As Ben and others say, Matrix provides many modern features new users
will expect, while preserving the spirit of IRC. Without wading into the
details, the design of Matrix I find impressive and to my liking, and it
has seemed to get steadily better over time for quite a while now.
Re Zulip, in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27202838 one of the
lead Matrix devs says their up-and-coming threading model aims to
support what Zulip does and they've been discussing deeper integration
with Zulip. Granted, It would be better to hear about those discussions
from the Zulip side as Matrix aims to assimilate everything and Zulip
could have some reservations, but I remain hopeful. (I certainly would
like to see culled the current explosion of mutually-incompatible chat
applications, leaving us with fewer protocols but as many competing
implementations.)
What I recommend for now that we make some official Matrix channels, but
also bridge them with the libera.chat ones once the bridge is up (should
be a few days). Creating a matrix room and bridging it is a bit
different underneath the hood than using a channel generated by the
bridge on demand. We can give them nice names on the matrix side, and
basically keep both options open of being "IRC-first" or "Matrix-first"
down the road.
For reference, see
https://matrix.to/#/#community:nixos.org?via=nixos.org which is the
Matrix "Space" (room that is a directory of sub-rooms, filling the role
of a Discord "server") that Nix community created while they debate what
to do next. See also https://github.com/NixOS/rfcs/pull/94 where this
same discussion is playing out.
John
On 5/21/21 4:00 PM, Iavor Diatchki wrote:
As I said, I am not a heavy IRC user, for my online chatting needs I
mostly use Mattermost, Discord, and Slack. So I don't have an informed
opinion on the technical merits of the various platforms---mostly I've
heard that the Matrix clients and servers are quite a bit less robust
than IRC ones but I've never personally used them.
If there is a feeling that GHC wants to use a new chatting platform,
by all means we should try it out. I just don't think that the
unfortunate situation with free-node is a good reason to drop IRC
entirely. Despite its flows, I think it has served our community
well, and while it may look "old" to "young" users it does have the
benefit of being pretty stable, unlike the myriad of chatting services
that seem to be popping up all the time.
-Iavor
On Fri, May 21, 2021 at 10:41 AM Ben Gamari <b...@smart-cactus.org
<mailto:b...@smart-cactus.org>> wrote:
Iavor Diatchki <iavor.diatc...@gmail.com
<mailto:iavor.diatc...@gmail.com>> writes:
> Hello,
>
> I am not a heavy IRC user, but I'd say it makes most sense to
just use
> Libera. It is essentially the same people that were running
free-node
> running pretty much the exact same service, and I believe they
are trying
> to make it extra easy to just switch, so this should be the
least effort
> transition.
>
> I believe IRC has served the GHC community quite well so far,
and there is
> a reddit post by Ed Kmett that the normal Haskell channels have
already
> been transitioned over, so I think it makes sense for GHC to
stick with the
> rest of the Haskell community.
>
The problem is that, in order to grow (or even merely not to shrink),
the community also needs to adapt to the preferences of younger users.
The fact of the matter is the younger users tend to be, at best,
unfamiliar with IRC. In the worst case, the need to leave a
browser/sign
up for a new account means that they simply won't participate. Of the
new contributors I have had approach me in the past year, less
than half
have had any familiarity with IRC.
Matrix has the advantage of being accessible to "web-native" community
members while being open enough to (at least in principle) allow
community members who are accustomed to IRC to continue to participate
via a bridge.
Cheers,
- Ben
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