[_dmn7]

I maintain a semi-popular project [1] with a support chat which is bridged between Matrix, Telegram, and Discord. The decision to bridge it to Discord was made having thought long and hard about it some time after reading this post.

When you chase purity, you sacrifice pragmatism and strategic flexibility, limiting your options. It is sometimes necessary to compromise to achieve your goals.

My conclusion is that it is okay to use proprietary platforms as long as it does not negatively impact the users not willing to use them, i.e. all channels must be bridged to non-Discord, so that it does not "partition the community" in any way. When a compromise needs to be made, FOSS users are prioritized. Discord-specific features should be avoided to not affect the usability of users on Matrix. So far it works well and I get to basically have the cake and eat it too. The bridges are set up using an Ansible playbook [2] which required relatively little effort on my part.

1. https://github.com/FreeLanguageTools/vocabsieve

2. https://github.com/spantaleev/matrix-docker-ansible-deploy

[rapnie]

This can be a good approach, and indeed pragmatic. I wonder how your experience will be on the longer term wrt partioning the community, as each tool introduced adds frictions and maintenance burdens. Would people flock to the lowest friction tool? Maybe you could encourage adoption of the FOSS tools of the project, e.g. by using Matrix as your main channel where the core devs post, and considering other channels purely as mirrors.

[_dmn7]

From the perspective of the users, Matrix has the "best" experience since it supports bridge controlling user accounts, so all accounts look like real users. Currently the largest part of the community is from Telegram, which is the earliest established platform. Discord comes in second, then Matrix, but there are at least one other contributor is joining from there. Although I want to, the primary goal here isn't to encourage Matrix but to avoid forcing people to use Discord and as ddevault says "set up users who are passionate about free software — i.e. your most passionate contributors or potential contributors — as second-class citizens".