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I have an existing community of thousands of users on discord, attempts to migrate to other platforms have failed. What would you suggest?
The community was inherited and existed when I became maintainer.
Set up a Matrix bridge and promote it too. You can’t force a community but you can inform and give choice.
We tried that. Did nothing but divide the community, cause increased cost, increased administrative burden, increased spammers and detracted efforts from actually working on the project. Ultimately, about five legitimate community members continued to used it over three to six months.
Matrix is IMHO a bad choice as it attracts the same demographic as Discord (glossy webclient) but is much more janky. Realistically speaking it is a poor Slack clone once you look beyond the technical aspect of federation which few people care deeply enough about to endure the buggy and half-broken user experience of Element.
I have had great success bridging to IRC (and XMPP). Yes, it will not fully replace Discord, but it allows a very dedicated group of people to participate in a community on their own terms and with great lightweight clients.
I agree though that any kind of bridge increases the risk of spam. But you should really try to get community members on board to deal with this kind of thing. Developing a software and running a community alone is not a good idea.
As someone deeply involved in Foss for many years and with multiple large Foss services running on my back, these constant requests for purity from outsiders will go nowhere until volunteers people step up to do the hard work of setting up and maintaining the infrastructure and management of such Foss solutions in the place of the core developers
? What’s the difference between setting up a free forum (they’re everywhere) versus setting up Discord channels? It’s the exact same process.
a free forum
“Oh great, I’ll have to create another fucking account” - me, already having some 300 accounts in my key-vault…
I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make unless you’re saying no one has to create a Discord account, or have to download an app, or have to find an invite to locate the server. My keys are auto-generated and auto-saved, simple 20 second process. Forums are also a lot easier to sign up for than Discord, if you’re worried about making another account I don’t know what to tell ya because every service requires it.
You set up a discord account once. When you want to join a project discord all you have to do is click the invite link and hit „accept“. Bam. Done. No need to join a forum. No need to keep track of another website and check if you got a personal message from someone or something. The benefit is that it is all one location.
It’s undoubtedly nice during that step of the process, but afterwards you’re on a platform that may not be well suited to the purpose. It’d be better just to make the new account on an actual forum. Granted, I use Bitwarden now, so I don’t sweat making new accounts anymore.
This makes me wonder if there is a centralized system for forums. We have stackexchange already, but that’s really designed to be a question and answer site.
Discourse, NodeBB and Flarum are all currently working on ActivityPub federation support. The first two have some basic support already available.
Edit: I read “decentralized”. The “centralized” system for forums is obviously Reddit.
