Hey, you're not gonna get me to disagree the new app is terrible. Ain't some sort of wild gotcha here.

The fact of the matter is that even with the frog partially boiled it's still better than the alternative.

See my other comments. There is still no suitable alternative to Discord that is as good at it for making communities people can easily access. The loss is not solely in the messages that get locked away (sure that sucks too). It's the loss of the communities that can't exist on platforms like Matrix or IRC.

When the OP article was posted in 2021, Zulip didn't even have public access as an option. This basically would make it a non-starter for what the article author suggests it for, as that's worse (having to make an account everywhere) than Discord, Matrix or IRC.

To be honest I don't have too much experience with Zulip or Rocket or all of these other new platforms, but my current default assumption is that they will always be designed foremost for organizations rather than the "I am in 20 communities I am somewhat active in[1]" like Discord. Matrix always seems like the better choice here... but it's got its own issues.

I also don't put much regard into the author's word here because unironically suggesting IRC in 2021 means they're off their rocker.

[1] I know you can only join like 100 servers without nitro ok.

I am fully aware why people go "Discord bad". But weak arguments like "you miss out on all the contributors that have too bad of a PC to run Discord" do not outweigh the fact that Discord is a million times better for building a community. You're suggesting to make the experience worse for 90% of people interested in a project to appease the <1%.

I wish it didn't have to be this way, but it is.

I've evaluated Matrix multiple times, even tried to set up a homeserver once, and I can confidently say it's an unusable mess compared to Discord.

If I wanted to set up a community like on Discord the experience would be worse than Discord 8-7 years ago. Is there a nice, GUI based system for managing permissions, administration and members in a group across 50 channels yet? No? Alright.

Also every time I try to set up Element on another device it takes like 5 attempts to get it to stop spouting errors about E2E stuff, and then still fails to decrypt messages.

The GPL has an exception for "system libraries" on this regard, but it's as handwavy as the rest of the license.

The GPL isn't meant to be a real license, it's supposed to be a toxic waste bucket that companies don't want to interact with. This it succeeds at.

50 generations of inbreeding later:

IANAL but since they used the word "threatened" instead of "I'm getting sued", no case is being filed.

Pretty sure that if they were actually getting sued they'd already be radio silent.

Please don't tell me it's actually been 5 years...

As somebody whose primary language is Dutch, the lack of an explicit plural "you" is one of the worst things.

If I'm talking to somebody, I can't nicely refer to a group they are part of, because "you" means they themself specifically, "y'all" makes me feel like engineer TF2, and "you people" sounds condescending.

What the fuck, transphobia on 196?

Trans rights 🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍⚧️