Wow did not expect that. Whenever I see slack, it feels like it is for closed associations like (closed) uni classes or corporation private collab.
I am strongly against discord. I tried to make an account, but it immediately locked me out and started extorting me for my personal information (email & phone number) claiming my ip address showed āsuspicious behaviorā without further explanation. If they were just upfront about asking that information I would have considered it, but this is just unacceptable. So, I definitely wonāt be joining any discord server.
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I fully agree. Discord is a non-starter in that in does not tick any of the boxes we should seriously prioritise if try to move away from Slack:
- Free and Open Source (transparency, does not yield control to corporate businesses)
- supports āserious workā workflows (i.e. email notifications, side discussions/threads, easy group and channels management)
- in-app full-text search with excellent reach, including archived material
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The Slack link used to be on the website (haskell.foundation) but I canāt find it anymore. Is this international?
Have you considered just bridging matrix to slack? Matrix has its flaws, but itās bridge ecosystem is one of its most powerful features.
Iāve seen other communities that create a Matrix space and then bridge individual matrix channels to slack rooms.
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@jaror cool, thank you! This is the last place I could think of. Having it on Contacts or About would make more sense imo. But maybe itās offtopic here, and I should just submit an issue against the repositoryā¦
The issue is many times more likely to get fixed if you file the issue rather than just mention it here
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It is on contact, near the bottom, right to the right of the discourse link.
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My bad, thanks for the pointer!
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I think focusing on the important features would help the discussion. To my understanding we want the following features (not particularly ordered):
- Accessible: it should be dead easy and fast to click a āDiscuss Haskell hereā button, and get into a chat and start communicating.
- Auditable: The chat log is an important piece of low grade documentation and can be a great resource for people solving a Haskell related problem or for people looking to learn more Haskell techniques.
- Modern Feature Set: As pointed out by @Nycticorax features such as notifications are important to the quality of the conversation. The chat client should have a reasonable feature set for the modern era (I cringe at these words
)
Please feel free to add a Feature if you think Iāve missed something important. With this list we can rate our options, for example I rate slack as good in Accessibility and Features but bad in Auditable:
Slack:
- Accessibility: Very good, its on all platforms including mobile
- Auditable: Bad, the log is locked in a walled garden hence the move from Open Source Projects from slack instances, and the owners of the channels do not have full control over the channel instance.
- Features: Very good, there are gifs, we could recreate lambdabot in slack (I think someone has done this before?) and there is a system of notifications through user accounts.
FWIW I like the libera.chat channels and IRC but I understand that is not to everyoneās taste. Iām +1 for Matrix, but agree with @hasufell RE the CEO
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Thank you, thatās a constructive remark.
I think it would be fair to add āeasy to migrate from Slackā as a (at least soft) requirement, since migrations go smoother when they are nice to people who dwell in the previous location.
I also think a (stronger) requirement is: Leans toward a āwork groupsā workflow, with easy groups, channels and side-threads management, because itās important to be able to do actual work there (something you can do easily on Slack/Mattermost/Chanty but cannot do as easily on mere IM apps like Matrix and the likes).
Well, one of the things that came up in this thread is that we should wait for our new ED. @david-christiansen is now revealed, and will formally begin in the new 2 weeks IIUC!
Whatās the best way way to move this forward? (Presumably just putting David in the hot seat and asking him to make a snap decision in the thread is not what people had in mind!)
Whatās the best way way to move this forward?
David can, of course, speak for himself, but my answer is: Wait a few months. There are many great things that we want from the HF, but my hope is that we can move quickly to delivering improvements to the Haskell ecosystem and community. Having a debate ā about which people will manifestly not all agree ā and then executing a potential change has significant costs in both time and annoyance. This change might be a good idea in the long run. But spending yet more time organizing and reorganizing ourselves is not a good look, in my opinion. Iād rather us focus on steps we can take in the near term to make Haskell a safer choice for your projects and more pleasant to work in than to switch from one imperfect chat platform to another.
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Oh, I donāt to rush or force a contentious decision. I had the impression the conversation mainly stopped here because people said āwaitā, and so I was checking in now that the āwaitā was dying down.
For me, facilitating good communication is not a distraction from good work, even in the short term, but precisely how that good work gets done. But if others donāt see it that way ā see instead we are already full steam ahead just getting reoriented with new staff and getting existing projects out the door ā then so be it.
My caring about how we work always has still getting out of the way of HF staff doing the day-to-day job as a top priority.
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I absolutely understand the concerns about Slack that are expressed earlier in this thread, but my instincts point me in the same direction as @rae. Meta-work spent figuring out how to do our work is important, but thereās definitely diminishing returns as more is done, and I worry that opening this can of worms right now will mean not getting other things done.
Perhaps we can have it in the back of our heads and then revisit the question when Iāve been working at the HF for some months and have more insight into where our efforts are going?
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OK! Itās your call. I can wait until then.
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This is a good reason for not using Matrix at the moment. Elementās search isnāt great.
(but I still like Matrix)
Well note we are just using Slack free tier, and so it has already pay-walled some past messages. Surely that is worse!
I suppose one thing I missed in that framing of this is emphasizing just how much the HF slack is basically dead, so this is really less āshould we switch chat apps?ā than ādo we want to try to resuscitate having a chat at all?ā
If the old thing is not in use, then switching is less disruptive because no one needs to stop doing what they were doing.
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All good points. In my experience the most socially enticing platforms are Discord and Telegram. Telegram is a non starter for work and data ownership. Discord is a non starter for the latter of these two reasons. Matrix is not ideal for searchability. So again, I cannot narrow down on anything else on the market than Chattermost. (Sorry if I sound like I am obsessed with it; I just think it tick all boxes.)
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