[toastercat]

> I would take Discord over Slack or Gitter any day of the week.

Gitter had terrible search, but one advantage Gitter had over Slack and Discord is that it required no login to lurk, and chatrooms were indexable by search engines. You can still do so with Gitter's switch to Element, although Element leaves a lot to be desired on the UX front.

> I would take Discord over Slack or Gitter any day of the week. Slack only retains 90ish days of text chat which makes it an awful platform for open-source projects to use.

But who is to say that one day Discord won't start enacting limits on search history? The enshittification seems inevitable, in my opinion.

[johnnyanmac]

>But who is to say that one day Discord won't start enacting limits on search history? The enshittification seems inevitable, in my opinion.

If it's inevitable, the service doesn't matter. YCombinator can one day do to HN what Reddit did to itself, but I'll still enjoy the community while it lasts.

It's better to work more on a "good enough for now but keep backups in mind" state rather than "there is nothing perfect so I won't go anywhere" state. If your mindset is the latter, why value online communitie at all to begin with?

[toastercat]

What I mean is that it's inevitable for a closed-source, proprietary solution like Discord. The service does matter, and there are better alternatives to Discord for online OSS communities.

[johnnyanmac]

Sure, just like how there were better alternatives for Facebook, and Twitter. Even when they were at their peaks. I think we've seen often enough in history that the best, most technically impressive tool is rarely the most popular one.

If you have the power to move the people you can help try to fight that aspect of society. But at large we can't even lead the horses to those theoretical oases (let alone make them drink)

[toastercat]

I think you're missing the context of the thread. An open-source project doesn't need to choose a tool that competes with Discord in popularity -- popularity is not important here. The aim is not to attract millions of users, the aim is to provide a valuable and sustainable resource to its community that it can link in the project's README file. A tool like Discourse or Zulip is more sustainable than Discord because they are open source, history is exportable, and the software is trivially self-hostable in case the managed hosting solutions don't pan out.