I’ve noticed a lot of people have started using discord recently, so I thought maybe it’d be a good place to have a Pencil2d chat.
a) Would anyone be interested in a discord server for pencil2d?
b) Would it be alright for me to go ahead and make one and send an invite to anyone who wants one?
@spark Hey man, glad to see you around. Well @fuzbrain made a discord server for various animation things and offered the server for Pencil2D related stuff, however I haven’t used it. I too am new on the discord groove although I had to make an account recently for a different project.
So the only thing I can say is that if it’s not bothersome or anything go ahead and create it, I’d like have an official server though, so if anything leave the link so people find out and I’ll gladly try to advertise it on the social media, in case more people are interested.
Besides only a few devs still use the IRC, so It’s possible that a discord server might be a good solution considering we’re closing into getting more “community-friendly” over the next months.
Hey Jose, good to see you’re still here! I made the server, here’s the link. I’ll give you and any of the other regular contributors that join some kind of admin role 
@spark Right now the regular contributos, and what I consider the core team member of Pencil2D are @MrStevns @scribblemaniac @chchwy @j5lx
Other top contributors who have needed to take time away from the project, but have nonetheless made invaluable contributions are @feeef @gordie and @mattia_rizzolo
There’s been other important contributors over this past months but some come and go never to be seen again and others I don’t know how what they are doing these days. Hopefully they’re doing well.
If any of the guys I listed here contact you, please give them a moderator or admin role as you see fit on the server. I sincerely thank you for your help. Hopefully Pencil2D can begin to evolve from this year forward and it’s really all thanks to the community and people like you Have a great day!
Besides only a few devs still use the IRC, so It’s possible that a discord server might be a good solution considering we’re closing into getting more “community-friendly” over the next months.
I think you are worrying too much here. Discord might be the hot stuff right now, but you said yourself that you didn’t really use it up to now, and neither have I or any other person I know face-to-face. As immense as the hype is, in the end Discord is still the new kid on the block, supported by a vocal minority, and it’s nowhere near as popular as the original gangsters like IRC or TeamSpeak/Mumble. Besides, we also have webchat for IRC and I’d argue it’s even easier to use than Discord since it doesn’t require registration.
Personally, I am not going to touch Discord again anytime soon. It only runs in browsers (and yes, the client is technologically a kind of browser, too), and in my experience browsers are notoriously recourse-hungry. It’s also an extremely closed system that doesn’t even allow running a server on your own system, while Pencil2D is an Open Source project using one of the strongest commonly used copyleft licenses around. When I want to have a text chat with other devs I use IRC. When I want to have a voice chat with my pals I use my Mumble server. We are used to it and it works very well for us, so we won’t move away just because there’s this shiny new thing.
tl;dr I think IRC and maybe TS/Mumble are currently better options, since they’re much more well-established than the hype around Discord makes it seem and also since they are more open systems. If some want to use Discord that’s fine by me but I won’t tag along and I don’t think it should be the primary means of real-time communication for an Open Source project.
@j5lx Hey man, first of all by no means I think we should stop using IRC, at least for the devs.
However our userbase is very heterogeneous in regards of open source adoption, many use Pencil2D for being free, nothing more. I understand what you’re saying though, both from the open source perspective and from the “hype” perspective, however if you notice with FOSS projects like Godot Game Engine, there are startups like GDQuest who are heavily using discord in a succesful manner to communicate with their open source community. They literally have hundreds of people daily communicating over, that’s why i created a discord account, because I helped fundraising the game engine course and I wanted to voice my opinion over there.
I think in the end, open source is about providing sensible options to everyone, being open and reaching out. It’s true that discord is closed as in we can’t tinker with the source.
Discord has a desktop app for windows, mac os and linux plus a mobile app for android and ios. https://discordapp.com/download You don’t have to use it on a browser and in fact they recommend you use the desktop app if possible. Browser is just another possibility and they do seem to care enough to provide many options despite being closed source.
However from a corporate perspective on Pencil2D, the fact that they provide free server hosting for either text of voice channels helps a lot since we don’t have the resources to purchase one. And they don’t have ads either. Right now I honestly don’t know how they pay their infrastructure.
Nowadays I don’t have any control over the forum aside from moderating, nor the web I can’t make use of the mailing list to bring attention to announcements, only the webmaster does and he’s very busy from what I can see since I’ve tried to contact him a lot and it’s been near impossible.
From a communications perspective I can only rally people through the facebook page, or tumblr blog, which sadly also have closed sources. A lot of the people that seem to register daily are actually spambots caught by akismet, many of the real users don’t look at the forum anymore.
The reality we’re facing nowadays is that a majority of our users utilize closed source communication applications, like twitter, facebook, instagram, tumblr, and so forth. Very few people will go to the extent of re-registering to an open source social network just for one project and as such it would be hard to measure how many were left out diminishing our capability to gain critical mass with each announcement. This is particularly true if they already have habits of using such closed source apps like twitter, or facebook to get their news.
I mentioned you guys in here because Nick said he wanted to provide an alternative to communication and he asked if anyone wanted to be given administrative roles. Even if some choose not to use it, which is perfectly fine, others might think differently.
I’ll look into Mumble too, and I’ve used Teamspeak in the past, although to a lesser extent, however as an individual thinking on how to setup a community, until I don’t know the extent of our reach I can’t think of looking to pay for a server to host chats like this and using my computer is out of the question for the moment i’m afraid. There should be other solutions but it will take time before I can look into them.
Lastly thank you for voicing your concern and opinion. It is important to hear each comment since we are just starting out to build the foundations of a better community, and every opinion counts. Have a wonderful weekend!
First of all, sorry if I came off as upset, that was not intended and it’s not the case. I only wanted to give it my two cents as the topic seemed to be expanding the communication into an entirely new direction (voice chat) and I wanted to make sure we had a more solid foundation for choosing a particular service than just “it was suggested first”. I wasn’t intent on saying that it’s impossible to make good use of Discord, it’s just that I personally haven’t come across any software projects that do.
As for the dominance of closed (source) social networks, I think the situation is a little different compared to the voice chat arena. On Facebook and Twitter, people are mostly “waiting” for information to come in from a variety of sources (as you say: “to get their news”), but it seems to me that voice servers have traditionally been something you go to in order to communicate with a particular community. When playing on, say, a particular Minecraft server, I’ll usually communicate on their TeamSpeak server; when engaging with the community of that internet radio I used to listen to, I was always using their Mumble server, and now that I’m mostly playing with my friends on my own game servers, I’m also using my own Mumble server, and my friends are, too. My impression is that server hopping is nothing particularly unusual in the voice chat arena, and if we got a choice we might as well use an open one (which, again, doesn’t even have to be an open source one for me). In regard to social networks there is no such choice at all – you can’t even choose between, say, G+ and FB if you want to satisfy (almost) all users, so I ignoring all of them would be outright stupid.
As I mentioned previously, the Discord client, at least the Linux one, is actually a kind of remodeled browser itself and in my experience this kind of app lacks far behind in terms of resource consumption compared to actual native programs. It’s not the end of the world, I just don’t particularly like it.
Regarding hosting, as I mentioned previously I already have a fully functional Mumble server (at j5lx.eu). It’s currently pretty much geared towards my gaming needs, but there is nothing preventing me from using it for other stuff as well; it’s not like we are expecting a giant, unmanageable mass of users.
Regarding the mailing list, I tried to setup Discourse, which also has an optional (per-user) mailing list mode in addition to its usual forum capabilities. So far their supposedly super easy custom-made production setup didn’t work for me at all, but if I get it running I’ll let you know so we might evaluate it.
Alright, I hope that cleared things up a little. Have a great weekend, too!
@j5lx It’s ok man! I don’t think you came across as upset, but rather passionate about the topic, so it’s cool I think we seriously have to sit down one of these days to chat about this because the points you bring forth are really good! and I’m very interested in a different perspective so keep them coming.
Regarding the voice-chat part, though I know discord has a voice channel, right now I think it’s safe to say that we will only be using a text-only channel to have a similar experience as with facebook or the forum. That is: People come in > say hi OR ask a question OR complain about app > stay connected > wait for response > get a response > leave OR stay to repeat the procedure.
I know it might seem ludicrous to use a gaming voice-chat oriented app for such community building, but I think it’s as good bet as any because of the way we can use it as a community announcement & support tool along other tools. With more communication options to cater to different audiences, we can look to synchronize each of them and reach a wider audience than we ever could before.
Again, and I’m not exaggerating, thanks a lot for everything. Your insight on this matter is very much appreciated Also just as I told Nick yesterday, I think we are on the verge of finally evolving this project into something that can stand on it’s own, and the motivation of people genuinely enjoying the software whom otherwise might have never been able to have a similar experience makes it even better. Cheers!