It's a cost-benefit analysis, like everything else. Supporting only github more than qualifies the Pareto need for the feature, as does Discord for realtime communication. None of the alternatives you mentioned to Discord, for example, are likely to already have a client installed for the vast majority of developers; with that as a litmus, the choices are effectively Discord or Slack. When you're doing the hard calculus of how to spend your most precious resource (time) in a FOSS project, you have to weigh the costs and rewards. Only supporting Github likely has no statistically significant difference in likelihood for contributions. Similarly, hosting conversations on an unusual platform most users are not already using increases the friction of their contributions, so you choose the most popular platform.

I'm sure this project's community would welcome a contribution to mirror their git in a read-only state somewhere else, because why wouldn't they? Similarly, I'm sure they'd be fine with collaborating on setting up bidirectional chat bots so you can communicate with them as you want.

But to expect these things from a nascent project seems ridiculous. We're not talking about React or Spring here, we're talking about a brand new project who should be investing as much time as possible making their software work, not catering to every potential communications niche.

If you've decided that contributing to someone else's code on Github violates your sense of ethics or privacy, that's well within your rights and I respect you for it, but you must have enough self-awareness to recognize that that puts you in the far extreme of digital ethicists. And that shouldn't come with an expectation that your ethics have been catered to.

It remind like every parents' lesson of: if everyone's jumping off a bridge, should you too? And as stewards of OSS, we should shepard users into these FOSS platforms.

Instead, you bifurcated your community that is passionate about FOSS and privacy from those that aren't.

> None of the alternatives you mentioned to Discord, for example, are likely to already have a client installed for the vast majority of developers

You seem to have a very distorted view of developers, the vast majority of free software developers are going to have either an IRC client or a Matrix client installed already.

I've never seen Matrix discussed outside of HackerNews. In the last five years or so, the reaction to people finding out I still use IRC is either "What is IRC?" or "People still use that? Brings me back..."

I don't know a single person in any professional context that doesn't have one of Slack, Teams, or Discord installed.

I may be overstating how much smaller your pool is, but to say that choosing Discord or Slack doesn't grossly expand your reach is just naive.

In my pool, having slack or teams installed is less likely than having an IRC or Matrix client installed.

So it's probably just that, different bubbles that rarely intersect.

> You're signaling to all contributors that you don't value their freedom or privacy.

I don’t think software freedom is a focus of this project. They can’t cater to every unrelated hobby issue.

> shows your project's priorities

Yeah - the priority isn’t software freedom. They can’t prioritise everything.

> yeah what happens if a few years down the road, the company decided to close the free accounts?

I guess they'll move on somewhere else? Likelihood seems low, impact seems low. Why spend energy on it?

> To me for open source project we need a way to archive the discussion and make it public not tight to any company or so.

Ok but that's what you're interested in. Most people aren't into that.

I don't get why you'd expect all projects to be focused on your particular hobby interests?

Maybe I love typography. Why isn't this project paying more attention to the typography in their website damnit!

>I guess they'll move on somewhere else? Likelihood seems low, impact seems low. Why spend energy on it?

many services don't really migration of the data. Why would I want my data stuck some where?

> Why would I want my data stuck some where?

Nobody wants their data stuck - people assess the likelihood of that as low and the impact as low, so rationally don’t care about it.

If one of my personal projects was unilaterally deleted right now by GitHub it’d be annoying to lose my issues but I could recover ok. And I don’t think it’s likely anyway, so why worry?

People only have so much energy to spend worrying about things. Most would spend it building instead.

Can’t be that hard to understand?

> You're signaling to all contributors that you don't value their freedom or privacy.

Disagree strongly with this. It signals to me that the developer cares more about building a good thing than standing up FOSS tools to appease the zealots. Seems very pragmatic.