That is more than fair enough, as said, not trying to get you to donate or anything, especially if you already donate your time. Just hoping to put something out there that some of us really do take the donations seriously and we try to be as transparent as possible with everything, I just wish more projects would do that to shake some of the potential mistrust.

Whilst I do understand that sentiment, with our project we have made as much effort as possible to make sure that nobody thinks we would ever do such a thing.

We are rather tight fisted with our donations and make sure we only spend them when absolutely necessary - none of it goes out as regular stipends for the team and all funds for expenses get sent in response to the actual bills incurred, I don’t think any of us would dream of siphoning it into our pockets.

We were even debating if we should use the “standard” funds to foot the bill for a new hosted service thing but felt this was a bit of a grey area - the service would be provided for free but footed by the donors of which only a small percentage would likely use it… We realise just how much of a privilege it is to be in receipt of the funds so we treat them with utmost reverence.

Not that I’m trying to encourage you to donate money to projects rather than time, I very much do the same as you and donate time and effort rather than money, but there are some good guys out there.

I have to admit that I don’t. I have done a couple of one-off donations before but I generally hope that my karma is balanced by some of the effort I put into helping out with a couple of projects.

That said, I’ve been utterly floored as to how generous the community has been with donating to one project I help with in particular. We added a donation platform with OpenCollective early on in the project but kind of hid the link away a little in the navbar, I thought we might get a tiny bit thrown at us every so often. When Distrotube did a video on us, one of the comments he made is that we should make the Donate button much more obvious, we did and now we have a whole bunch of super generous sponsors backing the project and making it possible. We keep the spending as open as we possibly can - it mostly goes into our backend hosting costs and website stuff and really does help it all stay alive.

And I wasn’t aware of the Elementary thing with Flatpak! Admittedly I hadn’t really thought of it in that way, I was thinking something more akin to F-droid where there are a couple of extra repos you can add which have applications not on the main one due to slightly looser requirements. But making it specifically for apps for that ecosystem in particular makes a lot of sense.

Not officially but people have managed to reverse engineer it before in order to host their own - https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/lol-an-open-source-snap-server-implementation/27109

Whilst I do get the sentiment (and in no way do I support Canonical in keeping it proprietary), how likely is it that alternative Snap repos are going to show up if they did make it possible? Even with Flatpak where it is encouraged and documented I don’t think I’ve heard of anyone setting up a Flathub alternative of any significance.

(except snap, but they seem too Ubuntu specific).

For what it is worth you can install Snap on most distros. https://snapcraft.io/docs/installing-snapd

From the conversation it seems to be a similar situation to the project I’m with is in. The flatpak is essentially community maintained rather than being directly supported by the team. To become verified it needs to be done so by a representative of the maintainers of the software. To be verified it doesn’t have to have a team member involved in it but this is a requirement Inkscape seem to have imposed.

For us we just aren’t in a position to want to support it officially just yet, we have some major upgrades coming to our underlying tech stack that will introduce a whole bunch of stuff that will allow various XDG portals etc. to work properly with the Flatpak sandboxing model. To support it now would involve tons of workarounds which would need to be removed later.

Yeah this has been our (well, my) statement on requests to put out ARM binaries for Pulsar. Typically we only put binaries out for systems we actually have within the team so we can test on real hardware and replicate issues. I would be hesitant to put out Windows ARM builds when, as far as I know, we don’t have such a device. If there was a sudden clamouring for it then we could maybe purchase a device out of the funds pot.

The reason I was asking more about if it was to do with developer licences is that we have already dealt with differences between x86 and ARM macOS builds because the former seems to happily run unsigned apps after a few clicks, where the latter makes you run commands in the terminal - not a great user experience.

That is why I was wondering if the ARM builds for Windows required signing else they would just refuse to install on consumer ARM systems at all. The reason we don’t sign at the moment is just because of the exorbitant cost of the certificates - something we would have to re-evaluate if signing became a requirement.

I can’t say I’m one who shares that sentiment seeing as the only two projects I’m involved with happen to be Electron based (by chance rather than intention). Hell, one of them is Pulsar which is a continuation of Atom which literally invented Electron.

Is that a developer licence thing? I know GitHub recently announced Windows Arm runners that would be available to non-teams/enterprise tiers later this year.

Electron apps using older versions that don’t support the 16k page size are probably the biggest offenders

But… that is exactly what I’ve been saying since the start… If used correctly there is no need to instantly reject a project just because it uses Discord, or any other chat, as one of its options.

I feel you haven’t been reading what I’ve been saying if you are claiming a “single chat log”. The whole point of what I’m saying is that there are various forms of communication that can be used in a project and the one I’m part of literally couldn’t function with an async-only forum type setup. Chat is for temporary, transient communication. Forums (and by extension Lemmy/Reddit) are for longer form async discussions with defined topics. Both are valid as has been the case all the way back into the days of having both a mailing list and IRC channel for a project.

You know IRC has been used alongside mailing list for open source software communities and projects for literally decades right?

The same could be said of Matrix though, I don’t think you can see a Matrix chat without an account either. Discord does have a forum layout… ish. It is pretty bad though and not something we use as a forum. It is used but really only as a way to separate topics in what would be a busy single chat area - more akin to something like Zulip. Even IRC channels tend to need you to connect with a nickname but unlike the others you can’t see chat history without a bouncer set up and at that point you have basically made an account in all but name.

That brings back memories… trying to play co-op games back in the day wasn’t so easy as it is now…

I think that is more of a comment on incorrect use of such a platform and it would be the same whether it was IRC or Matrix. I’ve put a more detailed response to another comment if you were interested - https://lemmy.ml/comment/11850496

We use Discord rather extensively but we don’t have this problem. I don’t think the issue is Discord itself (or for that matter any chat, be it IRC or Matrix) but the way it is used. I think it unfair to just blacklist a project just because it uses it.

We use Discord for team chat and conversations, the instant nature of a chat app suits this purpose far more than an async platform like a forum for us. This is either commonly known or transient info, not something we are interested in preserving. Long form conversations (like the status of our OS packaging) that require input over a long period goes into a forum topic.

We also use it for support for short form questions and help - anything more than a quick answer or “active” help then we recommend filling in an issue form or using the forum.

If a question comes up more than a few times then we make sure that it is documented - either in an FAQ or in the main documentation as it is clear that information isn’t readily available or easy to find.

I’m not necessarily defending their use of Discord as I don’t know exactly what they are doing but it does seem they don’t have any alternative community areas. In contrast, yes we have a Discord but we also have a Lemmy community, a Subreddit (I’m honestly against keeping that one going but we would rather not shut out users from support), Mastodon and forum.

So no, it doesn’t increase volunteer load in all cases, it is a valuable tool for us. Not that I’m wedded to Discord in particular (I’d honestly prefer to migrate it all to Matrix) but the idea of a chat platform for projects is not a bad thing by itself, it is how the project uses it.

Discord is still a legitimate form of contact and support for a lot of people. Out of interest, where do you see that line? I can only see Discord mentioned alongside e-mail and some other (even less tasteful than Discord) contact methods for support.

To all those downvoting I’m not saying that Holesail is using Discord correctly, just saying that just having Discord (or any other chat platform) as an option shouldn’t be an instant red flag and it depends on how the project actually utilises it.

Totally understand the limits on your server, I know why you would have it set that way hence why I was wondering about the limits if self hosting. Definitely going to have a play with this.