16-09-2025
Reading my fedi feed I came across this post by SuperDicq. Of course I got pissed because I dislike Discord and decided to chime in. After a while I thought it would be nice to expand my ideas on a longer post.
But… I don’t want to go that way, not as the main argument of this post at least. I swear there are practical and convenience reasons not to use discord, but I do have to be honest, I do align ideologically with free software. I try not to use proprietary software on my day to day life, unless I end up isolating myself (that means I sadly have to use shit like whatsapp). Also, unfortunately, God made me a gamer, so yeah, there’s that. That means I use steam and play games which are, mostly, proprietary software.
But outside of that, I don’t willingly use proprietary software and I do not believe neither using free software or being privacy minded is an all-or-nothing situation.
IRC, due to its age and apparent lack of evolution, has a fame of being obtuse, bad, complicated and the whole lot. And it doesn’t ‘vibe’ with the kids if you catch my drift. But it’s actually pretty simple, easy and straightforward to use; just not for the person handling the project’s socials (which mostly means its creators).
And I’m really not talking about my perspective here, of course that, for me, who already has weechat installed and his IRC nick reserved with nickserv on liberachat, it’s extremely more convenient to open weechat and type /join #your_channel, rather than registering on discord (because I do not and never will have an account), giving up my cellphone number and having to disable a lot of my browser’s extensions just for the damn thing to load.
IRC is more convenient than discord, for one simple reason: you just get in the channel and that’s it. While in discord you have to register, give extremely sensitive data like your phone number and either install literal spyware or use it in the browser (if you must, use it in the browser for God’s sake).
That’s why I said it’s easy but not for the sysadmins of the project. As a sysadmin, you should set up a self hostable IRC web client and a logging system, which are plenty. That way, someone looking for support just clicks in your contact page and in the “Chat with us” or whatever button, enters a nick and that’s it.
The logging system also should be set up in a way it’s indexable by search engines, making it an even more transparent channel of support than discord, which is literally part of the dark web. (As in, not indexable. Not because of the large amounts of CSAM, terrorist attack planning and death threats that get shared on it. That’s another subject).
But this is why it’s kind of obvious why you’re mandating your users to install spyware to chat with you: it’s easy (and free, while VPS are cheap, they’re still a necessity in order to host the web client and the logger), and you assume most people have gone through the process of selling their soul to the devil so you say to yourself: whatever.
Big tech garbage thrives due to the network effect. They chain you and your community and friends and make it a hell for you to leave. By using a platform like discord, you’re growing that network and making YOUR community dependant on a proprietary platform whose interests usually clash with yours. They do not give a fuck about your users and contributors.
Also, and I am being repetitive here and I know it, but man… it’s an awful way of storing information like troubleshooting, technical discussions and support, which should be as transparent as possible.
The power dynamics of proprietary platforms like Discord ARE a practical disadvantage, because those power dynamics are that of a master-slave relationship, while on open protocols like IRC that type of lock-in simply can’t exist. It didn’t take too long, nor was it hard, after the freenode debacle, for people to move to libera. Project mantainers just had to edit their readmes.
Ok, now I’ll become political and ideological and woke if you will. But you’re developing Free/Open Source software for fuck’s sake. Don’t force your users into using proprietary software.