The misleading "openness" of "open source"
There are very few commercial products that are open source. And I want to make the argument that opening your source code is not enough to be a "free" platform. In order to be a "free" platform, there must be a way for your users to engage with the creators, maintainers, contributors and the community, without subjecting themselves to corporate data-mining oligopolies.
Github
Github is without a doubt the biggest offender. Probably 95%+ of open source projects are hosted on a centralized platform owned by Microsoft. When you do that, you're asking all of your contributors to sign up and subject themselves to all of the expected terrible things that come along with one of the most exploitative companies in the world. Annoyances, spying, theft, etc. Not to mention the recent instability that has caused many to leave.
github
Home Assistant has an absurd amount of their automation software hosted via HACS and you literally cannot use any of it without a Github account.
Discord
Discord is the main platform for discussion for seemingly the majority of "open source" platforms. Discord is not remotely open source, subject to the same terrible things as Github. Incessant pop-up ads. Mining your every click to feed the data machine. Only in addition to all of that, the information is completely siloed and invisible without creating an account and joining the "server" (which is not actually a server at all, no idea why that was allowed to become normal nomenclature). Again, this is often the only available platform for interacting with the project, along with GitHub.
Examples
Immich
Immich might be the single most popular self-hosted FOSS project. Software hosted? On Github. Communities? Discord, Reddit, Xitter and Youtube. Free platforms? Literally zero.
Bazzite
This one makes me especially angry. Partly because this is maybe my favorite Linux distro. But much moreso because they actually have a free and open platform for discussion, a Discourse forum, but if you go there, the pinned top post says no one will answer your questions there, and to redirect your questions to other corporate platforms like Github, Discord and Reddit. And indeed, I can confirm that is the case. No one pays it any attention.
antheas
Tasks.org
This is my favorite task manager. There is literally no way to contact the devs except Github and Reddit.
It's totally ok to have closed platforms, too!
I would totally prefer it if there weren't any, and all discussion was exclusive to free platforms, but I totally understand wanting to go where the people are. And I totally understand that you can't or won't want to participate in a thousand different platforms. But just maybe, you could have a single free platform for discussion? Just one? Is that too much to ask?
Examples of free community platforms
There is absolutely no shortage of alternatives. For hosting code, we have Codeberg/Forgejo (my preference), Gitlab, Gitea, etc.
For alternatives to Discord (there are fewer "good" ones here) my top contender is Fluxer. It is extremely polished, licensed AGPL, and has self-hosting, federation, and E2EE on the roadmap. Their biggest problems currently are server infrastructure. But they've received a ton of support (including monetary) to expand the project, and have even begun hiring a couple of developers.
Fluxer Team
Then of course there are other platforms like Matrix, Stoat, TeamSpeak, Zulip, Rocketchat, Mattermost, and many more. All of these have their drawbacks, but all of them also are varying degrees of free, a long long way away from Discord.
Threadiverse
The Threadiverse is a federated community of Reddit-like platforms. Piefed, Lemmy, Mbin, Kbin, etc. Piefed is my favorite, personally. Polished frontends include Blorp and Photon. Below I'll link to the piefed.social server from both frontends so you can get an idea of what these look like:
Notable exceptions
CoMaps
These guys are absolute Chads of open source. It was forked from Organic Maps after a very clear change in direction. Their code is hosted on Codeberg (self-hosted would be ideal, but this is the next best thing) and they have an official community on every platform imaginable.
CoMaps officially supports the following community platforms:
- Mastodon
- Matrix
- Lemmy
- Telegram
- Bluesky
- Pixelfed
- X
- Threads
- SimpleX
I've never seen anyone else officially support my favorite chat platform, SimpleX. Again, I don't mean to suggest that anyone should support all of these platforms. But, like, 1 Pixelfed? 1 Mastodon? 1 Fluxer or Lemmy or Mastodon or Zulip or Fluxer or or or... is that too much to ask?
Conclusion
It seems like 95%+ of supposedly FOSS platforms adopt this model of being completely unable to communicate with the creators or the community without subjecting yourself to corporate shitholes. This is especially infuriating when it comes to open source, because there's no way they simply don't understand the problems with it. They're just unwilling to do anything about it, or don't care enough, about themselves or about their users. I'm afraid that I have to argue that these platforms are not "open" at all.
I understand making this transition is difficult, and will involve sacrifice. But we cannot continue to subject ourselves to the tyranny of convenience. Change is hard. Bettering yourself and the world is hard. But the more people who make that choice, the choice to embrace open platforms, the easier it becomes. We absolutely must choose freedom over convenience, or we are all eternally doomed.
I love Dr. Doctorow (and his cool name) but I often find myself disagreeing with him, as he wants to place 100% of the blame for these corporate megaplatforms on the platforms themselves, and their owners. But the reality is that millions/billions of users make the choice to use these platforms day in and day out. He says in order to leave you must "hate Zuckerberg more than you love your friends". I would argue that leaving the platform and giving your friends a free place to follow you is a gesture of love, and a gift to those people, even if they choose not to accept it.
We must be better. We must do better.