I know this is a losing battle, but . I continue to frequently find answers to problems via the public chat archives, a resource that withers with these migrations to Discord. Or I recently had a general functional programming question, and found the answer in the Haskell community, while Scala has fully retreated into a walled garden. We are locking away the collective wisdom of the community, and the natural outreach it brings, for a few extra sparkles in the chat app du jour. All at a time the Matrix experience has improved considerably!
I argued bitterly against the Typelevel one, and this battle looks lost as well. Please at least keep the Matrix integration bot, because none of my other communities are on Discord, and I donāt want to run yet another chat app to stay in touch.
For the record, I share the discoverability concern, and I put that in the list of cons.
That said, I think there are so many pros that itās still the best alternative: the clients are modern and work across the range (at least on web, desktop, iOS, the devices I use), the moderation tools are best in class, including the automated ones, itās actively maintained by a profitable company, and - already cited - many communities already moved there and you pay the signup price once
I know weāve had this discussion before, but just to get it in the record, itās far more than that. Discord functions very differently from Gitter in ways which foster community discoverability and interaction. This isnāt just an opinion, itās been born out in hundreds of thousands of communities across innumerable topics.
Even if you donāt buy the āDiscord works better for the usersā argument though, the mere fact that it has moderation tools which work is reason enough for any community to switch. Even banning doesnāt work correctly on Gitter (you can just delete and recreate your account to bypass any ban or moderator action, which has been demonstrated in the Scala channels several times in the past). It doesnāt have gradient roles. It doesnāt even have a slow mode or other ātable stakesā type tools for putting out fires. Discord has all of this, and given the communities it was originally built for (and continues to serve), itās safe to say those tools are dramatically more battle-hardened than literally any other system in existence.
Discord vs Matrix is the only question that even bears examination here, since Gitter is simply not a tenable tool for any modern community on moderation grounds alone. Matrix is quite good, but itās also very immature, lacks (and probably will always lack) a lot of the tooling that Discord has built up around it, suffers from the same discoverability problem as Gitter, and still has the walled-garden issue of Discord. The fact that Matrix is federated in theory doesnāt make it any more federated in practice than XMPP was (or is), and we all know how that saga ended.
Yes, it sucks that Discord is not indexed by Google. It is quite nice though that itās indexed at all (Discordās search is incredibly good), which is something that Matrix and Slack still canāt seem to get right. And at the end of the day, the concern of locking off community content behind a walled garden is only a meaningful concern if there exists community content to lock off, which is to say, an active community producing said content. Discord demonstrably fosters this better than other systems, and thatās reason enough to use it.
The fact that Matrix is federated in theory doesnāt make it any more federated in practice than XMPP was (or is), and we all know how that saga ended.
Iām following four communities across three protocols using the Matrix client, including the Discord under discussion, so Iād say federation is working just fine. I canāt stop this train, so Iām requesting that the bridge remain supported to lower the barrier to participation.
For the record (I have been told that this thread is āthe recordā), I like Discord less than Gitter, and I donāt think the fragmentation matters as long as which one to go first is clearly indicated from the web site. Having a hardly-used Gitter site hasnāt seemed to harm the Rust community at all. If it were up to me, Iād leave Gitter up until the only things posting there were tumbleweeds.
But I also donāt think it matters all that much, so Iāll grudgingly go along with whatever.
re: Rexās suggestion, I actually wouldnāt mind leaving scala/scala Gitter around indefinitely. Kind of like how #scala IRC still exists (on Libera, these days), but we often refer people to the more populated platforms if their question doesnāt get answered on IRC.
Itās scala/contributors and scala/job-board that Iām rather more interested in actually shutting down, in order to avoid fragmentation and reduce moderator effort.
Has anyobdy tried bridging a Discord directly into the rooms on the *:gitter.im home server rather than *:matrix.org? It could unify the old with the new. Itās the same protocol as the existing bridge, so it probably works. Discord communication from that point forward would be public, but thatās a positive thing as long as itās communicated.
A while ago, Before Matrix took over gitter, I did try bridging matrix to gitter to discord on another community server and it worked fine so It can be done, it just needs someone with admin rights to all platforms.
Funny enough at the time users didnāt like it as people who were only in the gitter chat when other discord channels were mentioned would get confused as they didnāt realize everything bridged.
Until this feature is implemented, bridging to gitter.im would require admins on all three platforms, which is not practical.
Matrix users can hide bridged Discord users, but Discord users canāt block bridged Matrix users. This is a significant safety concern for users on the Discord side where there is a bridge.
. I continue to frequently find answers to problems via the public chat archives, a resource that withers with these migrations to Discord. Or I recently had a general functional programming question, and found the answer in the Haskell community, while Scala has fully retreated into a walled garden. We are locking away the collective wisdom of the community, and the natural outreach it brings, for a few extra sparkles in the chat app du jour. All at a time the Matrix experience has improved considerably!