don't hide community behind walled gardens
dear open source community,
please don’t hide your community behind walled gardens.
the past few years, more and more communities have moved their communities to platforms like Discord and Slack. many have valid arguments for this move, e.g. “it’s one of the easiest platforms to use”, “people don’t use IRC channels/Matrix/XMPP/etc.”, “lower friction/barrier to entry for users”, and so on.
starting an open source community will require a lot of work, which founders often don’t have the time for. they go from being only a developer to being a community manager as well. and i understand these arguments, but in my opinion we need to try our best to preserve the openness on all ends, not just the code. Discord, for example, does not allow accessing information without registering with them - think of how many good discussions, for example, an FOSS-only user misses.
when browsing this topic i also see the argument of Discord or Slack will mostly become the biggest platform for a community, even though the maintainer has set up their own open platform for this. valid argument, but i think it doesn’t hurt to have more places, as long as there is an open platform for the community as well. Discourse is a good example of a good platform that can be selfhosted for this.
in summary i would say all platforms have their pros and cons, and there is no single perfect solution. but, i still think that open source communities will fall into more pitwalls by hiding some of the community within walled gardens. information should be able to flow freely to all users.
i’d like to end the post by quoting Benjamin in his post “free software needs free tools”:
“We should resist using tools that do not allow us the freedoms we are trying to provide our users in the development of their software and we should apply pressure on the producers of our development tools. Free software has not achieved success by compromising our principles. We will not be well served, technically, pragmatically, or ethically, by compromising on freedom of the tools we use to build a free world.”
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