Looking at Chattermost’s GitHub it says it’s a (-n early) clone of Mattermost. Why not use that? It’s open source, too.
Actually, I think, with a custom Matrix homeserver, you could achieve searchability.
And there’s already an active Haskell community on Matrix at #haskell-space:matrix.org that could integrate with HF rooms.
Woupsie I had a brain lapse because I certainly did mean to write “Mattermost” and not “Chattermost”. I would be glad to help migrating to Mattermost.
As for the other point, when I first entered this thread I was strongly against Matrix for the lack of email notifications. Now I’ve found out that you just need to turn them on, but I am still a bit reluctant because it’s quite deeply nested within the settings structure. On Mattermost it’s much easier to find. Also Mattermost is much easier to bend to a collaborative workflow in my experience. Rooms are easy to set up, you have out of the box global search (relative to all your rooms) and you get subthreads for side conversations.
For the record, the HF Slack started life as a tool for HF board members and executives to communicate, it subsequently morphed into a place for folks who wanted to communicate about HF work, and then further morphed in a general Haskell community forum. One of the things we should bear in mind when making a decision is which of these three things we want it to be (or something else).
That’s a very good point!
For me, all are good, but “HF board members and executives to communicate” is the lowest priority.
The strong push-back I got from @rae makes me think I was interpreted as trying to tell the staff & board how to work, but really I am just hoping for an “official community chat” with the HF’s stamp of approval on it. Come to think of it, I was surprised what the reaction was “wait for new ED” in the first place. But if I was interpreted as primarily being interested in how the HF works, then asking me to wait for new staff-people part makes a lot more sense.
I specifically like Matrix because it is good for these “concentric circles of purposes”. If I am involved with project A and project B, and I would like one to learn from the other, if they are are both using the same medium cross-project dialogue is much easier. But by the same reasoning, if I was doing some general purpose Haskell community chat, and then the discussion veers into talking about an HF project in particular, it is nice if that doesn’t mean hopping a new platform.
I am not on the board or an executive, so how those people want to talk amongst themselves does not concern me!
Ah, I think I can see how confusion arose.
For me saying “The HF’s Slack” is a bit like saying “The HF’s Google Workspace” (i.e. it’s where people formally running the HF do their work). For you I think it’s more like saying “a chat server set up by the HF for the communiy”.
As a point of information, the original reason for setting up the HF Slack was the former. Perhaps the scope has crept to the latter.
I think most people don’t interpret it that way because it’s linked on the website and open.
Which link are you seeing. I’m seeing this one
Joining the Slack is a great way to begin volunteering and participating in HF projects. …
https://haskell.foundation/contact/
which does suggest fairly strongly it’s for HF business, not a general Haskell forum. That’s not to say it couldn’t become a general Haskell forum, but that should be a conscious decision.
But it is also explicitly open to the community, not closed for board and staff. So, middle “ring” in your 3 from earlier.
What is the goal of the haskell foundation having such a platform? Is it solely for seasoned members of the community or the haskell foundation to collaborate on? Or is it for the entire ecosystem to leverage and collaborate on?
I ask these questions, because I believe it’s important to meet people where they are already. And if it’s just a platform to be used by a few people, then it’s easy to convince those people to use anything.
But if the platform is intended for everyone, then it might be tough to convince people outside our ecosystem to install new software just to keep up with the conversations there.
Eg, a developer who heard about haskell and wants to learn more, is more likely to join a slack or discord channel if they already use slack or discord on their computers, than to go over the mental barrier of downloading and using a new platform only for haskell.
Just looking at the programming ecosystems I am active on, I don’t know of any language ecosystem that uses something non-mainstream.
Here are some of the communities i’m part of:
And these are just the communities I know about. There are loads: GitHub - mhxion/awesome-discord-communities: A curated list of awesome Discord communities for programmers, GitHub - thisdot/tech-community-slacks: Here is a list of all the tech community slacks!
My point with listing this out, is that the haskell community is very small, especially compared to other ecosytems, and I don’t think we benefit from using an obscure tool which few others use, since this would be a barrier to entry fir lots of other developers who can’t justify installing a new software just for haskell.
We would however, benefit from just using the tools that most other developers are already using, and leverage that to attract more developers into our ecosystem.
It has never consciously been that. Perhaps it should be! But as yet, it has not.
I know that the syntax of comments takes 50% of language design, but seriously, folks, a gratuitous change of internal HF communication platform has the least chance to make an impact on Haskell. There are plenty of existing IRC or matrix channels, everyone is welcome to use them if they wish. But please stop forcing others, who made a (concious) choice to use Slack.
@Bodigrim See the point about the miscommunication. For internal comms, the HF can use whatever they want — none of us should care.
But for external comms — as @tomjaguarpaw points out, something the HF slack was being used for via scope creep not design, so no one is at fault here — that we have so many different fora is precisely the problem. We’re all small community that’s further balkanized.
Oh, so HF slack is for HF working communications. Also explains why it is guarded by manual approvals.
I wonder why not so much communication is happening in the slack? Do most of the workings go through mail, not HF slack?
I am confused.
Let’s suppose that the HF did switch away from Slack as a result of all this - how long would it be before someone else starts another thread with the question:
I know these things tend to spiral into long, unproductive, subjective threads, but I would, humbly, like to propose
$ALTERNATIVEinstead of Matrix for the Haskell Foundation.
(…whatever $ALTERNATIVE might be) and we all go for yet another “spin” on this creaking carnival ride?
That sounds like an excellent suggestion!
Does Slack have a private-message mode like Discourse?
Oh I missed that possibility. How naive of me.
Did not know discourse also has permission-locked discussions…
We already have haskell communities in IRC, discord, matrix and slack. Why would HF need to make a decision here? Just provide channels on all platforms. It’s already quite common to follow multiple social media channels these days.
If you want unification, there are services and bots that can connect IRC/matrix/discord/slack etc.
I don’t think there’s a good reason to make this a political or technical argument.
Two small points:
I agree with @tomjaguarpaw that the original intent was for the HF Slack to be a way for people to discuss HF projects / initiatives / etc., not as yet another general Haskell community space. Around this time last year, my understanding is that the HF Slack grew beyond these bounds somewhat, but has since died down. The HF board & staff do use the Slack instance, but not heavily, and most of the communication is via direct message or private channels.
Regardless of whether the HF Slack is for internal use only or for the community generally, the act of changing the service requires real work from HF staff – time that (I think) is better spent elsewhere, at least for now.
I am not here to reopen the discussion, just to paste a data point: How the GNOME foundation approached the problem of instant messaging.
It’s not quite as fast as I wish, but Element’s built-in search has always been reliable and accurate for me.
Re general searchability, eg with Google: services like https://view.matrix.org/?query=haskell provide search-indexed logs of the Haskell rooms - at least, the ones configured with 'history viewable by anyone". Today I noticed the main Haskell room is not one of these; I hope to fix that shortly.
Done. The Haskell room’s log now appears at https://view.matrix.org/alias/%23haskell:matrix.org
(shortcut: haskell-links.org/matrix-logs-haskell).
And in the room list at https://view.matrix.org/?query=haskell
(shortcut: haskell-links.org/matrix-logs).
How long it takes to show up in Google search results is unclear, for unknown reasons the indexing of these logs seems… very… uneven.