Because the "third party" doesn't have any other choice, they have been forced into that situation by the walled garden platform vendor. The demand does not come from them, it comes from Discord Inc, who refuse to let anyone access the service on any other terms. They are the ones who are telling everyone to take a hike, and when you relay that message I really doubt you're speaking for yourself. All you're doing is reinforcing their decisions. This isn't just some chat room you spun up, it's an active business with a plainly evident market strategy. To put it another way, if we got down to it you (or any of these other projects) don't seem like you'd be personally against an open source Discord client. But when you tell people to take a hike, that's effectively the stance you're taking, and it's only because that is the company's stance.

Don't get me wrong, I would love to have made an open source discord client years ago when discord was new and I was being asked to use it regularly, and if that panned out then this blog post wouldn't have even existed. But the company has always been hostile to the idea.

I really don't think anyone is holding a gun to the project owner's heads and forcing them to use Discord. So they aren't forced into that position.

I personally don't like Discord for lots of reasons, but the original blog post and other comments supporting it are basically arguing that project owners have to change things in order to accommodate some people who have an issue with Discord. My point is that no project owner has any obligation to change things for any random potential contributor who is making demands.

Sure, Discord being less slimy and/or having other client options would be great! I personally use IRC a lot partially for these reasons, but I object to someone telling other people how to run their projects.

>I really don't think anyone is holding a gun to the project owner's heads and forcing them to use Discord.

This is not related to what I said at all. No one is being forced to use Discord. But Discord absolutely is forcing the project owners to get all the other contributors to accept the discord terms if they want to use it. That is the entire reason they make users accept the terms before they even sign up. Some users don't care about being forced to do this. Some users do, and if the project owners want to accommodate those people then yes, they need to change things. None of this is really up for debate and you seem to understand it well, so it's unclear to me what your point is. It also is very strange to me that you're now blanket objecting to these type of requests when you mentioned before that it's easy for the project owners to just say no thanks.