The year 2026 has seen an increase in centralization by governments and large platforms, accumulating more and more data about all of us. It’s something we deal with on a daily basis.
The Zcash community has always emphasized education about privacy and individual security. If we want a circular and truly free economy in the financial sphere, we should also apply those same principles to other aspects of our digital lives: browsing, communication, social media, etc., relying on alternative applications and FOSS.
That’s why I’d like to talk about Stoat, an alternative to Discord developed in Rust. It currently allows you to create servers, text channels, voice channels, and bots. Some features such as video calls and screen sharing are still in development.
I would like to hear your opinions on this application. It is true that today many centralized platforms are, to a certain extent, a “necessary evil,” but I also believe that it is important to have alternatives that give us control over our own data and that, in some cases, may even surpass centralized options.
Do you think that in the future it could be feasible to migrate from Discord to an alternative such as Stoat, if the time came?
I don’t think there’s a need to pick a single platform to migrate to. A better solution would be having a presence on all platforms we’re willing and able to manage, and bridging between them. #zcash:matrix.org already exists, but it’s a little quiet. And it seems RocketChat - like Gitter - also utilizes the Matrix protocol since a few years. So those wouldn’t even require bridging.
My experience with bridging, at least between Matrix and Discord, is that it’s quite broken. It’s leaving a good number of messages as unable to load for whatever reason (length, threads, etc).
RocketChat could be a very interesting move though. It does have a good balance of everything we need and stand for.
Each bridge is a different project. There is no reason to expect issues with one translate to issues with another. There are 4 Matrix-Discord bridges available.
Our Telegram - Discord bridge operates well. The only practical caveat is that moderators need mod perms on both sides, otherwise you can get a spammer from the other side that you cannot do anything about without shutting down the whole thing.
If we succeed, which I expect we will, our community size could become orders of magnitude larger. This implies that getting our moderation right before this happens is rather important. Actually I’d be curious to know the opinion of @Shawn on all this.
Of course, the idea is to diversify. If I understood correctly that it is centralized or mandatory (which is not the case), that is not what I want. It is always good to look for alternatives, but not all of us adapt quickly to new alternatives. A clear example is that there are several who use Matrix Telegram, because there are people who prefer one over the other. New users who are learning about FOSS should be introduced to an interface similar to a centralized one so that they can adapt.
Of course you would need moderators on all sides, but that doesn’t necessarily mean having the same moderators everywhere. In fact, I think it would be best to diversify on this front as well, for the sake of more democratic authority.
“Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely.” — Lord Acton
I ran a Zcash dedicated RocketChat server for a few years:
It’s relatively easy to setup and has just as many features as Slack, it was also bridged to the old internal ECC Slack in a couple channels.
However it’s not without it’s own caveats. You have to trust whoever is running it to not be malicious and that person has to be willing burden the legal responsibility for it’s users content. That’s one of the main reasons we decided to close it, that and it was much cheaper (free) to just go with Discord where many users were already chatting.
I’m personally in favor of any and all forums and channels wether they are Mastodon, Matrix, Telegram or anywhere else. The challenge is getting the general public to accept and use the more “complex” channels. Many don’t want to go through the hassle of installing apps and creating accounts for things they’ve never heard of.
As far as moderation goes I think it’s always beneficial to have multiple people and a clear CoC. Plus an open communication channel like “Moderation Feedback” where users can question decisions that have been made Where other platforms like Reddit, X, YouTube ,etc… fail (imho) is the lack of accountability for the mods. There are no appeals, no clear CoC, no way to ask what someone did wrong. r/cryptocurrency r/Monero etc.. is really poor for this especially when it comes to Zcash related stuff. The way things are setup here it’s actually much more work because you need to justify why you took an action vs just clicking the button and saying oh well. Plus I am a contractor for the ZF so if I’m going crazy users can always contact ZF directly to go over my head.
All that to say any new platforms should have a diverse mod team with accountability. Users who don’t like a how a platform is being moderated won’t always complain they will simply stop showing up.
There’s many things I’ve heard of, for which I’d refuse to create an account. And that’s exactly why we need bridging: Because people have different reasons to use certain applications. For some it’s convenience, or what “everyone” is using, while others base their choice on whether something is free software along with the level of privacy it provides. These personal choices should not stand in the way of connecting with fellow community members, nor can people be expected to install every chat application that’s out there.
To get back to the original topic: There appears to be a Stoat bridge for Matrix, but it’s marked alpha, was developed by one person who abandoned it, and doesn’t seem to support threads. That doesn’t have to be the end of the story of course. If it does not meet our needs, it could be improved.
I think the first group is rather flexible; the people currently collaborating in Discord would just use whatever tool they all agree would be better for them. I’d ask @cryptojedi / @str4d / @daira / @dismad / @nuttycom / @pacu / @conradoplg (most active users on Discord as far as I can tell) for this. Ultimately we need the best tool for people who are actually using the chat feature in the first place.
The second group usually can’t be bothered to install a new app or whatever, and I’m not here to solve their problem either.
Zcash is a privacy-focused free software project. The most ardent privacy supporters will not join Discord. To ask people who are on Discord which application they prefer is pre-filtered polling; circular reasoning. I’m not advocating to ditch Discord, but - without question - having it as the only option goes counter to the core values of the Zcash project, regardless of what the already-on-Discord crowd prefers.
One might say “if they refuse to join Discord, those potential contributors apparently don’t care enough about Zcash”, but from their perspective it can be argued that Zcash seems to not really care about privacy since collaboration happens through Discord of all options.
Reasonable point, but everything is about balance and trade-offs. The people I’ve mentioned in my previous post very much care about privacy, to be fair.
Personally, I’m totally with you in that I can’t be bothered to participate into that ugly a$$ centralized tool. That’s at least two of us. But at the same time I want to read what those users I’ve mentioned are saying. So I’m personally looking for a balance that would better accommodate most of us.
I like (and appreciate!) how this forum is moderated currently and I do want the chat to also be a safe place where people can respectfully exchange ideas, including fringe ones; for as long as respect is #1 rule. Chat platforms without proper moderation tools are therefore sort of a no-go for me due to this.
I’m sure they do, but not so much that joining Discord is unacceptable for them. That is a measure of sticking to principles. As an extreme example, some of the neckbeards we might want to bring into the fold still use IRC. There’s Matrix bridges for that too.
PS: I use neckbeard as a compliment to indicate a high skill level.
I’m not convinced at all that bridges are working well enough, but happy to be proven wrong.
Sticking to principle at the cost of not being able to collaborate, is not necessarily a sign of great intelligence. I’m roasting myself here probably because like I said I can’t be bothered with Discord.
I’m here though. Who are those neckbeards you are talking about? I’m basically curious what we are really missing out on if they don’t even care to participate on Discourse.
