[Development] Changes to Freenode's IRC

[Jason H]

Aren't all the kids these days moving to Discord? Slack is inefficient as the history is rolling unless you pay for more.

I would worry about moving it under Digia (tQtCo), because I'd expect them to encumber the access to it(paywall, ads, tracking, etc*). I don't trust them.

Perhaps the KDE people would operate the Discord infrastructure?

* Before you laugh, and say that is crazy, consider that the online Qt Docs search results now have ads: https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/search-results.html?q=camera shows 4 ads for me.  And I don't know of any other toolkit who serves their documentation with ads. Take for example mozdev: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/search?q=camera shows 0 ads. React, 0 ads. I figure it's only a matter of time until the actual documentation pages have ads too. (There may be good reasons for ads, but it's still not a good look.)


> Sent: Wednesday, May 19, 2021 at 10:49 AM
> From: "Giuseppe D'Angelo via Development" <development at qt-project.org>
> To: development at qt-project.org
> Subject: Re: [Development] Changes to Freenode's IRC
>
> On 19/05/2021 16:37, Andy Nichols wrote:
> > Rather than just move to another IRC server, we should really take this as an opportunity to move to another chat service as the official Qt Project chat.  IRC has a terrible user experience and is not at all accessible for people who haven't been using it for decades like many of us. It does us a huge disservice when trying to attracting new contributors to point to our IRC.  There are lots of better options out there now (which I see some of you on already), so lets move on already.
>
> The mandatory question is always the same: which ones?
>
> Do they have goals, policies, end-user agreements that are compatible
> with a free software project? Do they have strong privacy requirements? Etc.
>
> Thanks,