> That's IRC.

IRC is the other one, not the only one. However, Discord is eating its lunch in these days, sadly.

I can’t imagine that the typical IRC user has any interest in Discord. They are wildly different in every conceivable way.

Unfortunately projects are increasingly using Discord or Slack instead of IRC.

It gets worse: for some projects I’ve been interested in, the docs are terribly incomplete and when you ask - you are told to ask in the discord

That’s horrific. I guess every generation gets to re-learn the mistakes of the past.

I’ve spent the last couple of days finding random GitHub and Gitlab projects that use a certain library/project to use as “documentation” in lieu of joining the discord.

Guess what? Most of them are abandoned and have similar bugs that are entirely down to some shit being completely undocumented :)

How can we oppose to this? At least open source projects should use open source communication tools.

> At least open source projects should use open source communication tools

I strongly agree.

I think there are a few steps the community could take.

• Promote awareness of this, put it in licence agreements or contributor guidelines.

• Document how to find and how to use FOSS comms tools.

• Pidgin is the best we have for now. It needs an update, so the package includes as many protocol connectors as possible as standard, together with docs how to enable and use them. Getting away from crappy web apps embedded in Electron is pretty important, especially for bringing xBSD and so on on board.

• A corresponding update for Adium would be good, too.

A few years ago I worked for a major Linux vendor and I had Pidgin talking to IRC, Rocket.chat, Slack, Telegram, Skype, Google $CHAT_NAME_OF_THE_MONTH, and all my other services... but it took considerable manual effort.

The result was working multiprotocol chat in about 10% of the RAM usage of the Franz Electron client.

We're working hard on that update.. But volunteers only have so much time, but hopefully we'll have an alpha soon (tm).

On Adium? Really? Great to hear that. I was extremely fond of Adium, a decade ago.

On Pidgin? Cool. I am surprised but I managed to get Pidgin working on macOS via Brew yesterday, which automatically installed a recent version of WINE, to my considerable surprise.

It wouldn't connect to anything and I couldn't find where, in one OS's emulated filesystem on top of my real OS's rather complex filesystem, I could put plugins, but hey, it started and ran and that's quite impressive.

Given that Gtk apps such as Geany manage to run on macOS, I thought a native Unix port of Pidgin would be an easier effort than the Windows one, but hey.

Last I checked the homebrew version of pidgin was native...

Really? I got a Windows binary and Wine Stable installed automatically as a dependency. Monterey, on x86.

You can make sure your own projects use such tools.

When Discord gets closed, let's see how the projects will manage the loss.

"The other one"?

Yes, "The other one". IRC and ICQ was equal in its use in my circles and both were indispensable for what they did. Plus, we all used alternative clients too.