[toastercat]

> Discord's accessibility has improved quite a bit. Even a screenreader user in the article's source section agrees:

Yes, but this ignores the others issues the post brings up: Users who cannot afford new enough hardware to make the resource-intensive client pleasant to use are also left by the wayside.

Or: Discord also declines service to users in countries under US sanctions, such as Iran.

> Discord is honestly a great place for FOSS to house their communications ... Discord does not take value away from FOSS communication platforms.

The blog's author, and others such as myself disagree. Discord chats are not indexible by search engines, so solutions are harder to find. You need a Discord account, and you need to join the channel to even see chat and use the search feature. Discord is proprietary and non-extensible because of it. Lastly, Discord is also profit-motivated, so they can shut things down or add limitations because they need to maintain a profit, and there would be nothing we can do about it. "Enshittification" as HN users love to say, is practically inevitable.

> It isn't IRC which is very inaccessible to lots of people new to computers and software in general.

Which client are you speaking of? :) The beauty of IRC, Matrix, XMPP, etc is that you have the choice and freedom (without being legally threatened by Discord Inc.) to build your own client.

[epolanski]

But discord is a better experience than IRC or any other chat I know of, and I say it as someone who pioneered #quakenet, #freenode and #libera on IRC.

Instead of bashing library authors that have already so much to think, why don't you propose a discord replacement and pay for it, while providing the same ease of use for the users and the same features from channels, threads, third party apps/plugins, video conferencing, etc?

[toastercat]

> But discord is a better experience than IRC or any other chat I know of, and I say it as someone who pioneered #quakenet, #freenode and #libera on IRC.

I'm glad you enjoy Discord! And thanks for your hard work. But I disagree, and all of the issues with Discord I pointed out above still persist despite your love for the UX.

> Instead of bashing library authors that have already so much to think

I never bashed library authors.

> why don't you propose a discord replacement and pay for it

I engage in communities that use Zulip and Matrix. Zulip is free for open-source projects [1], and I donate to a small community that hosts its own Matrix server.

> while providing the same ease of use for the users and the same features from channels, threads, third party apps/plugins, video conferencing, etc?

We're kinda getting away from the point here. No one is suggesting that there is a FOSS alternative to Discord that has 100% feature parity.

[1] https://zulip.com/for/open-source/

[nonethewiser]

> Users who cannot afford new enough hardware to make the resource-intensive client pleasant to use are also left by the wayside.

Wait… people can’t run web browsers?

[toastercat]

By "client", they mean the web application that is Discord, which is CPU and RAM intensive especially for folks with older hardware.

[toastal]

Not everyone lives in the West & has access to the fastest hardware or fastest networks. Some folks are living mostly off-grid using solar power & each heavy application is chewing thru their limited batteries.