I think if we were to meet people where they’re at, Aux wouldn’t have been created given Nix’s userbase. I’m also confused on the term interest parties… you mean beginners or organizations looking into Aux? The Nix chat spaces are already inhospitable to beginners who are just learning about the technology, because that’s what the docs are there for – chats are for specific questions that are currently unanswered, which would be after they’re already at least familiar with it. I agree with the sentiment of reducing friction for people to join, but I don’t think that this is the right way to go about it.
I’d like to clarify that when I mean beginners I mean they just heard about Aux an hour ago, not like people who are experimenting with the software.
Could I setup the discord server as I have experience using discord? I think the ownership of the discord server should be given to the official aux.computer discord account.
So, one issue I’ve noticed with Nix’s unofficial discord and reddit is that they quickly become places to brigade the discourse.
I’ve seen numerous instances of people (I don’t want to name names) riling people up on those platforms to come brigade the discourse and the result is never pretty.
I don’t really have a solution for this. I’m just putting this out there because it’s something I’ve noticed and we need to think about what to do in those situations.
My bad, interested parties was vague. Primarily beginners to intermediates, people who have specific technical questions that are unanswered in the docs or wiki. For instance, the VimJoyer discord server was very crucial to getting my issues with nix resolved, and was most certainly not “inhospitable”. While a lot of those questions could have easily been answered in good documentation, many of them were too specific to reasonably be found in the docs or wiki. Having an actual person to talk to if you are running into an issue makes a world of difference. I think having a discord bridged to matrix makes that easier.
Matrix has always been very unreliable for me. I’ve had accounts on the same instance as the chatroom, and accounts on matrix.org which I thought would be stable. Messages get lost silently, and I’m still unable to leave some chatrooms due to errors.
For realtime chat I think IRC is stable and simple. It can easily be logged to an archive for searching. Web clients provide easy access for users who don’t want an irc client.
For long running conversations, and topic based chat, I really like Zulip. The way they handle threads means you can subscribe to certain streams, and conversations don’t get lost in history, nor flood the “main chat”
One challenge we have faced in Scala is that bridged users appear in Discord as manifestations of the same bot. Users lose the ability to ignore individual accounts and become wholly reliant on the moderators to enforce their own personal boundaries, or block all bridged users. Typelevel dropped the bridge for safety reasons, and imposes Discord on everyone. The resulting walled garden of information has made the community more fragmented and less discoverable. I would strongly urge avoiding Discord altogether.
The creation of a subreddt is inevitable, whether official or not. I think the best way to manage it would be to post discourse topics on it and encourage people to use the forum for help, while allowing other topics (memes, “Aux is incredible”) to have a place, which helps spreading the ecosystem.
I don’t like IRC because it hasn’t logs or notifications. When you have a question and arrive an IRC chatroom you see an empty chat and it’s difficult to know if there’s anyone connected. You would have to leave your irc client connected until someones answers and that could maybe take hours if there isn’t anyone
Also, sending logs or atttachments is more complicated than on Discord or Matrix
Of course, and I think the reasons that you listed are precisely why I don’t want it to be on discord. You finding your answers on VimJoyer is a fault of the decentralization of information, something that would be solved if all the chats were all in one place. I think that adding a discord server segments that, again with discords attitude towards third parties. Your reasons for using discord are that talking to a human is better than docs which I totally agree with! I love chats, and obviously it’s better than a static page – but what you said goes for matrix as well. The benefits to discord is ease of use, but I think the dangers of decentralization outweigh that benefit.
Zulip Chat seems to check all the boxes to ask questions without the problems of matrix or discord. If we can direct people to the zulip chat I think this would be a very good option
Some people here have already brought valid concerns regarding the usage of Discord so I won’t repeat them again. But I think we should strive towards using software that better aligns with our values and I doubt Discord is exactly that.
Matrix seams to work decently well (at least better for the bast majority of users) than XMPP, IRC any ML and as it stands it’s currently the “standard” for FOSS projects.
zulip chat took about 45 seconds to load on my computer, so idk what went wrong but i’d hazard a guess that it’s probably gonna be a sub-par experience for people with older computers or weird browsers.
I don’t feel it’s appropriate for a free software project to endorse a proprietary platform, so I would urge against using discord or bridging to it. An unofficial discord may at some point be created, but I don’t think we should be endorsing it.
I think Matrix is fine, IRC and Zulip are fine too.
Never heard about it but it seams to be at least selfhostable and the UI at a glance looks reasonable. I would consider it over Discord if we ever came to such decision. Specially due to selfhosting.
I’ve used matrix and zulip before and either one of them is a great option. I don’t like discord at all and I agree with some others that free software alternatives are preferred, but I can see how having a bridged community could be helpful for outreach, I’m neutral on that front.
Communication in general is hard to put in discrete boxes or functions. But yeah, I agree there are similarities with Discourse and Zulip. There could be room for both in my opinion
Zulip is good for on topic realtime chat, I know many Rust compiler teams use it for meeting chats. I could see working with SIG efforts in Zulip would work well.
IRC is also realtime, but more of a “hangout room” in my usage at least. Matrix fits this usage as well in my mind, but my experience with it is buggy.
Discourse is great for announcements + comments, link sharing + comments. I use discourse kind of like I used to use Reddit. (What are people sharing and talking about today?)
