I’m not saying proprietary software doesn’t also have problems, just that FOSS has problems unique to it that are rarely acknowledged.

Everything I implement at work is open source because I don’t want to wait for a purchase approval. But I’m also practically the only one interacting with those systems, so I’m the only one who’s affected if something breaks.

IDK, said laptop is from 2010.

Discord is an evolutionary culdesac if we’re talking about its role as a forum killer. It’s terrible for long term information storage and retrieval compared to the more permanent, and search engine indexed, forums it replaced. It’s a never ending waterfall of chat messages that’s hard to search, so the same questions keep coming up again and again.

I tried asking a question on Blender Guru’s discord about his doughnut tutorial, on the channel specifically meant for questions about the doughnut tutorial, and it flew off the top of the screen like a barrel going over Niagara Falls, never to be seen again.

Even if the age verification wasn’t a thing, I think the enshittification would set in eventually. So it’s not going anywhere for now, but I’m pretty sure the investors will want their money back sooner or later.

Mumble isn’t requiring you to submit your ID.

I second this. My gaming group probably won’t leave discord for the foreseeable future but Mumble is probably where we’d go if we did. IMO all these Discord alternatives are trying to do everything Discord does, when even Discord can’t pull it off sustainably at their scale.

I don’t want federation. I don’t want it to scale to infinite concurrent users. What I want is something simple I can plonk on a crusty old laptop running Proxmox or a Raspberry pi for a few friends.

I wrote a post a while ago comparing various wiki and wiki-adjacent offerings. I’ve settled on DokuWiki as it’s easy to host. The UI is dated (though I don’t think it’s outright ugly). The vanilla experience is a bit bare-bones but there’s a built-in GUI for searching and installing plugins. The only pain point I can foresee is upgrading and long-term management thanks to juggling so many plugins. If the newest version of the base software doesn’t play nice with a particular plugin, or if a plugin stops being developed, etc.

And this is exactly what I want, something easy to deploy and host for a small group of friends. It doesn’t need to scale infinitely or federate.

I’m still waiting for a useable screen reader :(