But from an end user and server operator POV, it's ass.