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points by esseph 2 days ago | 0 comments
> [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.
[–] lrvick 16 hours ago
Sure. So most devs should probably just pick an open platform that already exists like matrix, so people can choose their own client.
[–] 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!

[–] lrvick 16 hours ago
I do not need a clone of Discord. Matrix already exists with an open federated protocol and many alternate clients.
[–] 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 19 hours ago
Ah, I see you never worked for US network providers, then.
[–] lrvick 16 hours ago
Nope, but I know people who have well and I know the level of quiet cowardly compliance that industry participates in. I want to enable an independent and private internet and US network providers are not in a position to help with that.
[–] 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.
[–] Arathorn 1 day ago
it sounds like you had an awful experience with a specific client and/or server combo (or perhaps multiple ones). can you share which ones? as you say, there's a lot of effort going into it, so it's important to know if impression is based on outdated knowledge or whether you or others have had a bad time with the current generation.
[–] 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.

[–] lrvick 16 hours ago
Matrix has been my almost exclusive chat solution for the last several years to talk to all friends coworkers and familt and it is a major upgrade to IRC in most ways, while also giving me end to end encryption when I want it, and the ability to self host and federate and bridge to other networks. Self hosted at two companies as well and works fine. Those are the features that matter most to me, and Discord does not do any of them.

Whatever issues you are experiencing will not get better if you are unable to describe them in words more detailed than "sucks."