There’s a popular-ish open source game I remember playing a few years ago, Warsow, and when I checked on it now, it’s been forked and while the fork is genuinely better and funner to play in so many ways, it expects to be launched through Steam. I wanted to tinker with maps and stuff and started researching, and while I did find what I was looking for somewhat in older Warsow-related threads, when I went to the official warfork-qfusion github repo looking for specific documentation for the new fork, I was greeted with a link to their Discord “if you have any questions”.
Yet this game brands itself FOSS, and it is technically released under a FOSS license and their github shows that they are actively developing it in cooperation with a community - just not a community you can be in without accepting certain walled gardens. It honestly sucks to see. I wanna access threads discussing this software, but I won’t be able to unless I go through an ID verification process and trust a silicon valley company to both secure my data and not use it in some nefarious way. And to even run the game, I had to accept Steam, which I honestly didn’t have to do in order to run Warsow back in the day, and I enjoyed that - what was wrong with just shipping a binary and letting people launch it how they like, with optional integrations? What’s wrong with having an open forum for tech questions? Why wall the garden that you’re making supposedly open products in?
In short, what do you call projects like this - the increasingly common projects that, while technically FOSS, put all their documentation and discussion on discord, and seem to expect their users to swallow unsavory default options or even use proprietary middle-ware or launchers? Proprietary FOSS?
I’ve thought for a long time that if a FOSS project wants to use Discord as its primary community center, they should build it on Matrix and have a bridge to Discord as a secondary.
That way, they get the larger reach and visibility of Discord for more of the normie crowd, without compromising their core FOSS user base and forcing them into proprietary solutions.
Matrix still has issues with rooms. There are a couple I’ve been in where the room breaks somehow and I have to join another one. The server is also a pain to run last I knew, and somehow, despite all the interest in it, nothing ever manages to rival the standard client and server.
I’d rather see Mov.im on XMPP get more usage once they finish implementing their more Discord-like features. They want to become an alternative since the age verification drama a few months ago, but it takes time to build the features. I’m hoping that becomes viable real soon.
Still, what I’d REALLY like for technical communities is for them to just use forums so the information can be archived in a searchable way. Discord is where information goes to die slowly, and an XMPP-based alternative wouldn’t be much better.
Not to be contrarian, just running a Matrix server is awful, and Matrix has been plagued with security issues in the past, including basic crypto gaps due to lack of domain understanding in the implementation, which is shocking for what is touted as a security first project.
Moreover, I don’t know of any acceptable alternatives.
I’m generally one of the first people on any FOSS bandwagon. I’ve been using Linux as my daily driver since 1999. Matrix is not simply “not as good” or “not up to feature parity” as alternatives. It is in my opinion unacceptably bad and the project leads seem to be actively hostile to efforts to make it better.