mikearnaldi
commented
2 years ago While I agree with your feeling related to privacy I have to say that we are growing and managing the community much better since we migrated it from the FP slack to Discord. I don't believe it to be an advantage to fracture the community in multiple places and we have not found any better platform from the perspective of community building than Discord.
A thing should be said, Effect is indeed an open source project and individuals can, and if they care should, take independent actions. That is if you, or anyone else, wants to support a different community chat they should do so (I'll happily join it if in a platform that I already have and that is easily accessible).
From my perspective I should also share why I started Effect in the first place and what are my beliefs regarding open source, I personally believe the only way to make successful open source projects (valid to be used in a commercial setting) is to have commercial initiative and justify the time spent in open source, without that there isn't any cash to be spent and we enter in the whole "open source funding problem" that many have tried and failed to solve, in this case the initial heavy lifting was sponsored by CreditSCRIPT where I am CTO and that uses Effect internally since before it was public (it started as an app module to build backend systems in node.js more safely) and by MATECHS where I am CEO and that took the project from "an internal app module" to what it is today, both companies profit in some sense from Effect.
Note that with the above I don't intend to minimize in any way the importance of community contributions, in fact they are of core essence and have been growing insanely to the point where at the moment I am no longer the most active contributor of Effect and I cannot say how proud I am about that :)
This just to provide context to safely say (hopefully without misunderstanding) that while Effect is OSS our involvement with it is very much Commercial and the current Discord community is incubated by MATECHS GARAGE LTD that actively manages it, I don't envision this for the very long term because MATECHS GARAGE LTD is supposed to be an early-stage incubator but until the point where Effect is big enough to justify forming its own foundation this setup ensures that there is enough push to grow and that there is a properly managed community that can be a safe space for everyone (and we only have the bandwidth to do it with one community).
SamB
tpict
Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe. Currently the README says
As a privacy-conscious individual, I do not wish to join any more closed-source, private platforms than strictly necessary. https://drewdevault.com/2021/12/28/Dont-use-Discord-for-FOSS.html
Describe the solution you'd like I would expect an officially sanctioned IRC room on Libera.Chat or public space on some Matrix instance (like Matrix.org) or part of the Functional Programming Zulip.
Describe alternatives you've considered There is no alternative. Discord will collect data on users and will not talk through an open protocol like IRC, XMPP, Matrix, etc. All users most agree to Discord ToS (which they can change at any time) to participate which is not a welcoming experience. Discord is even hostile towards all open source client alternatives demanding cease and desists.
Additional context A Git mirror not on Microsoft's GitHub may be a bridge too far...