As someone deeply involved in Foss for many years and with multiple large Foss services running on my back, these constant requests for purity from outsiders will go nowhere until volunteers people step up to do the hard work of setting up and maintaining the infrastructure and management of such Foss solutions in the place of the core developers
I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make unless you’re saying no one has to create a Discord account, or have to download an app, or have to find an invite to locate the server. My keys are auto-generated and auto-saved, simple 20 second process. Forums are also a lot easier to sign up for than Discord, if you’re worried about making another account I don’t know what to tell ya because every service requires it.
You set up a discord account once. When you want to join a project discord all you have to do is click the invite link and hit „accept“. Bam. Done.
No need to join a forum. No need to keep track of another website and check if you got a personal message from someone or something. The benefit is that it is all one location.
It’s undoubtedly nice during that step of the process, but afterwards you’re on a platform that may not be well suited to the purpose. It’d be better just to make the new account on an actual forum. Granted, I use Bitwarden now, so I don’t sweat making new accounts anymore.
This makes me wonder if there is a centralized system for forums. We have stackexchange already, but that’s really designed to be a question and answer site.
I guess we have different perspectives. Ease, convenience = forums, existing userbase? = Do you prefer Reddit for this reason?, familiarity = forums lol, search-ability = forums, privacy = forums, etc etc.
As someone deeply involved in Foss for many years and with multiple large Foss services running on my back, these constant requests for purity from outsiders will go nowhere until volunteers people step up to do the hard work of setting up and maintaining the infrastructure and management of such Foss solutions in the place of the core developers
? What’s the difference between setting up a free forum (they’re everywhere) versus setting up Discord channels? It’s the exact same process.
“Oh great, I’ll have to create another fucking account” - me, already having some 300 accounts in my key-vault…
I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make unless you’re saying no one has to create a Discord account, or have to download an app, or have to find an invite to locate the server. My keys are auto-generated and auto-saved, simple 20 second process. Forums are also a lot easier to sign up for than Discord, if you’re worried about making another account I don’t know what to tell ya because every service requires it.
You set up a discord account once. When you want to join a project discord all you have to do is click the invite link and hit „accept“. Bam. Done. No need to join a forum. No need to keep track of another website and check if you got a personal message from someone or something. The benefit is that it is all one location.
It’s undoubtedly nice during that step of the process, but afterwards you’re on a platform that may not be well suited to the purpose. It’d be better just to make the new account on an actual forum. Granted, I use Bitwarden now, so I don’t sweat making new accounts anymore.
This makes me wonder if there is a centralized system for forums. We have stackexchange already, but that’s really designed to be a question and answer site.
Discourse, NodeBB and Flarum are all currently working on ActivityPub federation support. The first two have some basic support already available.
Edit: I read “decentralized”. The “centralized” system for forums is obviously Reddit.
Ease, convenience, existing userbase, familiarity, choose a few
I guess we have different perspectives. Ease, convenience = forums, existing userbase? = Do you prefer Reddit for this reason?, familiarity = forums lol, search-ability = forums, privacy = forums, etc etc.
Forums are not the same as real-time. And yes for most of the people using discord, forums wouldn’t cover the same niche.
I don’t want real time. Does me no good in my time zone.
That’s what lemmy is for.