[dmitriid]

> Yes, this is really sad to see that much people in the OSS scene using nonfree ways to communicate.

And the reasons are entirely understandable:

- you don't have to run your own infrastructure

- you don't have to run your own protections against fraudulent activity, DDOSes, bots etc.

- you don't have to worry about availability on any number of platforms, including mobile

[detaro]

free software as a hosted service is a thing.

[dmitriid]

It is a thing, is there enough of this thing? Is it free? Do these hosted services provide the infra and protection? Do these hosted services solve the issue of the dearth of clients for these services?

And if you look at hosted services like IRCCloud, it turns out they are not that different from Slack/Discord: closed source, for full range of capabilities you need to use their apps.