[spion]

A study group, a programming community, any social group that you want to be a part of and they've decided to use Discord.

Don't like the Discord client or have trouble using it? Pay the price of not participating in dozens of communities you would like to participate in.

[JetAlone]

It reminds me of being a little kid growing up in a house without any channels on TV which had been my parent's deliberate decision (to shelter us from all the advertising and presumably, help us become more active and creative). All of my friends would be talking and joking about some show they saw the other night, and I'd be out of that loop. Asking them to explain what they saw would annoy them a little, but I might get a begrudging explanation. For a solid couple of years, my friends' favourite characters from shows like South Park and Family Guy were mysterious figures from apocryphal legends, whose personalities I understood fragments of without actually ever seeing them.

Maybe sometimes I could pick up on a meme without knowing the source material and sort of fit in for a bit. That's what not participating directly can be like, when you're caught at the fringe of your community because you don't use <platform>.

[prvit]

Maybe take it up with those communities?

[maskros]

Or maybe we can just have interoperability and open systems so all users can be happy, and don't have to choose between being obnoxious social outcasts or bow down in total obedience to the surveillance capitalists?

[Jetrel]

The problem is that all users aren't happy. Having used federated services for years, they're never in synch, and some users always have access to some features that other users don't have.

In fact, the problem is chiefly that a certain group of assholes never upgrade their clients, ever, and disingenuously try to keep everyone on an old version of the protocol, because they don't see a need for new features. Period. I've been through this gauntlet with some long-running open-source projects, and basically these guys were like "plain text and command-line should be sufficient for everyone (and shame on you if it's not!)".

Of course, that's fine if you're a programmer, but then these guys were SHOCKED - shocked, I say, that people's whose primary working medium was images rather than text - you know, UI designers and artists - found it a struggle to work on their project and quickly gave up.

This kind of bigotry constantly stifles progress in the OSS community.

---

There's a damn good reason no federated service even comes remotely close to Discord, and it's because despite all of those features being developed for other clients, repeatedly, there is always heavy social pressure not to leave people out, so "newfangled" features get swatted down by communities, and people are forced to only use the features that everyone supports.

You can have IRC that supports pasting images just fine, but some asshole's client doesn't support it, so you're back to using a shithole solution like external pastebins or personal FTP servers, again. Otherwise you're dealing with a constant "I don't see anything! Why can't you just use something that works on my client!"

---

So no, "interoperability and open systems" doesn't mean all users can be happy. It's a trojan horse to let luddites force obsolete versions of the protocol on everyone because they don't want to update.

[spion]

This is not the ask. Its just to have some kind of API.

[systoll]

We have interoperable, open systems; things like IRC and XMPP exist.

People chose discord over them.