Mastodawn

So You Want To Write An Open Source Discord Replacement

Things you don’t need:
- federation/distributed systems
- multiparty end-to-end encryption
- an entirely new operating system kernel specially designed to—

Things you DO need:
- a user interface that is Normal
- the ability to use languages other than English and writing systems other than Latin
- higher standards of user experience than how irc actually works in the real world
- any fucking clue how Discord works and why people use it

I have muted replies to this post due to the usual reasons

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Roger BW 😷Feb 12

@0xabad1dea (I realise I'm muted here, but I think some of those negative points are significant)
- No federation: some bastard can come along and buy it. Doesn't matter if I can run my own if everyone else is on the Nazi Server. Federation is not proof against this (see email) but it's a necessary start.
- No multiparty e2e encryption: we don't care about black or gay or trans people being allowed to talk without everything they say being fed into the secret police machine. They, however, do.

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Dmitry Tantsur Feb 12

@RogerBW @0xabad1dea these are fair points, but you need to keep in mind that not every chat room is designed for high stakes conversations. Offline parallel: you're applying the security standards of a revolutionary cell to a comic convention or a book club. Which would be fine if it did not lead to significantly degraded user experience.

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Roger BW 😷Feb 12

@creepy_owlet @0xabad1dea I agree that that's a valid argument; the downside is that leaving out encryption is essentially telling significant numbers of people (deliberately or not) "we're not for you, we're only for people with enough social capital that they don't have to watch what they say and people who are eternally on edge".
That may work for whatever use case you have in mind of course, and I've done things like that myself, but these days it's not a good smell.

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🇨🇦🇩🇪🇨🇳张殿李🇨🇳🇩🇪🇨🇦

@RogerBW @creepy_owlet @0xabad1dea You know what else is not a good smell? "Everybody else needs to cater to my niche needs."

That's actually kind of a terrible smell. Indeed it's the kind of smell that has historically killed movements.

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V For Viennetta Feb 16

@ZDL @RogerBW @creepy_owlet @0xabad1dea This is half the issue with new open social media stuff, it always winds up with everyone bikeshedding about how the fun user friendly chat app for normal gamers to shitpost needs to have features to allow people to securely plan a violent overthrow of the state, or to resist a hypothetical future takeover by Elon Musk, and because they outnumber all the normal people involved in development (zero) they all get their way

End result - the world has yet another hideously complex user unfriendly social app and everyone gets really upset that nobody is using it

Any similarities to Mastodon are entirely intentional