Sadly it's becoming more the norm to rely on other services for social interaction. The last company I worked for completely ditched forums in favor of Facebook groups for community support.

This happens a lot, but I've recently worked with a couple of clients who are trying to own the communities they built after migrating to Facebook because "that's where everybody is".

Turns out FB is capricious and has no problem pulling the rug out from under those companies and the communities they foster on Facebook without notice or recourse. Pages and groups with hundreds of thousands of followers can be wiped off FB and there's nothing your business can do about it.

If I were in their shoes, I'd just use FB as a funnel to an online property that I own and control.

Yeah even open-source projects, like HomeAssistant moved to discord :(

Matrix would be a much better choice IMO.

Just tried it with the hopes it's not just another FOSS alternative to <popular app> that gets touted everywhere as 'better', but is very clearly worse in every way.

It's worse in every way. It's not even close to something as polished as Discord.

1. "Open in browser" is a good start, but then the registration process is downright painful. Discord doesn't require you to register at all to try it out, just to pick a nickname, it's vastly better for onboarding.

2. Requires unique nicknames. A chat app with unique nicks? this has to be a joke right?

3. As usual with FOSS, the worst part is the UI/UX. The whole design is extremely confusing. At first glance it appears the app only supports 'rooms'. But it seems that there are 'communities' and 'spaces' too? I have no idea what's going on. Discord just has servers with channels and private messages and it's all clearly indicated in the UI.

Listen, I do want to use open and free alternatives if possible. But let's be realistic and stop pretending that something like Matrix is anywhere near Discord. A more reasonable alternative would be Zulip.

I see this comment on so many different threads about so many different organizations who choose something other than Matrix. Matrix is clearly not a much better choice for most orgs, or more orgs would use it. That many FOSS orgs don't suggests that even people who believe in free software don't all see Matrix as a viable alternative to commercial solutions. Nebulously insisting that Matrix is "better" (without any specifics) doesn't help address the problems that drive people away.

“Better” and “more often used” are not definitionally equivalent.

But they do have forum which seems fairly active I don't see why they need to have Facebook. I am guessing it will have pretty niche crowd which probably don't frequents to fb.

http://board.kolibrios.org/

The giant Facebook logo is probably from a time when Facebook was regarded with less suspicion than it is today. But if you want to avoid Facebook, you can use their good ol' phpBB forum. If you look at it more closely, the site is really a time capsule: forum powered by phpBB, documentation on MediaWiki, source code hosted on WebSVN, bug tracking powered by Mantis...

I can understand. The maintainers might want to focus on maintaining their project, not the social network infrastructure for their community.

Matrix.org

It seems from the past somehow.

The code is in svn. I think it's all relative.

I mean SVN for the code repository vs a more modern alternative eg git, mercurial, fossil… I don’t know of an SVN language??

Not hating on SVN, just think the “why aren’t they using a more modern/superior X” should be taken in that context.

Whats the problem with old technology? Linux is quite old and Unix even older.

>why aren’t they using a more modern/superior X

Because no one cares if it's not superior for that case.

I'm very confused by this conversation. I am agreeing with you.

The line you quoted, I had in quotation marks because it was essentially the question of the parent thread, not because it was my stance.

"That context" meant that they started with tools like SVN for version control, and Facebook for their community. They were 'current' at the time and they probably haven't seen a reason to switch.

I have no problem with this. I use many tools people find uncool or outdated. I still use RCS in places and like it better for those particular use cases (eg Bind DNS zone files), where things like file locking and versioning files vs codebases are features and not detriments. I have shell scripts I've carried around for 10-15 years to support it (ironically kept in git now), and I don't feel like reengineering for a git/ci workflow to get back to feature parity.

You should look into the history of RCS->CVS->SVN (and revision control systems in general) to understand the nuances there.

>Not hating on SVN, just think the “why aren’t they using a more modern/superior X” should be taken in that context.

Take it into context? If there is no befit why waste your energy?

>You should look into the history of RCS->CVS->SVN (and revision control systems in general) to understand the nuances there.

I don't know what you want to say. Newer is better? Distributed is the only way to go? Mongo better then sqlite?

It's a source control system, and if it matches your organization good, if not change it.

They could be using github or gitlab for their source code repository and then use gitter.im for the community perhaps.

Gitter.im is a poor substitute for IRC, imo.

Gitter is on Matrix now, which is a great substitute for IRC.

There is no better way to get engagement than Facebook these days. People don’t sign into forums on websites like they once did,

People are downvoting this, maybe because of the fact-of-the-matter'ness, but I think this is probably true, coming from someone who despises Facebook. Especially for certain age-groups, Facebook is one of the few social networks you can assume people have logins on, and (maybe especially) niche communities need to lessen friction to get people involved.

I don't know, I've never tried to create a public forum for this kind of thing, but I'd bet you'd get more activity out of facebook than some bespoke web forum or IRC/Matrix/what have you.

Yes, it was engineered to be this way intentionally, through unregulated competition rules and systematic killing of any open alternative by way of massive pumping of capital.

We live in a disgusting scenario, we're held hostage by a racket.

I see a lot of people moving away from Facebook here in Europe though. Maybe not in the US.. But about half of my friends were either never on FB or left it recently. The other half are still there. Mainly the older people in fact. The younger ones are on other stuff (like Instagram which is of course also facebook I guess)

But I don't see it as viable as a sole outreach platform for that reason.

A lot of my friends are still there but using it much much less. Has happened over the past few years. It has kept up during our plague which I didn't expect. I figured it would pick up a bit with more people being indoors and not traveling as much. I think it's rotting from the inside out. I know accounts are one metric, but how is traffic doing?

I don't most people under 30 in the US use facebook unless they have to for something. Boomers, on the other hand...

People don't sign into FB just for this.

It's just not a great fit for an open source project IMO. They go to all this trouble to build something noncommercial without tracking, and then start requiring a commercial tracking platform to collaborate?

In fact one of the reasons I use HN so much is because it's not doing any of that. And because I can choose what I read (rather than Facebook's algorithms deciding what appears on my timeline). I'm sure many people come here for that reason. This'll be a reason for the many anti-facebook sentiments. Because those sentiments are one of the reasons to come here :)