Consider moving away from Discord or bridge it to a FOSS chat platform

[PureTryOut]

I've been away from Cuberite for a while but I see nowadays a Discord guild exists. It's a shame to see a centralized, walled, proprietary platform like Discord is used for such an awesome FOSS project. I was wondering if it could be considered to either move away from it, or at least bridge it to a FOSS platform like (preferably) Matrix or IRC.
I'd like to keep track of development and on-going discussions but I refuse to do so by joining Discord. There are bridges available to at least Matrix and you don't even have to host them yourself.

[bearbin]

I am not a fan of Discord myself, and would strongly prefer that we had a FOSS discussion platform; I have at some points thought about setting up a matrix homeserver for cuberite developers and organising a channel.

However - I haven't done that, because it would almost certainly be as much of a failure as our IRC channel (which still exists on freenode, #cuberite), because of the network effect Discord enjoys. The discord is primarily a support platform for users (with some development discussion also); and adding friction (getting a matrix account, and choosing client is non-trivial) sort of defeats the point. Unfortunately, Minecraft players use Discord and not Matrix.

If there is demand I could see about getting Cuberite set up on Matrix, but I don't want to divide the community more than it is at the moment (across the forum, github, and discord) without good reason.

That said, please rest assured that no major development decisions are being made out of sight on Discord and there's no need at all to be involved there to follow along or to contribute either.

Fundamentally, Discord (and Matrix) are chat platforms, and while it's useful for an open source _community_ to have a chat platform, it doesn't really advance the aims of a open source _project_. Chat platforms are closed by design, even if their source is open - there are no archives or good search; and without proper threading it's impossible to advance a detailed point or keep a discussion going for more than a day or two. An open source project needs a permanent record of design choices and development that is open and searchable by anyone. In the case of Cuberite, this requirement is fulfilled by the Forum and GitHub, further, neither Discord nor Matrix are able to replace these functions.

[PureTryOut]

I fully understand your points. Luckily Matrix is famous for it's bridging to other platforms. Like I mentioned, one can run a bridge to just connect a Matrix chat to a Discord one. Normally you would host it yourself but there are pre-hosted ones that you can just re-use like https://t2bot.io, that way you don't have to host anything yourself and have almost no maintenance.

That way everyone can use the chat platform they enjoy, be it a proprietary one like Discord or a FOSS one like Matrix (and you can even bridge it further to IRC if you want), but you don't split the communities and keep history and the network effect.

[tigerw]

Welcome back, by the way!