[FOSDEM] virtual presence "stands" on FOSDEM

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

On 12/5/20, Richardson, Brian <brian.richardson at intel.com> wrote:

> Dragon Con, one of the largest sci-fi fan conferences in the US, applied
> this model to the Discord server used in the 2020 virtual event.

Discord has a huge following because it is well known in the gaming
industry.  As such it seems on first inspection to be a natural fit.
The real time chat and video facilities built-in augment communities
for event participation.

Now here comes the downsides.

1) it's closed source.  to ask Libre/Open developers to rally behind a
closed source system is... anomalous.

2) it's fundamentally designed around gaming.

this sounds initially great until you understand that gamers and all
gaming platforms operate by convention on ports 50,000 to 60,000 (UDP
and TCP) and everyone knows to configure UPnP and other routing tables
through NATting to get best latency.

unfortunately.... ISPs *also* know this convention and consequently
decide, either arbitrarily or in some countries which no longer have
Net Neutrality (USA) to cut all and any access to these ports.

in particular - mobile broadband ISPs such as those utilising
Hutchinson Laboratories backbone equipment, e.g. Three Networks in the
UK, decide that after many complaints and huge adverse impact on their
cellular networks supporting "silly frivolous gamer traffic affecting
their higher paying business customers" to also block these ports.

why does this matter?

because, and now we come back to Discord... Discord's clients Audio
and Video *including the WebRTC browsers* all use ..

... yep you guessed it...

... ports 50,000 to 60,000.

consequently, the combination of 1 and 2 will mean that a large volume
of participants would have "inexplicably been unable to chat over
audio or video" and without the source code there is absolutely
nothing that you nor anyone but Discord "Gods and Priests Of The
Closed Source" can fix.

bottom line: in contacting Alasdair and the team to offer help, can i
possibly recommend only contacting with offers that involve libre /
open software solutions, rather than closed ones? hardware of course a
different matter entirely, i am sure the team would welcome hardware
and hosting sponsorship and solutions.

l.