Carlo Zancanaro <[email protected]> writes: > Hi Sergio, > > I don't understand how this: > > On Tue, Feb 17 2026, Sergio Pastor Pérez wrote: >> Maybe I have not been clear. I'm not proposing to remove any of those >> platforms, the expectations for those have no reason to change, people >> know what to expect from a mailing list; and if they do not, the will >> find out as they use it. > > is consistent with this: > >> So I don't think that allowing newcomers to participate on the mailing >> list from a Zulip webclient will necessarily change things for the >> mailing list. > > Especially if you're also imagining bridging IRC to Zulip. If the one > space (Zulip) is interacting with both mailing lists and IRC, do the > newcomers using it just need to remember to apply different expectations > in the different channels/topics?
I was expecting to have a Zulip channel called IRC, where people participating there know that this is an IRC bridge, and the expectations are the same as for any IRC room. Of course, I imagine other topics discussed elsewhere to not have this expectations. > I also think it would be technically tricky to do a bidirectional bridge > between a Zulip channel and a mailing list. There is support for a user > interacting with Zulip entirely via email[1], but that's not the same as > bridging to an existing mailing list. > > You can get mail from the mailing list into Zulip pretty easily, but > it's harder to get messages from Zulip back out to the mailing list. You > could probably add the mailing list as a Zulip user, and set it to send > notifications as emails to the list, but that would be pretty horrible. Well this is the part I was planning to explore as I'm not a Zulip user. I was hopping that it would be possible to message the mailing list through Zulip, and that each topic would be a thread in the mailing list. But if you tell me that's not possible, I understand your skepticism. Again, I'm not a user, so I don't know Zulip's limitations, it would be nice to explore the possibilities though. I could ask in the Zulip development community whether this kind of use case is possible. >> The idea is not to replace what we have, but to open new doors to >> different interactions that our current media does not allow. >> [...] >> ... use Zulip for fast troubleshooting problems and recommendations, >> which is the role that most of our fragmented chatrooms are fulfilling >> (Matrix, IRC, XMPP, Telegram, etc). > > Adding Zulip will, in the short term, add to that fragmentation. I'm not > as optimistic as you are about the bridging, so I can only imagine us > reducing fragmentation if Zulip replaces at least one form of > communication. Well in my opinion Zulip should replace all those I listed (Matrix, IRC, XMPP, Telegram, etc) + the Guix help mailing list + allow newcomers to participate easily in IRC. Participating from Zulip in the devel mailing list is still something we should explore, we are not sure it's technically possible to do bidirectionally. Even if it's only possible to make a readonly copy of the mailing list, I think it would still help with centralizing information, newcomers (an all of us) would have a powerful search engine for archived mails and help topics. Plus I would hope to bring other Guile communities under our instance, so we can participate in discussions across multiple projects. > As another relevant factor, we should consider friction. I think Zulip > is an option with high friction for casual use, while being great for > regular use. In some ways, that's the opposite of what we want for > newcomers. There are two particular things that I've struggled with for > communities using Zulip: > > - I have joined Zulip organisations for several projects/communities, > but because each one is on a different domain and with a separate > login I usually forget to open them and be involved. (You can turn on > email notifications as a potential solution to this, but I don't like > to do that for various reasons.) Yes, I understand this concern, this is why I would hope other Guile projects to jump onboard as the platform solidifies in the community. I've seen that at least the phone application allows being signed in multiple domains at the same time, so there is that. > - Zulip's threading model is excellent, but it's also unusual. My last > team switched to using Zulip for our internal chat and almost everyone > complained about the threading model at first. If you're coming from > almost any other chat application then there's a learning curve before > you can use it well. > > In practice, at present, I do not meaningfully participate in any > communities using Zulip. > > I feel like I should reiterate: I really like Zulip. It's probably one > of my favourite pieces of software, and I will happily sing its praises. > However, I'm not sure that it's great for newcomers, and I firmly > believe if we're going to use it effectively then the community would > need to commit to it, not just add it on top of what we already have. Could you elaborate further on what would committing to Zulip mean for you? Remove the mailing lists and IRC and centralize all communications through Zulip? If you are thinking something like that, I'm afraid that it would be unlikely to reach a consensus, at least not until Zulip has proven to be the ideal tool for us. So I can only imagine something like that happening in a natural way, where just by preference people gravitate towards Zulip for most communications. I don't think consensus on that would be possible if done artificially through discussions. Do you perhaps have a different proposal? Best regards, Sergio
