Hi all. At today's Fedora Council "virtual face-to-face" meeting, we decided that it's time to move our discussion from this mailing list and IRC to more modern platforms: namely, Discourse via https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/ and Matrix via ... something yet to be determined, but probably initially a channel on element.io and then eventually our own server.
Some Fedora Teams, like the Magazine, have already moved from the mailing list, and noted a significant increase in visiblity and participation. The fact is, even those of us who proudly self-identify as "old school" are reluctant to sign up for yet-another-mailing-list these days. It's a serious barrier to project entry.
And IRC ... it's served us well, but... it's also not kept up, and it's *long* been a problem we've seen in attracting new contributors. More and more new projects turn to Slack or Discord for their real-time discussions. I'd like us to move to something open source while such things are viable, and hopefully by doing so help them stay competitive. Since we don't have a Matrix server up and running, this is a little further off, but I wanted to mention it here.
In any case, we plan to:
* Bridge IRC and Matrix, so that you can stay on IRC and interact if that's your preference. Freenode isn't going away anytime soon!
* Plan to port zodbot to be a Matrix-native bot, so we can have logged meetings, cookies-with-badges, adamw "firing" people, etc.
* Retire this list for new posts (tentatively, starting December 1st), and instead direct conversation to https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/c/project/council-discuss/60
* Set up a bot to automatically post summaries of discussion from that category to this list, so that long-term subscribers aren't left out
Note that unlike a "BB"-style web forum, you can interact with discussion.fedoraproject.org via email, including getting individual new posts and responding in your mail client. It isn't quite a first-class experience, though -- there are many features which are web only.
Any questions about any of this? Anything I haven't thought of?
On Mon, Nov 9, 2020 at 4:32 PM Matthew Miller mattdm@fedoraproject.org wrote:
Hi all. At today's Fedora Council "virtual face-to-face" meeting, we decided that it's time to move our discussion from this mailing list and IRC to more modern platforms: namely, Discourse via https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/ and Matrix via ... something yet to be determined, but probably initially a channel on element.io and then eventually our own server.
What do you hope to gain from moving Council discussions to Discourse?
Some Fedora Teams, like the Magazine, have already moved from the mailing list, and noted a significant increase in visiblity and participation. The fact is, even those of us who proudly self-identify as "old school" are reluctant to sign up for yet-another-mailing-list these days. It's a serious barrier to project entry.
And IRC ... it's served us well, but... it's also not kept up, and it's *long* been a problem we've seen in attracting new contributors. More and more new projects turn to Slack or Discord for their real-time discussions. I'd like us to move to something open source while such things are viable, and hopefully by doing so help them stay competitive. Since we don't have a Matrix server up and running, this is a little further off, but I wanted to mention it here.
In any case, we plan to:
Bridge IRC and Matrix, so that you can stay on IRC and interact if that's your preference. Freenode isn't going away anytime soon!
Plan to port zodbot to be a Matrix-native bot, so we can have logged meetings, cookies-with-badges, adamw "firing" people, etc.
Retire this list for new posts (tentatively, starting December 1st), and instead direct conversation to https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/c/project/council-discuss/60
Set up a bot to automatically post summaries of discussion from that category to this list, so that long-term subscribers aren't left out
Note that unlike a "BB"-style web forum, you can interact with discussion.fedoraproject.org via email, including getting individual new posts and responding in your mail client. It isn't quite a first-class experience, though -- there are many features which are web only.
Any questions about any of this? Anything I haven't thought of?
I would strongly not recommend promoting the email features of Discourse. They're pretty terrible to work with from an email-workflow perspective. Personally, I'm fortunate that I don't have to discuss with the Council too much, or this might actually be a huge problem for me.
The intent to move to Matrix, however, is quite welcome. I'm looking forward to helping there wherever I can.
On Mon, Nov 09, 2020 at 04:37:04PM -0500, Neal Gompa wrote:
What do you hope to gain from moving Council discussions to Discourse?
* more visibility
* more participation
* easier involvement for new users
* @mentions and very customizable notifications
* <3 to highlight popular/interesting comments
* markdown formatting
* edit typos
* ability to include cat pics
* easily move off-topic posts to the right category
* other easier moderation (if you're the admin of any Fedora mailing list, you see the spam deluge I'm talking about)
* possible integration with Fedora Badges in the future
* Matrix integration!
* encourage other parts of Fedora by example
* me being on fewer mailing lists and getting less email in general!
I hear bells ringing.
These platforms are not established for the long term. That was one of the appeals of selecting IRC and mailing lists for those communities in the 'old days'. Those platforms are highly resilient to the passage of time.
I hope that you hear me when I ask that these decisions be weighed with the same rigor and criteria that brought things to their current state.
When these platforms fail, and they will eventually, IRC and mailing lists will still be here, but, the contact interfaces for those foss communities will have been moved around and back, thereby introducing an instability to those organizations.
Discord's not even an open source platform.
And the rush to the decision. Is this decision influenced by IBM?
Castles out of straw.
Something smells really bad about everything I've seen in terms of movements in Fedora over the last year or two.
Without violating any NDAs, since I have not signed any relevant to this, you're not attracting new contributors because there's a coordinated corporate takeover of the Linux space between a few big companies that's been going on for five years, which cause culture and project changes that impact the draw dynamics, and over the next two years you'll see the impact on Github after it is radically altered in an initiative that has not yet been announced, that no one asked for, and will have too much money in it to fail immediately -- in addition to trickle-down cultural changes in various open source communities like this one implemented by paid staffers whose purpose is to shape things to fit in line with that roadmap.
A response isn't necessary to this question, I want to leave it rhetorical, and I hope you ask it of yourself: Are the contributions you are permitting preserving the future of Linux?
Some of it's Embrace, extend, extinguish. Some of it's just poor light on a dark journey. Some it's lack of planning. I won't make claims as to what's going on with Fedora, but, something is.
-C
On Mon, 2020-11-09 at 16:32 -0500, Matthew Miller wrote:
Hi all. At today's Fedora Council "virtual face-to-face" meeting, we decided that it's time to move our discussion from this mailing list and IRC to more modern platforms: namely, Discourse via https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/ and Matrix via ... something yet to be determined, but probably initially a channel on element.io and then eventually our own server.
Some Fedora Teams, like the Magazine, have already moved from the mailing list, and noted a significant increase in visiblity and participation. The fact is, even those of us who proudly self- identify as "old school" are reluctant to sign up for yet-another-mailing-list these days. It's a serious barrier to project entry.
And IRC ... it's served us well, but... it's also not kept up, and it's *long* been a problem we've seen in attracting new contributors. More and more new projects turn to Slack or Discord for their real-time discussions. I'd like us to move to something open source while such things are viable, and hopefully by doing so help them stay competitive. Since we don't have a Matrix server up and running, this is a little further off, but I wanted to mention it here.
In any case, we plan to:
Bridge IRC and Matrix, so that you can stay on IRC and interact if that's your preference. Freenode isn't going away anytime soon!
Plan to port zodbot to be a Matrix-native bot, so we can have
logged meetings, cookies-with-badges, adamw "firing" people, etc.
- Retire this list for new posts (tentatively, starting December
1st), and instead direct conversation to https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/c/project/council-discuss/60
- Set up a bot to automatically post summaries of discussion from
that category to this list, so that long-term subscribers aren't left out
Note that unlike a "BB"-style web forum, you can interact with discussion.fedoraproject.org via email, including getting individual new posts and responding in your mail client. It isn't quite a first-class experience, though -- there are many features which are web only.
Any questions about any of this? Anything I haven't thought of?
-- Matthew Miller mattdm@fedoraproject.org Fedora Project Leader _______________________________________________ council-discuss mailing list -- council-discuss@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe send an email to council-discuss-leave@lists.fedoraproject.org Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/council-discuss@lists.fedorapr...
On Mon, Nov 09, 2020 at 04:55:34PM -0500, Chris Punches wrote:
When these platforms fail, and they will eventually, IRC and mailing lists will still be here, but, the contact interfaces for those foss communities will have been moved around and back, thereby introducing an instability to those organizations.
Things change. That's always a risk.
Discord's not even an open source platform.
We are not considering Discord.
And the rush to the decision. Is this decision influenced by IBM?
There's no rush. I've talked about it before.
Why do you imagine it would be influenced by IBM? I mean, I'll just go ahead and spell it out explicitly: of course it is not.
My goodness, Matthew, please accept my sincere apology for misreading. I swear it said Discord the first time I read it.
I'll adjust my picket signs accordingly :)
Still, though, these platforms need to be more established. I really hope the interface points with the public are managed more conservatively going forward with some effort at continuity with other communities, but still guarded against whatever is going on across the software horizon.
-C
On Mon, 2020-11-09 at 17:01 -0500, Matthew Miller wrote:
On Mon, Nov 09, 2020 at 04:55:34PM -0500, Chris Punches wrote:
When these platforms fail, and they will eventually, IRC and mailing lists will still be here, but, the contact interfaces for those foss communities will have been moved around and back, thereby introducing an instability to those organizations.
Things change. That's always a risk.
Discord's not even an open source platform.
We are not considering Discord.
And the rush to the decision. Is this decision influenced by IBM?
There's no rush. I've talked about it before.
Why do you imagine it would be influenced by IBM? I mean, I'll just go ahead and spell it out explicitly: of course it is not.
-- Matthew Miller mattdm@fedoraproject.org Fedora Project Leader _______________________________________________ council-discuss mailing list -- council-discuss@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe send an email to council-discuss-leave@lists.fedoraproject.org Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/council-discuss@lists.fedorapr...
On Mon, Nov 09, 2020 at 05:05:25PM -0500, Chris Punches wrote:
My goodness, Matthew, please accept my sincere apology for misreading. I swear it said Discord the first time I read it.
Thank you! It's sometimes hard to be wrong on the internet. :) We definitely don't want to move to something proprietary. Discourse, the software are using, has been around since 2014, and is entirely open source (not merely open core, which is a rare pleasant situation I'm happy to encourage).
We've used it for https://discussion.fedoraproject.org and https://ask.fedoraproject.org for about two years, and I've been really happy with how that turned out. I'm reasonably confident that there's a future here.
On the IBM comments, let me add: I've seen no evidence of any undue IBM influence on Red Hat's corporate plans (and while I'm not exactly a corporate suit, I'm positioned well enough that I'd notice), *let alone* on Fedora. In fact, I'd really love to see IBM become a little more involved. Our resourcing from Red Hat is pretty narrowly focused (on RHEL success), and IBM could help invest in some more speculative things and wider community priorities. But, as of so far, no influence for either ill *or* good.
....Discourse, the software are using, has been around since 2014, and is entirely open source (not merely open core, which is a rare pleasant situation I'm happy to encourage).
Six or seven years, and not on a platform governed by an IEEE/IETF standard, though. I'll have to dig through it to understand its internals to put my mind at ease, as, I think my primary dependence on IRC is that it's goverend by an RFC-driven protocol so, you know, if that system fails, another will pop up that implements that protocol. Same for mailing lists.
That also means there's a whole downstream ecosystem of tools around them both.
On the IBM comments, let me add: I've seen no evidence of any undue IBM influence on Red Hat's corporate plans (and while I'm not exactly a corporate suit, I'm positioned well enough that I'd notice), *let alone* on Fedora. In fact, I'd really love to see IBM become a little more involved. Our resourcing from Red Hat is pretty narrowly focused (on RHEL success), and IBM could help invest in some more speculative things and wider community priorities. But, as of so far, no influence for either ill *or* good.
Well. I just hope both Fedora and RedHat keep in memory that they were bought because they were successful. IBM needed them not the other way around.
I sound like I hate IBM. I actually don't. I'm just mid-scramble watching all the movement with these acquisitions the last few years (not just RH) and still trying to get a decent view of where it's going.
Some of that's an artifact of the legacy the corporate space has with open source. If monolithic fortune lists collaborate to deplatform a troll like Alex Jones, who knows what they'll do to establish an oligarchy in the systems and software markets worth trillions of dollars in investment returns.
:: puts on a tin foil fedora ::
-C
On Mon, Nov 09, 2020 at 05:05:25PM -0500, Chris Punches wrote:
My goodness, Matthew, please accept my sincere apology for misreading. I swear it said Discord the first time I read it.
I'll adjust my picket signs accordingly :)
Still, though, these platforms need to be more established. I really hope the interface points with the public are managed more conservatively going forward with some effort at continuity with other communities, but still guarded against whatever is going on across the software horizon.
I think this is a valid point, but not something that should block adopting somethingnew. One point to remember is that these changes are not mandates for all projects within Fedora. There is solid evidence that Council engagement with the community is difficult given current tools. I think the new tools here makes sense for the Council. That probably also means the types of users each sub-project of Fedora is engaging with are different. And that's fine.
One thing I like about Matrix is the bridge with IRC. This makes it easier to engage with those users already on IRC but also removes the hurdle for new users who are unfamiliar with IRC. If Matrix goes away it goes away, but like you said...technologies like IRC will likely remain and I forsee whatever replaces Matrix as continuing to offer an IRC bridge simply because that expectation will remain.
Thanks,
-C
On Mon, 2020-11-09 at 17:01 -0500, Matthew Miller wrote:
On Mon, Nov 09, 2020 at 04:55:34PM -0500, Chris Punches wrote:
When these platforms fail, and they will eventually, IRC and mailing lists will still be here, but, the contact interfaces for those foss communities will have been moved around and back, thereby introducing an instability to those organizations.
Things change. That's always a risk.
Discord's not even an open source platform.
We are not considering Discord.
And the rush to the decision. Is this decision influenced by IBM?
There's no rush. I've talked about it before.
Why do you imagine it would be influenced by IBM? I mean, I'll just go ahead and spell it out explicitly: of course it is not.
-- Matthew Miller mattdm@fedoraproject.org Fedora Project Leader _______________________________________________ council-discuss mailing list -- council-discuss@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe send an email to council-discuss-leave@lists.fedoraproject.org Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/council-discuss@lists.fedorapr...
council-discuss mailing list -- council-discuss@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe send an email to council-discuss-leave@lists.fedoraproject.org Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/council-discuss@lists.fedorapr...
On Mon, Nov 09, 2020 at 04:32:20PM -0500, Matthew Miller wrote:
Hi all. At today's Fedora Council "virtual face-to-face" meeting, we decided that it's time to move our discussion from this mailing list and IRC to more modern platforms: namely, Discourse via https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/ and Matrix via ... something yet to be determined, but probably initially a channel on element.io and then eventually our own server.
Some Fedora Teams, like the Magazine, have already moved from the mailing list, and noted a significant increase in visiblity and participation. The fact is, even those of us who proudly self-identify as "old school" are reluctant to sign up for yet-another-mailing-list these days. It's a serious barrier to project entry.
And IRC ... it's served us well, but... it's also not kept up, and it's *long* been a problem we've seen in attracting new contributors. More and more new projects turn to Slack or Discord for their real-time discussions. I'd like us to move to something open source while such things are viable, and hopefully by doing so help them stay competitive. Since we don't have a Matrix server up and running, this is a little further off, but I wanted to mention it here.
In any case, we plan to:
Bridge IRC and Matrix, so that you can stay on IRC and interact if that's your preference. Freenode isn't going away anytime soon!
Plan to port zodbot to be a Matrix-native bot, so we can have logged meetings, cookies-with-badges, adamw "firing" people, etc.
Retire this list for new posts (tentatively, starting December 1st), and instead direct conversation to https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/c/project/council-discuss/60
Set up a bot to automatically post summaries of discussion from that category to this list, so that long-term subscribers aren't left out
Note that unlike a "BB"-style web forum, you can interact with discussion.fedoraproject.org via email, including getting individual new posts and responding in your mail client. It isn't quite a first-class experience, though -- there are many features which are web only.
Any questions about any of this? Anything I haven't thought of?
At the risk of digging up more alternatives, has any consideration been given to zulip instead of matrix? ( https://github.com/zulip ) They are open source, have been around longer than matrix, are more active than matrix and provide free hosting for open source projects (so we would not need to run a server if we didn't want to) ( https://zulip.com/for/open-source/ )
They also have a number of improvements over matrix/irc like topics in channels.
Of course it could also be linked to irc/matrix so we could let folks choose, but I'm not sure how the threading works for that case.
kevin
On Mon, Nov 09, 2020 at 02:28:06PM -0800, Kevin Fenzi wrote:
At the risk of digging up more alternatives, has any consideration been given to zulip instead of matrix? ( https://github.com/zulip ) They are open source, have been around longer than matrix, are more active than matrix and provide free hosting for open source projects (so we would not need to run a server if we didn't want to) ( https://zulip.com/for/open-source/ )
I'm open to considering! Matrix is the one most of us on the council are familiar with, and groups like Fedora Design have been using it for a while.
On Mon, Nov 09, 2020 at 05:36:04PM -0500, Matthew Miller wrote:
On Mon, Nov 09, 2020 at 02:28:06PM -0800, Kevin Fenzi wrote:
At the risk of digging up more alternatives, has any consideration been given to zulip instead of matrix? ( https://github.com/zulip ) They are open source, have been around longer than matrix, are more active than matrix and provide free hosting for open source projects (so we would not need to run a server if we didn't want to) ( https://zulip.com/for/open-source/ )
I'm open to considering! Matrix is the one most of us on the council are familiar with, and groups like Fedora Design have been using it for a while.
Sure. I'll see what I can do to provide a proof of concept or demo.
kevin
Hey Kevin!
Ar 11/9/20 5:28 PM, scríobh Kevin Fenzi:
At the risk of digging up more alternatives, has any consideration been given to zulip instead of matrix? ( https://github.com/zulip ) They are open source, have been around longer than matrix, are more active than matrix and provide free hosting for open source projects (so we would not need to run a server if we didn't want to) ( https://zulip.com/for/open-source/ )
Since we use Matrix for the design team I am wondering about your point re: matrix being less active than zulip? I've been a Matrix patreon for a long time and Matthew and Amandine and the rest of the team give solid regular video updates and have always seemed consistently active to me even more so now that they've picked up some rather large customer accounts, but I might have missed something.
I really trust your opinion / judgment so I wanted to learn more!
~m
On Tue, Nov 10, 2020 at 09:48:43AM -0500, Máirín Duffy wrote:
Hey Kevin!
Ar 11/9/20 5:28 PM, scríobh Kevin Fenzi:
At the risk of digging up more alternatives, has any consideration been given to zulip instead of matrix? ( https://github.com/zulip ) They are open source, have been around longer than matrix, are more active than matrix and provide free hosting for open source projects (so we would not need to run a server if we didn't want to) ( https://zulip.com/for/open-source/ )
Since we use Matrix for the design team I am wondering about your point re: matrix being less active than zulip? I've been a Matrix patreon for a long time and Matthew and Amandine and the rest of the team give solid regular video updates and have always seemed consistently active to me even more so now that they've picked up some rather large customer accounts, but I might have missed something.
I really trust your opinion / judgment so I wanted to learn more!
Well, that was just eyeballing the github status and from some zulip pages. In retrospect, it's really not an easy thing to say without being involved in both communities... I mean I have no idea where matrix work is going on (outside commits, which is probibly a poor measure).
Matrix definitely has advantages over IRC, but I kind of feel like it's not gone far enough... the zulip threading seems like a step up over that. (Of course I have not used zulip day to day either).
Anyhow, I'll see about setting up some demo or proof of concept and invite folks to take a look when time permits.
kevin
Hi Kevin,
Ar 11/10/20 1:11 PM, scríobh Kevin Fenzi:
On Tue, Nov 10, 2020 at 09:48:43AM -0500, Máirín Duffy wrote: Well, that was just eyeballing the github status and from some zulip pages. In retrospect, it's really not an easy thing to say without being involved in both communities... I mean I have no idea where matrix work is going on (outside commits, which is probibly a poor measure).
I do occasionally watch the weekly developer calls and it is actually quite active. You may have been looking at the repos related to the old server; a lot of effort is going into a new server. The older server is called synapse and dendrite is the new one. matrix.org I believe is running synapse but it should be a big upgrade when it moves to dendrite.
https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse%C2%A0 (last commit 4 days ago) https://github.com/matrix-org/dendrite (last commit yesterday)
Matrix definitely has advantages over IRC, but I kind of feel like it's not gone far enough... the zulip threading seems like a step up over that. (Of course I have not used zulip day to day either).
I have a tiny bit of experience with Zulip. When COVID started, the non-profit org I am a board member of attempted to do remote meetings through chat and we tried Zulip for 2-3 meetings (I think this past April-May-June.) Let me say that this non-profit is *not* a techy audience; it's a local coop for children and parents and the board members are parents from the group. The threading system actually ended up confusing the other board members and it didn't work out too well; kind of similarly to how the Slack I have to use for one of the projects I'm involved with gets confused with subthreads on the occasion they come up. As a UX person, I do prefer the matrix reply-to style that doesn't generate thread offshoots that aren't immediately visible or obvious for users not experienced with the feature.
The reason we tried Zulip instead of Matrix is because I think our CRM system at the time had some kind of Zulip integration. We ended up dropping Zulip and just use the embedded chat in our video chat client instead now.
Anyhow, I'll see about setting up some demo or proof of concept and invite folks to take a look when time permits.
+1
I also just want to put out there that I've been trying to put together a small matrix homeserver on fedora infra to set up a telegram<=>matrix bot (but I have no clue what I'm doing so it is going to probably take me a few weeks.)
If we had our own matrix homeserver then it would be trivial to set up a telegram bot. The telegram<=>matrix bot is *really* nicely integrated, I tested one someone else had set up. It sets up "puppets" on either side with the user profile details, and appears completely native to the other system. It also allows for seamless DM between the two systems. For better or worse we do have a community of some folks on telegram. Right now the tg bot in the design channel causes a lot of confusion (am I a bot, or am I human? lol) and doesn't allow DM between services.
~m
On Tue, Nov 10, 2020 at 01:53:49PM -0500, Máirín Duffy wrote:
I have a tiny bit of experience with Zulip. When COVID started, the non-profit org I am a board member of attempted to do remote meetings through chat and we tried Zulip for 2-3 meetings (I think this past April-May-June.) Let me say that this non-profit is *not* a techy audience; it's a local coop for children and parents and the board members are parents from the group. The threading system actually ended up confusing the other board members and it didn't work out too well; kind of similarly to how the Slack I have to use for one of the projects I'm involved with gets confused with subthreads on the occasion they come up. As a UX person, I do prefer the matrix reply-to style that doesn't generate thread offshoots that aren't immediately visible or obvious for users not experienced with the feature.
I can see how it could cause confusion... The default seems to be that anyone can make any threads they like. I think it might be usefull if this was more carefully curated. ie, you see a bunch of people in general/default topic talking about say fudcon prep you could make a topic and move that stuff there.
The reason we tried Zulip instead of Matrix is because I think our CRM system at the time had some kind of Zulip integration. We ended up dropping Zulip and just use the embedded chat in our video chat client instead now.
ok. One downside to that is that most video chats don't save your chat logs from that, or show the entire thing to people who join late. ;( Perhaps they will get better...
On Tue, Nov 10, 2020 at 03:27:55PM -0500, Matthew Miller wrote:
I'm interested to try it for sure. Ironically though, I'm not excited about the "topics" feature as they've described it in their "features" slideshow:
Messages in Zulip retain their context even if they’re sent hours after the conversation started .... Without topics, it’s hard to catch up efficiently, and hard to participate in conversations that started while you were away.
... because I really don't _want_ that from a real-time chat platform. I don't need _another_ place to check an ever-growing backlog. It seems like this is actually designed to replace _both_ real-time chat and async messaging like an email list or web forum, and ... I'm not sure I'm ready for that. :)
Well, instead of a channel with 1000 lines of backscroll, you can only subscribe to/read the topics you care about, so it helps you not have as much to read back on?
On Tue, Nov 10, 2020 at 03:41:43PM -0500, Neal Gompa wrote:
This feature in Slack exhausts me. It has a high tendency to require managing many more parallel threads of conversations, and it's mentally draining to keep up.
I think it depends on how good the topics curation is... but I can understand how it could be bad.
That said, I have a slightly larger criticism of Zulip over Matrix, and that is that Zulip is an inherently closed platform, like Mattermost, Slack, and others like them. Today, anyone from any
I am really not sure what you mean here? zulip is 100% open source.
Or do you mean that it's users are closed into one instance?
Or ?
community can trivially join our IRC channels and participate in discussions. This aspect of IRC is something that Matrix carries further than any other option through its federation functionality.
ok, so you are talking about federation?
Well, zulip can auth people by any of a number of ways. You can use saml2/oidc I think, so you can let any number of idps create/auth users. You can also have 'guest' users that you can limit in various ways (only join some rooms, only have some perms, only see some topics).
For example, since I launched the Fedora KDE SIG Matrix room, we now have members from the KDE community actively collaborating with us in the Fedora KDE Matrix room. They can join our room from the KDE Matrix homeserver. I presume that eventually we'll see the same benefit for GNOME and Fedora Workstation once they finally get their stuff in order.
I suppose.
In general, now that Matrix has a number of clients and has a well-defined standard, communities are starting to more aggressively adopt it. The Mozilla IRC server is now just a gateway to the Mozilla Matrix server, for example. And I would easily foresee us doing the same once we switch over to our own Matrix server.
The openSUSE Project is also in the process of rehoming onto Matrix, and already *has* a server up and running. Debian has done the same, too.
From my perspective, I'd like for us to focus on a transition to a Matrix-first world for real-time communication.
I guess I can look at matrix again, but at the time (a year or two ago?) the client was not great, the android client kept sending back and forth and ran my battery down quickly due to this polling. The sever was... not fun to setup/get running (sounds like they are making a new nicer server tho).
Anyhow, I hope we will have a open process and look at everything and choose the (open source) solution that meets most of our needs.
kevin
Ar 11/10/20 7:18 PM, scríobh Kevin Fenzi:
I guess I can look at matrix again, but at the time (a year or two ago?) the client was not great,
They've redone the official client, the old one was called Riot, the new one is called Element. There's many other clients too that are native like Quaternion, nheko (Qt), Spectral and Mirage (qml), and Fractal (GTK).
the android client kept sending back and forth and ran my battery down quickly due to this polling.
Did you install it from f-droid? The f-droid one doesn't use Google play services so it needs that polling set up (which *any* client not using Google play services would need.) The Google Play client uses Google play and doesn't wear down your battery (I have used both and learned from experience.)
~m
On Wed, Nov 11, 2020 at 08:39:44AM -0500, Máirín Duffy wrote:
Ar 11/10/20 7:18 PM, scríobh Kevin Fenzi:
I guess I can look at matrix again, but at the time (a year or two ago?) the client was not great,
They've redone the official client, the old one was called Riot, the new one is called Element. There's many other clients too that are native like Quaternion, nheko (Qt), Spectral and Mirage (qml), and Fractal (GTK).
Yeah, there do seem more clients now.
the android client kept sending back and forth and ran my battery down quickly due to this polling.
Did you install it from f-droid? The f-droid one doesn't use Google play services so it needs that polling set up (which *any* client not using Google play services would need.) The Google Play client uses Google play and doesn't wear down your battery (I have used both and learned from experience.)
Yes. My phone is de-googled, so I am sure I installed from f-droid. :)
kevin
On Tue, Nov 10, 2020 at 10:11:29AM -0800, Kevin Fenzi wrote:
Matrix definitely has advantages over IRC, but I kind of feel like it's not gone far enough... the zulip threading seems like a step up over that. (Of course I have not used zulip day to day either).
I'm interested to try it for sure. Ironically though, I'm not excited about the "topics" feature as they've described it in their "features" slideshow:
Messages in Zulip retain their context even if they’re sent hours after the conversation started .... Without topics, it’s hard to catch up efficiently, and hard to participate in conversations that started while you were away.
... because I really don't _want_ that from a real-time chat platform. I don't need _another_ place to check an ever-growing backlog. It seems like this is actually designed to replace _both_ real-time chat and async messaging like an email list or web forum, and ... I'm not sure I'm ready for that. :)
On Tue, Nov 10, 2020 at 3:28 PM Matthew Miller mattdm@fedoraproject.org wrote:
On Tue, Nov 10, 2020 at 10:11:29AM -0800, Kevin Fenzi wrote:
Matrix definitely has advantages over IRC, but I kind of feel like it's not gone far enough... the zulip threading seems like a step up over that. (Of course I have not used zulip day to day either).
I'm interested to try it for sure. Ironically though, I'm not excited about the "topics" feature as they've described it in their "features" slideshow:
Messages in Zulip retain their context even if they’re sent hours after the conversation started .... Without topics, it’s hard to catch up efficiently, and hard to participate in conversations that started while you were away.
... because I really don't _want_ that from a real-time chat platform. I don't need _another_ place to check an ever-growing backlog. It seems like this is actually designed to replace _both_ real-time chat and async messaging like an email list or web forum, and ... I'm not sure I'm ready for that. :)
This feature in Slack exhausts me. It has a high tendency to require managing many more parallel threads of conversations, and it's mentally draining to keep up.
That said, I have a slightly larger criticism of Zulip over Matrix, and that is that Zulip is an inherently closed platform, like Mattermost, Slack, and others like them. Today, anyone from any community can trivially join our IRC channels and participate in discussions. This aspect of IRC is something that Matrix carries further than any other option through its federation functionality. For example, since I launched the Fedora KDE SIG Matrix room, we now have members from the KDE community actively collaborating with us in the Fedora KDE Matrix room. They can join our room from the KDE Matrix homeserver. I presume that eventually we'll see the same benefit for GNOME and Fedora Workstation once they finally get their stuff in order.
In general, now that Matrix has a number of clients and has a well-defined standard, communities are starting to more aggressively adopt it. The Mozilla IRC server is now just a gateway to the Mozilla Matrix server, for example. And I would easily foresee us doing the same once we switch over to our own Matrix server.
The openSUSE Project is also in the process of rehoming onto Matrix, and already *has* a server up and running. Debian has done the same, too.
From my perspective, I'd like for us to focus on a transition to a Matrix-first world for real-time communication.
How can I be looped into the discussions about Matrix and bridge bots?
Radka
------------------------------ *Radka Gustavsson - Janeková (she/her)* .NET Core QE Lead, Red Hat *radka.gustavsson@redhat.com radka.gustavsson@redhat.com* IRC: radka | Freenode: Rhea
On Mon, Nov 9, 2020 at 10:34 PM Matthew Miller mattdm@fedoraproject.org wrote:
Hi all. At today's Fedora Council "virtual face-to-face" meeting, we decided that it's time to move our discussion from this mailing list and IRC to more modern platforms: namely, Discourse via https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/ and Matrix via ... something yet to be determined, but probably initially a channel on element.io and then eventually our own server.
Some Fedora Teams, like the Magazine, have already moved from the mailing list, and noted a significant increase in visiblity and participation. The fact is, even those of us who proudly self-identify as "old school" are reluctant to sign up for yet-another-mailing-list these days. It's a serious barrier to project entry.
And IRC ... it's served us well, but... it's also not kept up, and it's *long* been a problem we've seen in attracting new contributors. More and more new projects turn to Slack or Discord for their real-time discussions. I'd like us to move to something open source while such things are viable, and hopefully by doing so help them stay competitive. Since we don't have a Matrix server up and running, this is a little further off, but I wanted to mention it here.
In any case, we plan to:
Bridge IRC and Matrix, so that you can stay on IRC and interact if that's your preference. Freenode isn't going away anytime soon!
Plan to port zodbot to be a Matrix-native bot, so we can have logged meetings, cookies-with-badges, adamw "firing" people, etc.
Retire this list for new posts (tentatively, starting December 1st), and instead direct conversation to https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/c/project/council-discuss/60
Set up a bot to automatically post summaries of discussion from that category to this list, so that long-term subscribers aren't left out
Note that unlike a "BB"-style web forum, you can interact with discussion.fedoraproject.org via email, including getting individual new posts and responding in your mail client. It isn't quite a first-class experience, though -- there are many features which are web only.
Any questions about any of this? Anything I haven't thought of?
-- Matthew Miller mattdm@fedoraproject.org Fedora Project Leader _______________________________________________ council-discuss mailing list -- council-discuss@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe send an email to council-discuss-leave@lists.fedoraproject.org Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/council-discuss@lists.fedorapr...
On Fri, Nov 13, 2020 at 09:55:01AM +0100, Radka Gustavsson wrote:
How can I be looped into the discussions about Matrix and bridge bots?
This is a good start....
Well, actually! Let's put this into practice. Join me at https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/the-future-of-real-time-chat-discussi... to figure out next steps.
That is fairly unfortunate. I don't see how it could bring greater participation, only less. It's harder to use Discord than a mail client. Everyone has a mail client. Everyone uses email. Not everyone can work that clunky UI or get mail to Discourse to work to begin with.
Hi,
That is fairly unfortunate. I don't see how it could bring greater
participation, only less. It's harder to use Discord than a mail client. Everyone has a mail client. Everyone uses email. Not everyone can work that clunky UI or get mail to Discourse to work to begin with.
Discord is not in the play. It's "Discourse" [1][2][3] a discussion platform, not a IM client.
Br, [1] https://www.discourse.org/about [2] https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/ [3] https://ask.fedoraproject.org/
On Sun, Nov 15, 2020 at 02:53:02PM -0300, Eduard Lucena wrote:
Hi,
That is fairly unfortunate. I don't see how it could bring greater
participation, only less. It's harder to use Discord than a mail client. Everyone has a mail client. Everyone uses email. Not everyone can work that clunky UI or get mail to Discourse to work to begin with.
Discord is not in the play. It's "Discourse" [1][2][3] a discussion platform, not a IM client.
From what I see around various moves to discourse, not all were successful. For example, the various SIGs that move to discussion.fp.o seems to have stalled: https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/c/sigs/rpm-packaging/17 https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/c/sigs/rust/16
And I can't say really say that the numbers are impressive for bigger categories either, especially for something here since ~2 years. And that's not just Fedora, since GNOME has also a instance: https://discourse.gnome.org/ and the traffic seems quite low after a few months of being a novelty.
So I do not feel changing the platform always bring more people long term.
Since earlier mails speak of increased engagement, do we have a numerical target at least to decide what would be a success (like, how much people using it in how much time) ?
Regarding Matrix, I am all to replace IRC (as a protocol at least, I still think most clients besides irssi are terribly inefficient for my professional usage), but the current state of the matrix ecosystem make me think that this will requires a bit of sustained effort all accross the stack to make it easier to use for all people before any serious move unless we keep IRC as a option.
I am running my own server (Synapse on Fedora 33 in a DC), and compared to a typical packaged software in the same space (Prosody in my case), the setup was a bit a chore. Documentation was a bit scattered (not SMTP stack level of scattered, but not great for a 1 single server stack), and synapse is working, but still has rough edge.
For example, I stumbled on https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/issues/3294 due to a / at the wrong place (and not exactly the most helpful message in log).
The setup of DNS + SSL cert + /.well-known was a chore (and this regressed from 2 years ago, where the acme negociation was done by synapse).
The whole move to E2EE room was also a bit botched, since for example, fractal is not able to connect to some rooms until https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/fractal/-/merge_requests/626 is merged. I have been told of a workaround, but that's not exactly going in the right direction.
So I kinda feel that for now, Matrix would either result in people using the same server/client (e.g., everybody on matrix.org like now), or restrict discussion on people who are experts in server setup (which is ok for me, but that's my job) or would requires CPE to provides a server, either self hosted, or hosted somewhere.
Given the current bi weekly release cadence (https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/tags), self hosting would result in a rather big strain on sysadmins time. For my own stuff, I do not care about being super up to date and fix all CVEs so I use the Fedora package, but I guess that if I was facing GDPR fines due to having lots of users, I would surely change my mind
Which leave us with paid hosting is the solution, which also bring to my last point.
I was speaking this morning with GNome folks of their plann for irc/matrix integration: https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/Engagement/initiatives/chat-evaluation/-/issu...
Thibault told me this morning that he was trying to get someone to pay the last 5k € for fixing the bridges.
Given the state of the ecosystem, I think a irc/matrix bridge is the way to go, and so if Fedora has some money to get the project going faster (cause I assume we would go for paid hosting), pooling efforts with GNOME could be a solution.
That was a typo on my part, sorry about that. I was referring to Discourse.
council-discuss@lists.fedoraproject.org
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Chris Punches -
David Cantrell -
Eduard Lucena -
John M. Harris, Jr. -
Kevin Fenzi -
Matthew Miller -
Michael Scherer -
Máirín Duffy -
Neal Gompa -
Radka Gustavsson