NixOS/Nixpkgs/Nix Discord (for voice communication)

privacy invasive

See Discord — Spyware Watchdog though it appears to incorrectly say that they record voice chat. While they do not collect it now, it does not mean they won’t silently collect it in the future either through being compromised, or an accident, or just because they feel like it.

proprietary

Feel free to scan over their github Discord · GitHub for public repositories related to their frontend or backend applications for Discord. There is no way to switch to a server hosted by someone else. For example in their terms of service Terms of Service | Discord they have strict rules of conduct. Relevant to this project, nixpkgs would likely be against the terms of service due to the fact that we include (derivations for) “cheating” software in the repository. Making a nonproprietary client and using would be against the terms of service and they will terminate your account for that. They even will terminate your account for simple modifications to the Discord client such as using a custom theme.

bloated

Discord uses electron and ends up bundling essentially a web browsing engine with their application. It uses much more resources than my IRC client partly due to this.

piece of spyware

Discord spies on what applications you have running on your computer. It then uploads matches it finds to Discords servers for two purposes. The first is to display to everyone what programs you are currently using. The second purpose is to store it on Discords servers permanently in order to advertise programs and other Discord servers to you. It additionally has autoupdate functionality that upgrades the software without a user initiating the update. This means that Discord, or someone who compromised their deployment process could deploy more malicious software to your system.

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FYI it seems like somebody (@tdeo ?) already created a Discord server a while ago and there are already 182 people in it: https://discord.gg/jqsPruD

If you care about privacy, as I do, the best option is to not install the app and use the browser with all the privacy-enabling features turned on. It sucks that companies are tracking us but it’s not really different than Slack, or any other website really.

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One thing to add about discord, you can start streaming to other inside the voice channel. This feature is often used in rust community, like someone start sharing his desktop screen and anyone can easily jumped in to watch and have voice discussion. I know the feature is not for everyone to like, but it sometimes works best for mentoring any beginner out there.

One thing that I dislike about zulip is only when I use it on mobile. I have 2 server, this and official rust working group. And everytime I want to switch. Between the two, I have to click my profile, then switch account, then choose server, then wait it loads. It is not good in UX perspective. But it’s small problem actually.

After all, I joined almost all nix/nixos channel. But lately, my network is not too friendly with #IRC and my irccloud is not helping either. So I hope we can move the cool channel like nix-darwin, home-manager (which already there), and so on.

I agree with zimbatm about the concern of privacy.

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It’s a bit on the tinfoil-hatty side but it does a good job of outlining issues Discord presents for FOSS projects specifically and why you should care about them even if they’re not important or don’t apply to you personally.

IMO we should try other solutions for official communication channels first and only fall back to less desirable options like Discord if the alternatives are not good enough.

Matrix in particular seems like a very good candidate, it is a modern app like Discord, has web, desktop and mobile clients and supports every feature you could need for real time communication in an FOSS project (at leas that I can think of).

On top of that it can be made compatible with IRC (properly) which allows you to include those who prefer it (similar to Discourse and email) and I feel like being inclusive is valued in the Nix community.

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I’ve dropped the argument for establishing a NixOS official Discord, it’s not going to happen.

However, there is a community discord. If anyone is interested in joining, I try to hang out in the general voice chat for about 2 hours a day in case someone wants help.

Invite link is Nix/NixOS (unofficial) for those who don’t mind discord.

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As someone who’s not a fan of Discord, right from the name (who even decides such negative names?!) to the helping the perpetuation (now inevitable) of electron, I am a bit sad that somebody was trying to spend time (“3 clicks and a username” but anyway…) to make the community more accessible but people started focusing on negatives.

Here’s the thing, I have a throwaway email account which is what I use for all illicit/illegal/inappropriate activities. Heck my GitHub & discourse are on that account too. If you care about privacy, please take your own time too.

Aside from maybe stallman, everybody uses oss and privacy et al for PR and not out of principle. What I mean by that argument is that it’s mostly about opportunity and there is no telling when one a friend turns into foe and vice versa. Google and Microsoft being two biggest examples in recent history. I shudder to use Google products now and it’s for everyone to see how hard they try to lock people in now (only yesterday I read that edge users get a misleading ad on Google properties that some Google websites work better with chrome)…

What I mean is that we cannot hold ourselves responsible for “proliferation” of a technology. If people come and participate on discord, food for them. Otherwise somebody else will create another official <zulip/x/y/z>…

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You are responsible for your actions and they have an impact.

When you buy or use a product, you show that you endorse it. That implies that it meets your values. For me it’s important to endorse privacy respecting free software and i think we as a project should also do that. There are a lot of good projects that people may not know of! https://switching.software/

It’s not about feeling moraly superior but improving peoples lives. They might not understand the implications that using Google/Amazon/Facebook/Apple/Microsoft (GAFAM) has. We should know better and lead by example and offer help to those willing to switch. We should build, support and promote privacy respecting free software!

That might apply to some big corporations like Microsoft, but not for individual users of free software and community free software projects. There are a lot of people out there that care deeply about free software and privacy!

The only unfree software on my systems for example is Steam and the proprietary Nvidia driver. Today i had to use Zoom at work for the first and hopefully also the last time. We are evaluating Jitsi Meet, one team already uses it for their daily standup in the homeoffice.

There is a free software project called Jitsi Meet which offers voice/video conferences right in the browser. Just open the URL of a room and your’ in. No software install or user account creation and login. It is widely used and quiet stable (with chromium, firefox has some issues).

NixOS Office Hours switched to it from Zoom
The new marketing team used it for their meeting

Please consider using it and recommend it when you like it. This way we can promote free software and help to free the users from companies like Google, Zoom and Discord.

Here is a list of public instances. About half of them added in the past days: GitHub - jitsi/jitsi-meet: Jitsi Meet - Secure, Simple and Scalable Video Conferences that you use as a standalone app or embed in your web application.

There is a PR for a NixOS module, so it should be easy to setup your own independent instance soon.

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We actually had a specific situation last office hours where we simply couldn’t use Zoom to have Alyssa on the call, and we also tried a different type of discussion that was more observational.
(none of us thought Jitsi Meet would scale properly for Office Hours with many participants, sadly)
We still use zoom, but hosting an instance of Jitsi Meet or using BigBlueButton is something I’d like to have.

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I just want to say this is so great! I understand some people have ideological concerns, but having a support channel for mortals is extremely important so that we’re inclusive of those that are conscious of their time.

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Doing a quick search, I didn’t see any mentions of mumble/murmur, which in my rather limited experience, with very few users, has been pretty easy to set up. Of course it’s more effort than if someone already has a browser and a discord account. Also, it’s voice only.

I think the discord is a good place to start, but moving to matrix is a good goal.

I had issues from Android using matrix and not discord, so that tells me they don’t have usability parity even if they have feature parity.

In the short term that likely makes discord the better choice for new people scrambling for direction, how to ask questions, ability to screenshare, etc.

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Jon via NixOS Discourse nixos1@discoursemail.com writes:

Personally I try to avoid IRC, because i found that the rooms are
relatively inactive even when there’s many people sitting in there
(I’m assuming so they have chat history).

Is this an experience you’ve had with #nixos?

Is this an experience you’ve had with #nixos?

When I would come home from work, and jump on for an hour or two, yes. Given I only tried doing it for a week, but the lack of a chat history between session was a bit disappointing.

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Jon via NixOS Discourse nixos1@discoursemail.com writes:

Is this an experience you’ve had with #nixos?

When I would come home from work, and jump on for an hour or two,
yes. Given I only tried doing it for a week, but the lack of a chat
history between session was a bit disappointing.

Wow, that’s surprising to me. Thank you for answering. I usually find
that for most of the day there’s a message every few minutes!

I’m not sure if you know this or not, but chat history is saved at
https://logs.nix.samueldr.com, so it is possible to catch up if you miss
something.

I’m also GMT-8, so I’m not active when Europe is. Yes, I could parse through the logs, but it’s just an ecosystem of little pains. Discord will show me where I last read on each channel. You can do proper mentions, you can have many channels within a given server, you can move to voice chat if needed, you can do screen sharing, you can do emoji’s to acknowledge that something was read, when I log in, all recent chat history is downloaded.

Like @domenkozar mentioned, for us mortals, it solves a lot of issues I don’t want to spend time fixing.

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A lot of us use the matrix bridge that offers stuff like a comprehensive chat log (when the bridge isn’t down) and stuff like mentions and emoji. So with that IRC becomes an almost always online experience. It also seems we’re in the exact same timezone, I haven’t had issues with activity either. #nixos-dev has been essential to my development experience.

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Fwiw there is also BigBlueButton which is an LGPL license.

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Yes, from what i hear it should scale better.

Here is a succesfull test with up to 200 participants: Zoom Alternative BigBlueButton™ im Praxistest | Hostsharing eG – die Hosting-Genossenschaft (in german)

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I’m not sure I understand what you mean here - in my experience voice chat tends to be possibly more effective for those asking questions, but at the expense of taking much more time and energy from those answering them - so I’m not sure how it is more ‘inclusive’ in this sense.

That said, anyone is free to decide for themselves whether or not to join such a channel, of course, so I wouldn’t have an objection to it.

Discord allows text and voice, anyone can decide what would work better for given discussion.

I was referring to suggestion of using an alternative open source platform over some other established and well working communication platform.

Yes, there’s a risk of those platform going crazy, but as with most real-time communication platforms switching somewhere else is not that painful as there’s little to migrate.

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