Eventually move away from Discord?

[magnetophon]

I've been using the Rust Audio Discord for quite a while now and feel connected to the community there.
Yesterday, I was all of a sudden asked to provide a phone number to Discord, before I was allowed to interact with the community.

I don't know if the timing was a coincidence, or if it was related to Discord going on the stock market, but in any case, I think it might be time to move away from Discord as a community.

I hope someone will post a link to this issue on the Discord, and I hope that everyone who wants to discuss this does so here and not on Discord, since I am no longer able to interact with the platform.
(FWIW: I tried to open a new account with my other email-adres, but that got banned right away, not sure why.)

[piedoom]

That's unfortunate, sorry to hear that Discord has been causing issues. I haven't hit the phone number requirement yet, but I would also be hesitant to provide it to Discord.

In my opinion, Discord is not a good or stable long-term home for Rust Audio. Unfortunately, I also think it is the few realistic options at the moment solely because of the network effect. Any shift to a different platform will likely entail the loss of most community members. This is similar to my stance on GitHub - I've moved everything personal to Codeberg, but still maintain Github as it is the main place to collaborate with others.

Let me know your thoughts - but I would be open to trying a hybrid approach. Perhaps there can be an officially sanctioned server on another platform, with crossposting between servers? I don't know the implications of replicating the entire discord to something like Matrix and vice-versa, but maybe something more limited is possible.

[magnetophon]

@piedoom Thanks for the reply.
In general, I agree that the network effect is a big factor, but I feel in case of a tight community like ours, it should be possible to overcome.
In the meantime, a hybrid approach, with a bridge, would be great!

If I may ask: have you posted this issue on the Discord itself, with the request to discuss it over here?

[BillyDM]

Zulip seems like a pretty promising platform. (It's what the Linebender team uses.)

[Dimev]

I've run zulip myself, it's neat, but a little more tedious to use as "normal" chat compared to what discord offers.

[magnetophon]

Another option would be Stoat chat, written in rust, formerly called Revolt.
And obviously matrix.org.

[crop2000]

because rust audio is mostly slow matrix wouldn't really work so well. zulip is great i think.

[piedoom]

If there is interest (and it sounds like there is), I'd like to experiment with another chat app. @magnetophon no pressure if you don't have the bandwidth, but since you've been around so long and shown to be a reliable community member, would you be interested in co-moderating? (I'll also set up an account so there's multiple points of support and can create the instance).

I know others have used Zulip in the rust community with success, and it seems like their FOSS model is a nice preventative measure against issues we're seeing with Discord lately. I haven't heard of Stoat yet, but their app looks a little bit more like a direct Discord competitor. Zulip has the benefit of (I think?) being around longer with a larger community (I assume?).

I'll give both a go and see if there's standouts in either and report back. I believe the main points of evaluation are: 1. Ease of account creation, 2. Moderation tools, 3. App experience/UX, and 4. Reliability. Separately, I would really like to investigate the existence of a bridging tool, even if its just a channel, so that there is some link between the two communities. That is of course, unless that is against Discord's ToS 🙄

[piedoom]

OK! So I'm going to be kind of verbose on these just so others can see the full experience and call out anything important.

Stoat experience

Precompiled binaries available on MacOS and Windows only. Apps are testflight. I would consider this a somewhat major barrier to entry, on the apps side - and we do have a sizable Linux userbase.

They have a webapp, however, which bridges this gap. I still prefer a "native" app, personally, but glad this option exists!

I do have to mark the bin as safe. Stoat mentions this on their page, but I would call this another slight barrier to entry. I don't think many of the users here have Macs, though.

Sign up page! I'm allowed to use a protonmail forwarding address, which is nice as sometimes that is blocked.

I'm asked to complete a simple captcha via hCaptcha

And... wait up to 10 minutes. Let's see how long that actually takes...

Unfortunately, the mail never came. I tried again on the web browser version, just to be sure... However, that didn't come either 😢. Just to be sure, I created a new address with a standard gmail account - and that works! Unfortunate that I am using google, though. I'll probably go back through this again and see if a more standard alias works. Strangely, I don't even get the email in my Proton inbox, even though my gmail is set up to forward everything to PM.

We're in - I joined their community server to get a sense of things. I like how close the UI is to Discord, however I imagine that's not a pro or a con for most of our prospective users.

Switching rooms doesn't feel very smooth and actually takes a fair bit of time to load, but to be fair this is also probably a relatively large server.

Here are the different permissions available per channel:

Stoat also has custom emoji slots, user roles, and managed invites. It doesn't look like there are per-channel text filters.

Note that uploads are limited to 20MB which is reasonable, but small (though I think still an improvement from discord).

Stoat does have bots, including a version of Automod. Some options for sharing channels exist, such as https://github.com/williamhorning/lightning.

Review

I like the direction, the similarity of the experience to Discord, and think they have adequate tools to moderate a small community. If we spun up a server today, I think it would be manageable from the management point of view. While my issue with protonmail is likely an edge case, I think the fact that their binaries are unsigned on mac, there is no packages built for linux, and no apps on the official store, are more relevant.

I'll take a look at Zulip next and add to this thread and do a wrap up comparison later.

[piedoom]

Zulip

I was able to use passmail here, so I created a user and org in one go. The sign up process was uneventful.

Zulip has apps on the majority of popular platforms (including terminal, which is interesting). The Mac app appears to be signed and installs without extra steps.

Zulip asks for an instance login, similar to slack, which might feel a tad unfamiliar to Discord users.

Login for the app pops up in a webview within the app, which I always dislike because I can't access my PW managers/security issues. But minor issue :)

This is way more like Slack off the bat. Apparently Zulip is known for doing threaded conversations well.

To note, the free plan does not have unlimited history, which can be an issue, but I think we would be able to get a Standard organization plan if we applied.

Zulip channel permissions. These seem a bit less comprehensive than Stoat's, but I also think there are less social features built into Zulip that require further permission gates.

Server settings. Moderation requests is a nice built-in feature!

Server permissions

Zulip also has custom emoji and a bunch of other server features. Login methods and export features seem rather relevant.

Review

The experience of Zulip is far more formal and Slack-ified, which I honestly don't care for. I appreciate the whimsy of Discord and how friendlier aesthetics can make people feel more free to talk and be casual. However, it looks to me like Zulip is far more mature than Stoat, and its moderation capabilities and server options are more extensive (though it appears bots might be more plentiful/easier to set up with Stoat). The final straw for me is having complete app support and a more streamlined signup process.

[piedoom]

TL;DR, I prefer Stoat's experience, but I am not sold on their maturity. I also agree that Matrix is probably not a good fit. As of today, I think Zulip is a frontrunner. I'll do some more tinkering and leave room for any additional musings before making anything public, but using Zulip is on my current course of action unless I learn something new that changes things drastically or there are other suggestions to investigate.

Oh also sorry, I didn't see - but yes I posted in Discord with request to discuss here :)

[magnetophon]

@piedoom Thank you SOOOOOO much for that comprehensive comparison!
I agree on all your points and I'd be more than happy to help moderate.
Let me know if there's anything else I can do to help!

And thanks for posting on Discord!

[piedoom]

Created an invite link, feel free to join if you're OK with a lot of things moving around https://rustaudio.zulipchat.com/join/bubumgsawswk6otksqlxsw5h/

I'll keep this to just this convo for now and open it up on discord/add to the rust.audio site once we're a bit more confident on settings and content filtering.

[dathinaios]

Hello everyone,

Just wanted to cast my vote on this as I see some momentum gathering towards changing from discord. I personally would prefer to stay on discord because it is a mature platform and Rust Audio a professional/technical community for which I don’t find anonymity essential or even possible since I have been sharing my business information in it. That’s not to say I don’t see any issues with discord’s evolution, I am just trying to be pragmatic when it comes to the Rust Audio community. Open to being persuaded to change my mind of course 🙂

[magnetophon]

@dathinaios
Sorry if I wasn't clear: it's not about anonymity for me: you can find all my personal data on my website.
I just don't want to give it, or any other data, to a publicly traded company, because I don't want them to be able to data-mine it.
In case you think there is only harmless data being made available on our discord, here is a very entertaining talk about how much you can learn from seemingly harmless data: https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-7912-spiegelmining_reverse_engineering_von_spiegel-online (available in multiple languages).

The second reason, for me, is the inevitable enshittification of Discord that is coming / has started.