Wuzzy wrote: ↑Sun Sep 27, 2020 17:51
Anyway. If Element has the same appeal as proprietary Discord (as you claim), but it's actually FOSS, that would be great in moving players and whole communities off of Discord towards freedom. I have become very frustrated by other FOSS projects that only use Discord for chat, which puts you in the ironic situation that you must install a proprietary software in order to participate in FOSS development. I think the Discord usage in FOSS is a big problem, so I approve of any possible method to solve it. :-)
I think that's the big one. I'm pretty new to getting properly involved in the FOSS gaming community. Until this whole Coivd-19, staying at home business started, I had long uninstalled Discord in part due to its proprietary nature. But then I found that some social activities I had been involved in now required it for remote participation, so I reinstalled it. Then when I saw that Minetest had a very active DIscord it was just a matter of adding another server, didn't think much about it.
But since then, with people like Zughy raising this issue, it does strike me as really odd how entrenched Discord is in the FOSS community, with relatively little commentary on that fact. Makes me wonder if for others, the whole 'open source' thing is just incidental and that something else brought them to Minetest or other similar projects. Or if they feel somehow the things that are great about a game being free software somehow doesn't apply to messaging applications.
Probably doesn't help that Discord has this very smarmy Microsoft approach to the whole 'open source' issue, where apparently they <3 Open Source and brag about how many open source communities they support...while still being proprietary software:
https://discord.com/open-source
I've noticed that the Unofficial Discord is probably the most active part of this community by far. It's a shame that if you're more committed to the philosophy of free software, or just don't want to add more proprietary tools to your toolkit, you'd miss out on that and maybe not even know how 'alive' this project is.
I think part of the reason that this was able to happen is right there in the name:
Unofficial Discord. If the Devs are happy on IRC, that's perfect and there's no point in pushing them off of there (especially when you can bridge it easily). However, there should maybe be a more OFFICIAL stance on and support for community communications channels, that stays both true to the free software philosophy that underpins this project as well as the evolving or differing tastes of the community. The Devs love the old school, KISS IRC approach, but from the busy Unofficial Discord, it's clear the community, especially its younger members want a more full featured platform, with more modern design, reactions and all kinds of fun do-dads. If Matrix/Element or things like Rocket.chat are both free software and give the community what they want, it seems like a win win.
It wouldn't even require much from the very busy core devs...maybe even just grant the existing 'Unofficial' (see that word again?) Minetest Matrix Community the 'Official' title. Even if people stubbornly stick to Discord, it would be good to put the foot down and make the stance of this project clear.
Now, this is all based on the assumption that free software is actually important to Minetest as a project. I could be misreading it too!