Recently I accidentally made a Fediverse post which went viral:

stop using discord for your open source communities

That post is short, punchy, opinionated, and prescriptive, which I suspect is the cause for its virality.

Unfortunately, like many micro-blog posts, it lacks nuance, which many replies highlighted. I made the post to vent my frustration at needing to join a Discord server to interact with a community, so it is far from a measured critique of the subject.

This blog post is an attempt to address those nuances in greater detail. This is not an exhaustive analysis, and I’ve resolved to not let “perfect” be the enemy of “done”.

    • If you aren’t on the same server, encryption doesn’t always work very well, and you semi-frequently end up with conversations where you can’t read each other’s messages. Id you try get signed out of your app on a given device, you’ll likely lose past conversations. Etc. It’s just… obnoxious.