Ha I didn’t even realize it was your answer, that’s great!
Yeah, totally getting rid of slack is probably overkill and unnecessary and moot because it’s not going to happen. That was a semi-click baitey headline born out of surprise and frustration all that effort was getting deleted.
Technically, my view hasn’t changed — I think there is a good chance elm would be better off without slack — but I think encouraging people to post more on SO is an easy solution that would go a long way.
Re this:
I personally pay 0 attention to identities of askers/answers, but seems solvable with a pseudonym.
For the record, while I sympathize with the issues you’re having, when people make aggressively opinionated proclamations like this post about the ways they think the community should be run, I find it exhausting, and I’m not even someone responsible for any of the community management decisions.
I think your concerns are reasonable, but they can be framed as something like “Are there ways we can get more Elm question answers that are shared on Slack to be posted to Stack Overflow” and be just as effective at sparking discussion without being a “click-baitey” proclamation about what the community should do “for its own good”.
For a mature chat platform whose vision and business model aligns with stewardship of open-source communities, it’s really hard to beat Element, which runs on the Matrix protocol. Public rooms are searchable and history is kept forever. Nobody is trying to monetize it by hiding old messages. Element runs in your browser or as a native app. Whatever else you may think of Mozilla, they migrated over to Matrix a year ago, and my project has used it for a couple of years.
So, may I suggest #elm:matrix.org? About 70 people are on here. I’d welcome more activity and break-out channels. If we end up with more channels we could create a community to make it feel more like Slack.
I agree with @nathanbraun on this. I was stunned when I realized Slack’s message history was limited to 30 days for everyone!
Not everyone likes sync chat for specific technical questions (personally, it’s my last resort: I don’t like bugging people, and I don’t always have time to wait for a sync response).
Fortunately, there’s a simple solution that doesn’t require any coordinated effort… We can just ask and answer more SO questions if we’re so inclined. And transfer questions we’ve had answered on slack over to SO. I’ll try to do both myself more often.
Anything more, like a community migration away from Slack, is probably a long shot at this point.
Matrix Communities are discontinued (they don’t federate well), but Matrix Spaces should show up some time this year. I’m hoping to have another go at splitting it up more then.
Yeah, this is pretty much where I’ve landed. I think the rate limiter is the number of questions asked on SO. I get the impression there are a bunch of people subscribed, watching the Elm tag and ready and willing to answer whatever pops up (I doubt it even takes much longer than the Slack). I’ll also try to ask/transfer more (and a few others have committed to as well), but it’d be nice per @neurodynamic’s idea if there were a bot in the Elm slack that prompted people to do it too.
Lamdera, elm-in-elm, incremental-elm are on Discord, why not following them?
Having elm in Discord is just a choice to be mature, it has great features and able video and screensharing, this is just awesome. Why trying to go and make people create account in unknown application like Element? It’s just a stopper to me
Ofc we will keep Element and some will talk there, but we SHOULD have a Discord, Slack is insanely bad. Moving to Discord is a safe choice.
While Element is unknown to you, Discord could be just as unknown to others. I’d be willing to bet that Slack has the largest install base of these 3. That’s not me saying we should use or shouldn’t use any of these though.
There are other concerns too when it comes to these platforms. What is moderation like on them? What about access at work? Legal aspects of free accounts? The 10k message limit for free Slacks is 1 of many considerations.
As I’ve said before I know many, many people who wouldn’t be able to join anything other than Slack at work. These things should be considered when claiming that Slack shouldn’t or should be used.
Discord is a webapp, you can run it on your browser, so no work related problem.
Moderation is better, legal access on an open source project? No messages limitation. Lamdera, elm-in-elm and incremental-elm are on Discord.
Who are the people you’re talking about @wolfadex? How come, as a developer, your boss would not let you be able to go through your langage community chat?
I’m not gonna defend Discord more, in 2019 Discord had 250 millions users, in 2020, it had 300 millions and now I guess they’re gonna reach more than 400 millions soon.
I could go step by step and compare each possibility but that’s total non sense to me.
That’s not true at all. There are plenty of companies that have blocklists and allowlists for ALL http traffic. I was once unable to access programming books on humblebundle.com because they have “game” listed somewhere in their meta tags. At that company it can take up to months to get approval. The software community is a very large and diverse community. I’ve been at companies where it can takes months to get approval to use OSS packages due to security, specific licenses, and more.
Comparing each option may not be worth it to you, but for some it is. For what other communities have done you could look at Mozilla Synchronous Messaging at Mozilla: The Decision - Mozillians - Mozilla Discourse. They chose Matrix over everything else due to accessibility and community safety. Does that make Matrix the best choice? Maybe, maybe not.
You also listed other Elm communities on Discord. You didn’t mention the dev communities I’ve seen leave Discord for Zulip, does that mean that Zulip is better and we should use Zulip? If people are leaving Discord, does that mean Discord isn’t as great as you make it sound? Maybe, maybe not. It does mean that Discord is likely not the panacea that some make it out to be.
I think zulip is the best option, given its relative similarity to slack interface-wise, and given that they are really very happy supporting open-source (in fact, zulip founders came from open-source projects - e.g. they were very nice in fixing zulip server, for free, for SageMath: https://sagemath.zulipchat.com - they probably won’t mind doing this for elm, too).
zulip has an import-from-slack walkthrough: Import from Slack (Zulip Help Center)
I don’t know if the Elm community should switch to Discord or not but one short coming you didn’t mention is that it lacks threads. Which means that a long conversation between two people will crowd out everything else in that channel.
Ironically the discord between @Charlon and @wolfadex re: discord is showing that discourse suffers the same problem.
I’m with @Adriano and don’t like sync chat for specific technical questions, but whereever we ask them, ideally answers wouldn’t get lost after 30 days like with slack.
With respect, this thread is full of hobby horses (yes, including my own). We all have diverse backgrounds and work/communication styles. Expressing a personal bias as “why don’t we just X?” doesn’t seem to move us forward.
I think someone needs to put on the Community Steward hat, set aside their biases, and shepherd this process. Talk to the project maintainers and whoever admins the Slack + Discourse. Work to answer these questions in a way that feels responsive to the whole community, from core maintainers to new members.
What is the purpose/value of real-time chat compared to a forum (Discourse) or a Q&A site (Stack Overflow), and for whom?
Should we try to steer folks toward or away from specific platforms for specific kinds of communication? Or just let them use what they want?
Don’t forget there’s a subreddit (/r/elm) with 10k members
How is Slack failing to serve our needs? Just the retrograde amnesia?
What features/qualities does this community need the most from a real-time chat platform, short-term and long-term? (I smell a survey)
How important is it to choose a popular service (so folks don’t need to use another site/app), as opposed to a platform that is less popular but maybe fitter-for-purpose?
How well would the other available chat platforms meet each of these needs? (I smell a table that compares Slack to Discord, Element/Matrix, Zulip, IRC, etc)
Is a migration away from Slack feasible?
What might that migration process look like, in a way that doesn’t suck for new users or project admins/maintainers?
Should a migration effort try to capture folks from other lesser-used platforms, or leave them be?
Many other FOSS communities have had to solve this problem. What can we learn from their experience?
I personally can’t lead this effort right now but I have a bit of relevant experience and am willing to help.
Btw, Discorse is still a no-go due to their terms of service, see Mozillas analysis due to that.
Element/Matrix with the spaces will be our best bet.
Most communities right now just run their own server and federate it, probably not an option for us, but Mozilla, Gnome, Fosdem come to mind.
It also works seemlessly with IRC and Gitter. (Funfact: Or well all known chat platforms https://www.beeper.com/ )
