Consideration for creating official Discord server?

1

I just want to ask if @stgraber would consider creating official Discord server for chat?
Current options doesnt seem much good and Discord is the most popular solution for this kind of community chat system.
Thanks.

1 Like
2

With all do respect, please do not move to discord.

  • does not offer email digest
  • gives all control over your community to 3rd party
  • gives all data to a 3rd party (discourse gives you the ability export and back up)
  • gives all future AI insight opportunity to a 3rd party

I totally understand why the average consumer likes using discord; however, it is the ultimate prison when it comes to creating and managing a community.

-2 cents
Chuck

3

At least it would maybe be alive, not dead like current Discourse chat.
I dont know if IRC is dead because it doesnt have history, but last time I tried having it open for a day I didnt see any messages.

Discord wouldnt replace this Discourse forum. It would just act as chat.

4

We have plans to set up a Matrix server for the linuxcontainers.org community which will replace the Discourse Chat and IRC.

We do not have any plans to go to a closed source, locked-in platform like Discord.

4 Likes
5

Please consider signal when performing the matrix evaluation. If you can, please make the evaluation details public. I would like to see how you decide. Thanks for considering.

6

Decision has been made, implementation hasn’t yet.

Basically we wanted:

  • Open Source platform
  • Used by other open source communities
  • Can be used from web
  • One account can be used to access multiple communities
  • Has reasonable moderation control
  • Can be integrated with external authentication providers (like this forum)

We can achieve all of the above by setting up a Matrix homeserver with our various channels and a second homeserver to provide Matrix accounts to those who don’t alerady have one, those accounts would then be tied to forum accounts so folks who don’t already use Matrix don’t need to set up a whole new account and can just join with their existing forum account.

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7

From what I see, Matrix is basically the biggest open source alternative to Discord.
I am looking forward to it.

8

Yeah and it’s been getting traction with some other large communities lately.
We’ve been actively using it for FOSDEM since 2020, the Mozilla and Gnome communities adopted it a while back and Ubuntu is slowly transitioning to it too, so we’re slowly getting to the point where a lot of FOSS folks will want to have a Matrix account anyway, which then makes it easy to keep up with a variety of communities, similar to what IRC used to provide, but in a more modern, convenient package.