I’ve just add list of online communities I know to the wiki and it doesn’t even include some of the online one in official Community page.
Having diversity is good, but I start thinking maybe there might start being choice overload.
Also I think the the former wiki page should be merged to main one for consistency.
I was a bit worried about the number of communities when we were talking about setting up this discourse.
The list on the community page can definitely be cut down a bit. We don’t have to list StackOverflow, the Facebook group is not very active and a few of the other links (Wiki, HCAR, Haskell Weekly and Planet Haskell) should be grouped somewhere else. This leaves us with:
That’s not too bad. There are also Discord and Slack channels not listed on the current page. I don’t use them, so I don’t know if they’re worth adding.
It might also help to separate asynchronous channels (mailing lists, Reddit, Discourse) from chat groups (IRC, Gitter, Slack, Discord). That still leaves both a bit dispersed—which is probably a bigger problem for the chat channels than the async ones—but still reasonable for newcomers to navigate.
I’ve just add list of online communities I know to the wiki […].
Thanks for your work!
Having diversity is good, but I start thinking maybe there might start being choice overload.
In my very biased opinion, the “Community” pages should only list communities which are community-run or too big too be ignored; this rule would see Facebook and Gitter getting the axe. It is a touchy subject (when I proposed it, it was not accepted), so for now I am happy with the list not growing with other walled gardens!
The wiki-list of course could be more thorough.
p.s.: does anyone know if HCAR needs a helping hand? I see there was no release in November and it was very useful resource to me.
There are various groups of Haskell programmers and fans, then there are various needs of different forms of communities. Not every one would join all the communities, although he/she might feel in that way when someone really did that.
I suppose there are young people like me who want to join a community with good Markdown support, clean UI, and like buttons, meanwhile whose content can be well indexed by Google.
Pulling asynchronous from synchronous sounds right to me, and otherwise reorganizing that section. I’m on the fence about deleting any links entirely. The Facebook and Gitter used to be pretty active. And I’m not sure why we wouldn’t want to list SO? Just because “everyone already knows”?
I’m not sure why we wouldn’t want to list SO? Just because “everyone already knows”?
“Everybody knows” is part of it, but it’s mostly SO’s format—SO isn’t a discussion forum, and the [haskell] tag on SO isn’t a community in the sense of the other options. Even though it’s interactive, SO fits more with documentation/tutorials than community forums.
It sort of fits in both, since you can ask questions and get help, and not just lookup prior documentation.
That said, I’d just argue it should stay somewhere rather than just being removed 
Furthermore, if you spend a while posting there you end up cooperating quite a bit with fellow Haskellers. Even with the peculiarities of the Stack Overflow format, I feel it counts as a community venue.
(On a side note, hidden in the depths of SO there is a Haskell chatroom. Traffic is very light, possibly because hardly anyone knows about it.)
As for the initial question, I am coming to appreciate decentralisation, along the lines of what @chenyong has said:
In particular, when it comes to online meeting places I feel there is a role both for bustling market squares and cozy local parks.
I hope everything can bridge everything else, someday 
Gitter
Now acquired by the people behind Matrix…
IRC
…which also bridges Freenode nicely. So that one is “solved” to me.
Haskell mailing lists
Discourse
At least when this came up with the Nix community a few years back (and probably also Rust community) the idea was that Discourse would subsume mailman. I think being able to import the archives (https://meta.discourse.org/t/importing-mailing-lists-mbox-listserv-google-groups-emails/79773 which perhaps is possible) would a very neat thing to tip the scales in favor of settling on a single tool.
This, and Discord, will never federate or offer good data retention as commercialization dictates, but we are in no position to get rid of them yet, I don’t think.
I would have been skeptical a few years ago, but email interface for Discourse is top notch and 95% similar to MLs. I would love to hear feedbacks/reports from communities who made the switch from one to the other.
Not directly related but connected - I understand that the mailing lists are the ‘canonical’ community. But I (and I’m sure there are others) do not want to access the lists through an email client, and I find the online interface basically unusable, more or less leaving me locked out. Would it be possible to use/build a better interface, or even migrate the lists to a different platform?