Estudante de Engenharia Informática apaixonado pela área; algures em Portugal.

Administrador da instância lemmy.pt.


Computer Science student, passionate about the field; somewhere in Portugal.

lemmy.pt instance administrator.


https://tmpod.dev

  • 6 Posts
  • 32 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: September 10th, 2021

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  • I’m not sure how they are less usable than Discord. “Everyone” (using quotations here because it’s not an absolute thing, but it’s almost so) knows how to e-mail, it’s one of the most fundamental Internet skills. Using Discord, however, is not, for a large amount of people. Sure, most developers either have had contact with Discord at some point or are capable of figuring it out just fine anyway. But seeing as FLOSS really shouldn’t just be about developers (as Drew points out too) and as end users should also be accounted for, e-mail as a basis for coordination and support is a very valid choice.

    It’s pretty much account-less (in the sense that you don’t need to create yet another account), it’s easily indexable (there are plenty of web UIs for mailing lists), it’s convenient and highly asynchronous, not to mention it’s a mature and well established open standard and decentralized protocol, with lots of open tools that fit the spirit of FLOSS in general.

    Discord, however, is closed, “unindexable”, doesn’t work offline at all (with e-mail you can read and compose e-mails totally offline, it’s heavier (both in terms of computing resources and data transfer) and full of intrusive pop-ups and whatnot (and has arguably distracting money-seeking features). That’s fine and maybe desirable for certain types of communities, specially the instant aspect of it, which is a strong and harmless difference between the two, but it’s not fit for the base space for contact between developers, contributors and users.

    In my opinion, of course.


  • I’ve been finding Zulip quite helpful. It’s threading model is great and they overall focus quite a bit in the project coordination use-case. You can either self-host it or pay for their managed hosting (which is free for open-source projects), and you can add a plugin to make static HTML pages of streams (aka channels) in order to make stuff indexable and searchable (and iirc this is getting polished and built into Zulip’s core).

    If you care about accessibility, email is still the best choice — it’s mostly text-focused, doesn’t need an account (besides what is universally seen as the most basic Internet identity), truly decentralized and has mature tooling. I just haven’t found a really good mailing list archive web UI. HyperKitty is good, but isn’t quite there for me. lists.sr.ht is neat, but lacks a lot of features. Above all, indexability and searchability (from inside the UI itself) is key.