While I’m fully into #FOSS and #federated services, I can also see the benefits of major and proprietary solutions from a beginners perspective.

I think it is always about the targeted user base and how to make it comfortable to them.

I can also see this with #BoxyBSD, where I’m targeting beginners who cannot afford virtual machines to learn and practice. However, to help them, you need to catch them at their starting point, which is mostly a well known service like Discord, Twitter etc. Beginners are not aware of the Fediverse, Matrix, IRC and all the other solutions. It won’t provide them or the communities to exclude them.

Moving code away from GitHub may reduce the visibility of projects and potential contributions. Moving support to nerd services may exclude them. Forcing them to deal with it, results in dead useraccoujts in long-term.

Teach them at the beginning, show them alternatives and as soon as they do it by their own will, they will switch and contribute.

I really love free and opensource software, projects and services but it does not mean that we should force people to avoid it. We should more be happy about people that decide to publish and contribute their code to the community in any way and also providing any solution to provide feedback, support etc. Decisions to a specific solution like Discord may have several reasons like not being aware of it, not having the time for it, no personal needs to deal with it (if it works, it works). Not everyone is deeply into FOSS or cares about it.

I always contributed heavily into opensource within the last years and was only on Twitter and never saw the needs for Matrix or Fediverse. I simply didn’t had the time nor the fun to deal with it - nowadays I’m running my own instances.