this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2024
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Very true, but self-hosting isn't free either, so there are maintenance/moderation/etc costs that take away time from the project. Small projects often just cant justify selfhosting.
But if your service is hosted by a third party, you really do want to be sure they will be around in the near future. And its not just chat that this applies to, git hosting, web hosting, ci/cd etc.
You don't need to selfhost most of those. There's IRC and webpage providers everywhere (you can literally walk into a cpanel hosting and click the button that says "make me a Wordpress", for example). After all, I'm sure your product has an email account, yet you are not selfhosting your e-mail, do you? And you release your software via what, Github? Flatpak? Lemme see, are you selfhosting those too?
You've come full circle. Of course there are hosting providers everywhere, but there are no guarentees that they will still exist in the future. And if your not selfhosting, then you have to pay someone to host it for you, whereas Discord and Github are free.
And a small subsection of the "dont use discord" crowd are equally against using Github for many of the same reasons.
To be clear, I am completely okay with Discord, Github etc for foss projects.
So long as you don’t buy into a platform’s proprietary features, you should be able to easily migrate if the basis is on a open technology. For instance, if you are using Git as your VCS, you can rehost it elsewhere easily. If your chat is on IRC and Freenode goes down, it wasn’t difficult to move to another platform as communities did. If you buy into Discord, you’re SoL for porting data out or having an easy way to transition to I different room/server since you have to migrate to a different protocol. If you start relying on Microsoft GitHub’s Issues, Action, Sponsors, etc. then you will also feel equally as locked in even if the fundamental system, Git is trivial to migrate.
Could chat histories get transitioned from Freenode onwards? Because that is the major issue I see with using Discord, projects often use chat history as a "wiki" of sorts. If you did the same thing on IRC, wouldn't you be equally SOL? I dont think switching the protocol is the problem, its leaving behind the historical data?
I think a lot of the arguments in this thread are pointing out that for info worthy of holding onto, you should probably be using forums. Part of the Discord issues is using it to hold onto permanent info (which requires an account to try to search). If you keep chat with the idea that it should be ephemeral in, then migrating isn’t an issue. The folks that mean for their IRC rooms to be longer lived, have public logs in HTML to search & those that didn’t, well they didn’t care that that history was lost since it was never meant to live forever. Without IRCv3 there isn’t even the concept of history (which has usability consequences needing a bouncer or an always-on remote terminal), but for instance with XMPP many rooms just give you the last n number of messages which is enough to understand the current conversation to participate, not read the entire log since room inception.
Yeah, forums or wikis for long term data, chat for ephemeral data. Just never confluence :D