On Sun, Feb 15 2026, Sergio Pastor Pérez wrote: > This is interesting. I'm not someone with experience using Zulip, so I > really appreciate you feedback. I think this particular concern is > something we should fix socially, rather than it being the > responsibility of a tool.
Absolutely. What I am describing is a social issue, but we benefit from the fact that expectations are already set for email and IRC by society more broadly. I don't think anybody expects real-time responses to emails, or days/weeks-delayed responses to IRC messages. (Although, it's possible that I'm just biased by my expectations of those tools - feel free to let me know if I'm completely off base!) Moving to Zulip means moving away from these expectations, which is fine, but it means we have to do real work to set and uphold those expectations. > [...] I propose to describe our expectations on our code of conduct. I'm not sure the code of conduct is the right place for this. Although, I don't know what is. > I worry that some newcomers from faraway time-zones may be excluded > from conversations or help due to the nature of IRC and them not > having a bouncer, which increases the boundary for participation both > economically and technically. I just wonder if this is looking for a technical solution to a social problem. The social issue is: "some people can't take part in synchronous conversations because of the different timezones" and the proposed technical solution is "we'll turn(/bridge) the ephemeral synchronous medium into a persistent (ambiguously) asynchronous one". I'm not convinced that's an improvement. I also want to point out that I am stretching the word synchronous a bit. IRC is still asynchronous, so I'm really referring to the shorter expected response time and the notion of "presence" (i.e. it makes a difference if you're there or not). Carlo
