TechTakes

My biggest issue with Discord is that most discussion boards moved there and it's ridiculously hard to find anything there. Plus it's a privacy nightmare..

Maybe unpopular take here, but I love discord as an excellent fit for specific use cases. I think plenty of groups that should be web forums use discord wrong, but for several of my favorite communities:

1. They are better smaller, I don't necessarily want or need them to be discoverable aside from word of mouth.
2. They are better without search history, because the discussion is more ephemeral and personal instead of assuming that anyone is digging history in after hours
3. Ad hoc voice chat rooms is a useful boon because of exactly 1 and 2.
4. No ads. Yes I understand the privacy issues, but I would still prefer to have opt in subscriptions, no ads, and my chats are harvested than many alternatives for small communities that need to subsidize costs. (Again fediverse, if not ads, requires a buy in in terms of technical operational costs)
5. Trivial to build specialized addons in the case your community has a need.

Good examples for me are: Friend of Friend Groups for organizing dinners or parties Online gaming communities Book clubs Co-worker chat alternative to slack

Unfortunately it's the best popular one. Like I use Teams, Slack and Skype at work and oh god are they terrible, using those makes me long for Discord.

Fun detail, before discord there was other similar chat gaming software also running with full web browser capabilities. I did some digging at the time while I was using it and found it has using adobe flash which was several version out of date. (at the period where a lot of the exploits going round were flash based), stuff like this makes these kinds of chat apps a bit of a risk (teams/slack/skype etc similar (Edit: if I had said electron based apps here I would have looked a lot better than editing it later), I heard if you really are security concious/paranoid you use those apps only via their website versions (as most browsers have reasonable security nowadays)). Up till a year ago (before they put it behind a text file setting you have to enable) they even made it easy to open the development console which malicious people used to socially engineer people into compromising their account. The discord thing isn't in the same risk category as the flash thing but still funny how high the shooting yourself in the foot risk was for the gamer app.

Can I ask for elaboration? In the context of GPL and free software licenses in general, "strong" and "encumbered" tend to refer to roughly the same thing, i.e. conditions requiring that the work and derivative works to be also distributed as free software.

Nothing in the license text of GPLv3 or GPLv2 reads to me like deliberate distancing from communism or anything else other than nonfree software. Do you have a different interpretation of the text or are you basing the claim on something else? Sure, RMS is not a socialist nor is the FSF a socialist organization, but I'm not aware of them "going far out of their way" to disproportionately emphasize the GPL's noncommunism. OSI and ESR arguably have, given their more corporate focus and particularly ESR's far right views. You also have to take into account that associating free software in general and GPL in particular with communism has been a deliberate smear tactic against them, so a lot of the ink spilled about the un-commieness of the GPL has been in response to its equally or more anti-communist opponents.

Designing a truly communist software license that still makes sense in the capitalist context of international copyright law seems like an interesting exercise. I like that the GPL has a whole preamble to explain the intent and values behind its terms, and that it manages to essentially invert what would normally be an exclusive privilege granted by copyright into a communal obligation enforced via the same. A communist equivalent would be something like exploiting property rights to ensure that some capital asset remains de facto collectively owned.

I think the (A)GPL manages to implement some radical and admirable principles while acknowledging that we live in a society [bottom text]. Even if the software licensing interests of some libertarian pedophiles happen to sometimes align with mine and what I consider the common good, they don't get to claim the license as theirs any more that I get to declare it to support my ideology.