Ask HN: Why do open source projects use discord?

2 points by gchaincl 2 years ago | 6 comments

I personally find discord bloated, slow and hard to use. But besides my personal impressions, I am genuinely intrigued by the fact that, having platforms like matrix, which very well aligns with the open source ethos, many people rely upon closed source services like discord to provide support and build communities for their projects. What are the features the it offers?

SubGenius 2 years ago |

I'm building a publicly-accessible matrix server [0], primarily so that FOSS communities don't have to move to a closed platform.

It's a negative trend that all the collective knowledge of these communities end up being siloed in platforms that can't be accessed from the open web.

[0] - https://shpong.com/shpong

gchaincl 2 years ago | |

This is really cool

mattl 2 years ago |

Discord seems very easy to setup, a lot of people already have an account and the client and the client is somewhat easy to use (notifications are annoying to me) and with a global identity.

I wouldn’t even know where to setup a new Matrix server, I suspect it’ll involve installing server software but is there a larger instance of Matrix people use? (Akin to mastodon.social)

snehk 2 years ago |

I've wondered about this as well. I can't use Discord. I'm in my mid 30s and I feel like an 85 year old man using that software. It feels absolutely overwhelming and bloated.

not_your_vase 2 years ago |

  Quick google:
  Number of discord users: 150M
  Number of matrix users:   60M

Go where you can reach the most people. Not saying I like it. It's just the way it is.

gchaincl 2 years ago | |

I didn't know matrix had that many users! Despite of that, I still believe that the ethos is important, I tend to think that people choose the open source model for a variety of reasons, including principles.