TheHarpyEagle

Joining via server invites that guide you through sign up, no dedicated server to host (I know, major downside for people who don’t want all their stuff centralized to Discord’s servers), GUI server admin tools, etc.

I think devs tend to vastly overestimate how tech-savvy the average person is. Bring up hosting, DNS, port forwarding, terminal, etc. and they’re going to nope out pretty quick. Provide an option that lets you do everything from a single GUI and they’ll use it. Enough people use it and eventually the tech-savvy folks have to follow because that’s where everyone is.

That’s absolutely not to say that it’s a good medium for documentation. I will always prefer well-written and organized docs first and searchable forums/issue trackers/SO second. But that second group has a lot of tech elitism and devs who are (perhaps justifiably) short on patience, so Discord seems a lot more accessible to newbies who are asking the most basic questions.

I’m trying to get my feet wet in FOSS by making small doc PRs since I’m way too scared to actually touch code. It’s not fun, but it is satisfying.

I’ve lost a lot of my rose tint for discord, right around the arbitration clause thing, but I can’t deny that it’s convenient. Chat, streaming to friends, popping up a new server for whatever project or group, VC for playing games together. There’s platforms that do all of these things better, but few that do all of them decently well.

Of course, it’s a privacy nightmare and I stick to IRC for anything I wouldn’t feel comfortable having linked to my identity, but I wouldn’t call people stupid for using it.

There’s a tradeoff between security and convenience that has to be dealt with. You’re not supposed to reuse passwords, but most sites/apps require a login. How do you memorize a couple hundred passwords? An offline vault is safer, but also a real hassle to keep synchronized between devices and locations.

I’ve settled on memorizing passwords for financial sites and emails and storing the rest in a password manager. All I can hope is that, should a breach happen and my passwords somehow get decrypted, I’ll retain control over the most critical accounts.

I use InkStitch for designing embroidery patterns on Inkscape and love it, especially because commercial embroidery design programs are so expensive. I won’t lie, it’s pretty clunky at the moment, but I hope to be able to contribute to it and really polish it up.