As you can easily notice, today many open source projects are using some services, that are… sus.
For example, Github is the most popular place to store your project code and we all know, who owns it. And not to forget that sketchy AI training on every line of your code. Don’t we have alternatives? Oh, yes we have. Gitlab, Codeberg, Notabug, etc. You can even host your own Gitea or Forgejo instance if you want.
Also, Crowdin is very popular in terms of software (and docs) translation. Even Privacy Guides and The New Oil use Crowdin, even though we have FLOSS Weblate, that you can easily self-host or use public instances.
So, my question is: if you are building a FLOSS / privacy related project, why using proprietary and privacy invasive tools?
I run a fairly popular open source project called Svelte Material UI, and I can tell you why I use Discord for support. My users want me to use it. GitHub too.
People want to use what they already have, and most people, even developers, don’t care that much about privacy. I would gladly self host a support forum, but tons of people would rather use a different library than sign up for my personal support forum. And the people who really care about privacy wouldn’t trust my self hosted solution either, so there isn’t really a better option than Discord, as much as that sucks.
I can’t even use discord at all because it forces me to verify with a phone number as soon as I sign up, every single time, no matter what ISP/browser/etc. I use.
When support is hidden away in discord, web searches can’t find it. Nobody can even look through it without having an account.
I agree that it sucks. I would much rather use a more open platform. But my users don’t want that. Discord is convenient, people want convenience, and I want to give my users convenience (even if it means I have to answer the same questions once in a while).
Only convenient for those who are on discord. Everyone else is excluded.
Sure, but I’ve actually had people ask me to set up a Discord, and no one has ever asked me to set up anything else.
Unrelated question but why did you not upvote your own comment?
on lemmy.world it automatically does that for you.
Anti Commercial-AI license (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
I posted like I normally do from the Voyager app, and it shows me that I’ve upvoted it, so I don’t know.
weird
Edit: It most like was a federation problem on my end.
Anti Commercial-AI license (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)