To put it in terms of technology, if we were to adopt Discord for ongoing use, I think these changes would probably happen:
Replacing the built-in forum text chat with links from the forum to the discord server.
Reducing or replacing the use of Zoom for meetings and presentations. It has a few advantages over zoom, the main one is that Discord’s meeting features are available to everyone, all the time. That could help make it easier for people here in the forum to collaborate on a project.
Discord according to my thinking doesn’t have as much overlap with this forum, there would not be much change in the role of the forum.
In other words I believe if we made those changes, it would still be possible for a person to have the full community experience here on the forum and perhaps only log into Discord when there is a scheduled meeting or discussion, as opposed to logging into Zoom.
I appreciate this discussion, it is very helpful to me to keep developing the concept. One of the themes of this effort is “what can we learn or use from open source projects and communities?”
This discussion itself gives me the feeling of working on open source: folks who are evaluating this setup and posting about it are contributing to our process. The feedback is valuable, thank you all.
One of the worries mentioned was a feeling of missing out on potential information exchange from a lack of desire to establish a discord account to reserve a username and participate. One address to this is that folks have streaming and desktop recording software today. If the chats were highly informative or pre-scheduled guest speaker events the discord meeting could be recorded, edited and published to platforms such as YouTube as is currently done with the GTS talks series. Nothing changes except the front-end the speakers and participants are using–presentation over discord vs presentation over zoom. The same back end format and delivery can still remain the same to the talks’ consumers.
Just popping in here to say that there’s pretty well-developed open-source alternative to Discord that is in wide use and can pretty much the same thing plus some important additions - the Matrix protocol. In Europe, hundreds of thousands of public employees in France and Germany use it on a daily basis, for example. I can even access Discord channels with it (Discord users can’t do the same the other way, because their whole business is to make people stay within their “platform”).
I love that this community uses Discourse for the forum. It’s a long-term investment, because it future-proofs it against enshittification. Discord is a corporate, closed source profit-oriented technology. Eventually they have to find a way to monetize the technology. And today that means either selling their users, start bombing it with ads or raising the fees. The problem is if your whole community has invested time and routine into that “platform”, the “switching costs” are now sometimes too high and you feel stuck. It’s much easier to change course early. I think the best long-term bets are going for technologies that don’t go through the enshittification cycle. It’s not so much more different than getting addicted to corporate closed-sourced seed that needs certain nutrient inputs, weeding practices, pesticides or whatever. They’re designed to have you keep coming back to give their owners money.
This is very interesting. Somehow I feel I must point out that open-source projects and protocols also worsen or die over time, but I know that’s not a response to you main point.
I don’t have any idea how close Discord is to breaking even, but we can see their existing ways of earning revenue and speculate what they would do to increase it. I think if they run into money trouble, adding advertisements is a possibility. I think it’s very likely if they need to raise money Discord would reduce functionality for the free version, versus what you get by paying for their various subscriptions and boosts.
From what I can quickly tell about the Matrix protocol is that there would be a higher technical learning and maintenance curve. We would have to take responsibility for running the software; one thing I really admire about Discord is that by the time you learn it as a user, you’ve also learned most of what you need to start and administrate your own server for your own neighborhood group, etc. I value accessibility in the sense of ease of learning and use.
matrix.org lists several providers for ‘hosted matrix’ which I imagine what we would use rather than running the software ourselves on a VPS server etc. Matrix.org - Hosting
I run a small web server and some little appliance servers for family projects, but I haven’t administrated web software professionally in a decade. I’m going to be more intimidated by managing something like that for public use than other people here might be.
Malte do you have experience Matrix administration? Could you recommend an existing Matrix protocol server for me to log into and check out? It does sound like a protocol worth my being familiar with.
Edit: the Matrix protocol sounds like it shares some basic philosophy with the Fediverse protocols for decentralized social networks. I also don’t have any experience with Fediverse technology!
You’re right Mark, lots of open-source projects are limited by lack of funding and development. Many of them have a promising start and then die out. Matrix has been in use for 10 years now, has seen adoption among institutions with both very large user bases (e.g. France has made their own matrix app for public employees) and where users are not assumed to be tech-savy. It’s not bug free and will probably have some of the problems you expect. The question is whether it is worth it, when you consider the long-term consequences. We might not have a lot of money to influence where things like this goes. But we can choose were we invest our attention, time and organizations.
I have several projects and communities that chat over Matrix. Two of them don’t host their own servers and just uses matrix.org which is preferable in this case. The third one hosts its own matrix server (with all the maintenance involved). I’m not system administrator or even that tech savy myself. I would recommend you just make a user on matrix.org - you can try chatting with me by searching for @malte:data.coop
Matrix is an interoperable protocol, which Discord is not. This is one of the fundamental differences. Matrix apps can cross-pollinate, intermingle, access and be accessed by other apps. I can talk with people on telegram or facebook or discord through my Matrix app. It doesn’t go the other way because those corporations are fundamentally not interested in breaking down the walled gardens they’ve made.
Yes, it probably has all the functionality you would expect with some differences (omissions and additions). You can create independent chatrooms, chat 1-on-1, create spaces where several rooms exists together, moderate rooms, define discoverability (private or public), you can link to other rooms, link to messages, there’s voice and video calls, cute emojis and so on.
It was made to become the open standard for chat on the internet.
More experimentally, to give you an idea of where it can go: There are people who are developing software on the Matrix protocol so you could turn a comment section on a blog into a Matrix chat room. That means you can read the comments on the site in one moment, then go into your Matrix app and continue the very same conversation. And 3 months later, when someone else comments there, I can set the preferences on the room to notify me about it. Just one example of the possibilities with an open protocol that is built to interoperate.
It’s a bit like email. This is an open standard we can all use and thus I can still email people even if I have @gmail.com and they have @outlook.com. Thankfully, it’s not the case that I can only send email to people with the same email-provider. That would be absurd. Yet, this is exactly what all the platforms ask of us today. We don’t expect from Discord to be able to send a message to someone on Whatsapp, Slack, Flock, Google Hangouts, Microsoft Teams, Steam Chat, Skype, Viber and so on. Technically it would be a simple thing to enable. Yet, they prefer that we have 12 different apps on our phones, one for each community we’re part of. I frankly find it a bit ridiculous
Great to see you all trying out new ways to communicate and organize. One suggestion on the branding of the channel – I’d recommend either:
Call it “Going to Seed” and use our logo (i.e. the blue on white or white on blue versions from our brand kit)
OR
Call it “Adaptation Gardening” and not use our logo / use a photo
For a new and growing organization like ours, I think that consistency in how we put ourselves out there is important. It helps people recognize us and builds trust. This channel could be either directly about Going to Seed or about the approach of Adaptation Gardening in general, and either could be great, but I’d like it to be more clear which one it is.
To hone in on one aspect of the branding conversation.
My initial setup used “Going to Seed - Adaptation Gardening” as the server name, but it was long enough that it was going to be truncated in a lot of places where it was used.
After that I shortened the name to “Going to Seed.” I believe the next step was when Julia asked to have it switched to “Adaptation Gardening”.
I’m interested in these kinds of conceptual and branding questions and I think this is a good question, but I don’t have a strong feeling on what I think would be better or best here.
Oh, well in that case it sounds like we could merely change the server icon pic and go from there. Would you be willing to pick one and do that, @markwkidd ?
@julia.dakin do you want to weigh in on the preference for “Adaptation Gardening” over “Going to Seed”? As I see it, one is the name of our organization, and the other is the method we promote.
The brand kit lives in Canva (https://www.canva.com/brand/kAE0B6h9U4k), which most folks have been using to create images, flyers, etc. If you don’t use Canva, or want something you don’t see there, you can just email me anna@goingtoseed.org. I should get those resources up on the website as well, just haven’t gotten to it yet.
Anyone want to chat today in the discord?
I’ll be available after about 3pm EST eastern standard time. About 14.5 hours from now, posting after midnight to give people time to see it.
I have volunteered to be chief instigator for organizing the video/audio meetings on discord. If you can give the days and times that work for you to join meetings. This will also be to help Julia in planning for other events to try to plan things so that the most people can join.
My time zone is… (ex: eastern standard time or gmt+2)
My day availability is… (ex: Saturdays 6-8pm, Thursdays 9pm or later, …)
Or… My time availability is… (ex: fri, sat, sun after 8pm or weekdays after 6pm)
My rough idea is to set up two or three meetings that work for the most people. Then I can remind people when the meetings will be. Once we have meetings set up I am happy for us to talk freely or about set up head topics,… Whatever works for that group.
for organizing the video/audio meetings on discord. If you can give the days and times that work for you to join meetings. This will also be to help Julia in planning for other events to try to plan things so that the most people can join.