Go back to Gitter instead of Discord

[Dominik George]

I would like to request moving back to Gitter instead of Discord.

Discord is a closed platform, has unacceptable privacy terms, and is legally inaccessible by anyone younger than 16 years (so, it is discriminating against users and contributors).

Gitter is now a fully open platform (moving to the decentral Matrix system).

Please make free software accessible to everyone independent of biological attributes and without requiring everyone to accept more inhumane terms of use than necessary!

[Dominik George]

It's almost like you didn't read [Gitter's Terms of Service](https://element.io/terms-of-service): > The Customer must ensure that all Authorised Users are at least 16 (sixteen) years old to use both our Hosting and Communication Services or such greater age required in their country to register for or use our Hosting and Communication Services. Or Matrix system's privacy policy because in [section 2.6](https://matrix.org/legal/privacy-notice#26-our-commitment-to-childrens-privacy) those under 16 also cannot access Gitter: > We never knowingly collect or maintain information in the Service from those we know are under 16, and no part of the Service is structured to attract anyone under 16. If you are under 16, please do not use the Service.

The issue here is not these terms of use, but that you do not understand federation. These terms of use are both irrelevant and do not need to be accepted to access a Gitter chat room.

Why are you acting like you don't know that many kids have YouTube channels at 8. Don't you remember the scandal where pedophiles would comment on little girls' videos in 2018? Yea welcome to the Internet

I don't have the slightest idea what your point is here. If it is "who reads ToU, if they want to take part, they can just ignore it and register anyway", Well, that is not a solution.

To me, I find it kinda sickening that your true motives is to push open source with the veil phrase of "accessible to everyone independent of biological attributes." Cut the crap; that's sounds more cliche than a deus ex machina.

I find it interesting how you derive my "true motives" from a request to use open platforms. My true motives are that I work ~30 hours per week in an organisation who's goal is to ensure that every user of free software can become a contributor if they want, with a focus on education. Half of its members are children excluded by the ToU of GitHub or Discord (by the way, as far as GitHub is concerned, it also currently bans users living in Iran, Syria, or North Korea — if young contributors do not matter to you, maybe adults do?). If you find a moment to consider the real backgrounds, here are the most recent two FOSDEM talks on the topic, held by people who were banned by the ToU not too long ago (they turned 16 last year, but have been FOSS contributors for much longer): https://fosdem.org/2021/schedule/event/schul_frei/ https://fosdem.org/2021/schedule/event/python_aleksis/ But as I understand your words, de facto freedom is not important to you, and your code is only published under an open source licence because you want downstrram users. Did I get that right?

Sorry if I offended you.

It is hard to believe your offence was unintentional.

[Bertrand Bordage]

Wow, you got a little carried away @Andrew-Chen-Wang 😅

About Gitter, I originally used it because it was easy to integrate with GitHub, but I always found the software buggy as hell (messages not displaying or displaying two times, broken layout issues).
I never used Discord yet, though I know it’s very trendy. I use Slack every day but I didn’t choose it because it required a hack to auto-invite people.

The discussion could be opened also on the GitHub vs Gitlab side. I hated it when I discovered that Microsoft bought GitHub after decades of open source shaming. I thought about moving to Gitlab. Gitlab was fairly limited compared to GitHub at that time and took more effort and maintenance to get working. I guess that’s why most people did the same and didn’t switch to Gitlab or even BitBucket.

So I’m personally open to either keeping Discord or switching back to Gitter. This is a small project and there are not too many discussions going on. If more than 10 people strongly want to go back to Gitter (by thumb-upping the original post for example) this is probably a good reason to switch back.

Ultimately this is @Andrew-Chen-Wang’s decision as he is the project maintainer now.

[Dominik George]

I also must emphasize that by no means did I make any assumptions about the project as a whole based on its decision to use Discord (or GitHub, for that matter). I will not occupy that chat room as long as I need to accept ToU like Discord's to do so, but as can be seen elsewhere, that does not stop me from making contributions (some of which might be opinionated as well, but completely independent of this topic here). So, please do not make assumptions about what my request says about my FOSS contributions in general either.