> Engagement on Twitter

> Official Discord chat room

No. Not at all. Many very popular OSS projects don't use Twitter or Discord. Any time you say "all OSS projects use technology X", be it GitHub or Twitter or whatever, the only thing you can be sure of is that the statement is wrong. Some projects may, sure, but that's different.

Probably the only "technology" you can say they generally use is a web page.

It is reasonable to say "they have 1 or more ways to interact, and that's clearly identified on their web page". But assuming that everyone uses the same communication mechanism is demonstrably false.

Yeah, I almost choked on my lunch when I read that. In addition to your well-said reasons, it just seems icky. In my not-so-humble opinion, Twitter (among others) has become a harmful echo chamber of dangerous ideas and hypocrisy. Requiring the use of Twitter is not a good signal to send.

I'm not sure why you're getting downvoted here, twitter is a pretty user-hostile platform for anyone who doesn't have an account, or you're a mobile user who doesn't want to install their app on your phone. Read access can/is restricted based on your platform, unless you're logged in. It's also difficult to search for specific issues/read threads, etc. There's better forum-style models to use for support.

Expressing disagreement with someone's opinion with a single click is sooo easy though ...

Don't disagree but tbf he also said:

> Lack of any one of these points isn’t the end of the world, but at the present moment, Jekyll lacks ALL of them. That’s a real problem.

I think the point is that most projects will engage with the public in at least some of these ways.

That's true, but I don't see how Jekyll would be improved with a Twitter and a Discord.

Although I agree, you can read content on Discord without an account. All you need to do is enter a username.

In this context, free Slack is worse than Discord. Despite that, some OSS still use Slack.

Well if you want to reach lots of developers, you have to be where they are, and they're on Twitter and Discord—for better or worse. :shrug:

Giving into the status quo is not going to change it. Free software projects aren't really free they make people sign up for nonfree platforms to collaborate.

The biggest projects are typically on IRC, mailing lists, and online forums. Linux, ffmpeg, practically every Linux or BSD distro, Git, nginx, postgresql, systemd, neovim, Freedesktop, etc.

Practically none of the software I use on a daily basis has a significant Discord presence.

The biggest projects have enough momentum that they can be on whatever communication channels they want - if Linux decided to switch to avian carriers tomorrow, they'd still have thousands of people talking over that.

>neovim

Neovim is on twitter, and doesn't have a mailing list. They also offer matrix and IRC (presumably bridged). See https://neovim.io/community/

You're right, but many of the newish projects are on Discord: Rust, Julia, Deno... I've seen many others that I can't remember now.

Sure, but hiding public discussions about your open source project behind a Discord server is a really bad idea. The goal of these things is to also act as a public repository for knowledge, and by using Discord you fail at that part.

Mailing lists are not bad, as well as the issue tracker on GitHub.

They're just the noisy developers who haven't found their hyperproductive niche. Once you've found your perfect tech stack, you just keep using it and stop making noise about it, and then your voice no longer gets counted. But that doesn't matter, because the work gets done, the code goes out, and the money comes in.

Mastodon and Matrix instead?

Elixir and OCaml mostly use a forum and it works well. Everyone can read it, it's easy to post on it, it's easy to moderate it, and it's great when you want to search for things. I don't think microblogging and instant messaging are what an open source community needs.

No one is on Mastodon or Matrix.

I certainly wish people were on Mastodon (haven't tried Matrix yet). I ran a Mastodon instance for some time. The experience was decent but discovery was terrible, and discovery is what makes Twitter (for example) so compelling.

Im on both. Mastodon has a busy busy community making the future of RSS and podcast feeds that I'm a big fan of, super welcoming people. Golang matrix has saved my bacon too many times to count, also great folks there.

The best part about these, is that though we step off topic sometimes, generally everyone is really helpful and focused on the general subject matter. It's not endless gossip, in jokes and memes, these people actively find new faces, and then find places for them to fit in the community and things to take ownership of.

These smaller networks are a rare type of community, and I love it.

Can you tell me which are these communities on Mastodon working on RSS and podcast feeds? I happen to be doing work related to both, currently, and would like to check them out.

Sure! https://podcastindex.social

You can help change that situation by joining the million or so Fediverse users or improving the platform instead of publicly dismissing it because it doesn't have a billion dollars in funding. It's quite easy to put together a feed with an update a minute if you really want that much activity.

Why would I do that?

Ladies and Gentlemen, the network lock-in effect in action.

Humour aside, you would do it if you wanted to encourage movement of the closed silos. It's not likely that your irl friends and family will make the jump anytime soon, but getting dev communities to make the switch is a much more tractable problem.

Not for mainstream projects - plus those places tend to become political mudwaters, because freedom in tech has become political the past few years.

Agreed about Mastodon, unfortunately.

But that has not been my experience with Matrix.

You can read Github without creating an account. You can't do that with Discord and it's becoming harder with Twitter. Discourse forums can be read without an account too. I agree that we should be careful of Github too.