AnimalsDream

So, going from Mealie’s instructions, having to learn how to work with Docker, whatever underlying server you’re working with, and a database system is easy 2-5 minutes?

Such as?

A large part of it is the obnoxious monetization and general enshittification and privacy violations, but that’s not all. There are a number of usability annoyances. If I’ve been away from Discord for a little while and try to continue where I left off in a thread on a server, it never properly preserves where I last stopped reading. There are often times when I get notifications but it won’t actually take me to the relevant message, and that can even result in situations where the ping just gets lost entirely.

Then there’s things inherent in Discord’s design and how people use it. It’s become a tool that people have decided is a convenient replacement for chats, wikis, and forums - but it’s a shittier version of all of those things. Pinned messages are such a tucked away and half-baked feature. The fact that people are using Discord both to organize and discuss projects - as well as using that same space to host documentation or other critical knowledge-bases has made information significantly less accessible. I don’t want to join someone’s niche club just to “learn more.” If I want to read something I would rather just go to a wiki on the actual open web.

Discord is hot garbage ultimately for the same reasons as Facebook. It’s trying to be everything to everyone, and dropping a black box on the open web by doing so. It’s just another example of people trading convenience for actually using the appropriate tools for the kind of job they’re trying to do.

How so?

Isn’t everything a pain to selfhost?

Sometimes, but my point is you don’t have to start from scratch. It’s free software. You are allowed to make extensions or even fork it.

Sure, go for it. Though XMPP has so many features at this point, it might already have Matrix, irc, Discord, and email for all we know. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

We really need to stop abandoning existing foss projects and thinking a whole new thing needs to be invented. Free and open-source software is not a product, it doesn’t abide by the same rules and relationships that proprietary tech does.

It’s more organic. It’s also a commons that we can continue to draw on, and reshape. If I recall correctly, there were something like three different vector graphic editors from the same codebase before Inkscape managed to be the one that gained traction.

Matrix isn’t perfect, but abandoning it just to reinvent it all over again just because some people really need a thing that works like Discord, even though Discord is absolute hot garbage; is just going to re-create all the same problems. Matrix today is better than it was two years ago. And Matrix in a year will be better from now.

The thing I don’t get about these self-host apps is why so many of them exist when the thing they do would be better to implement as a run of the mill offline program.

I just want to auto-import recipes from websites into a cookbook app without any fuss. We do not need to bring a server into this equation!