I would like to start a conversation about whether folks would be willing to switch to a different place than the FP slack. I don’t really want to get into the recent events, but focus on its CoC and its administrator’s official stance. Their decision to enforce “no politics” rules, while accepting (or even condoning) “both sides” arguments with people who (in my opinion) were at least dogwhistlling and/or agitating, if not worse.
I don’t think such a community is compatible with our community. There’s a few options that I can think of right now, and I’m sure there are others I’m not considering. I would like to invite you to a conversation on this topic.
The options I mentioned are:
make our own Slack space, owned by the PS core team: this has the advantage of keeping the same medium we’re all used to, just switching the server
discord has some advantages, like unlimited history by default and the ability to easily jump into a voice/screen sharing session with anyone which might be a nice feature, but it has worse chat features (threading is way worse than slack’s, for example)
zulip is also interesting, but I’ve found it awkward to navigate
I agree we should move. I would like to move somewhere that’s not slack. The limited message history really sucks if you want to go back and look at some older stuff
If we do move, please try to make it a FOSS platform. I really don’t want to use Slack, Discord, or any other closed solution. I’m not saying not to choose closed platforms, but just to please put “FOSS” as a pro when comparing platforms.
If you want something similar to Slack, there’s Zulip, but I haven’t used it much, so I can’t say much about it. For something more akin to Discord, I know of Matrix and XMPP (note that these are protocols, not platforms per se). Of course, we could also use good ol’ IRC, but it doesn’t support history if you don’t use a bouncer or a bridge with history (e.g. Matrix bridge, gets a bit buggy at times though).
Note that this is by no means an exhaustive list (of both solutions and pros/cons); these are just the options that I am aware of.
I am generally pretty curmudgeonly about chat/social platforms (I just signed up for Discourse to post this; I dislike Discord and Slack), and I have really been enjoying the Functional Programming Zulip instance at https://funprog.zulipchat.com/. Not a lot of traffic in the PureScript channel at the moment, but I intend to be hanging out there for the foreseeable future.
(There’s a public archive of most of the channels at https://funprog.srid.ca/, which you can read if you want to sample the discussion prior to signing up for an account; it’s also indexed by search engines, which addresses the only real dissatisfaction I’ve had with Zulip.)
Oh… huh. I haven’t seen any political drama on that instance, but I have zero context for what is happening on the FP Slack, so I don’t really know what you’re talking about.
If the FP Zulip has a particular political stance associated with it, please don’t take my previous post as an endorsement of that stance, necessarily. They don’t seem to have a CoC so I don’t know what their politics are.
If someone wants to start a PS Zulip with an explicit political stance, I’d certainly consider joining it if I’m compatible.
I have zero context for what is happening on the FP Slack, so I don’t really know what you’re talking about.
I think there was some activity that happened in the #haskell FP slack channel recently where a user got banned. I wasn’t there watching it happen in real-time, but there were a few conversations that described it.
I think Zulip gets points for being sort of Slack-like, OSS, and relatively easy to use (not requiring you to pick a client program or navigate setting up an IRC bouncer or similar), but yeah, in my mind the existing funprog.zulipchat.com is immediately out because it appears to be run by @srid and @TheMatten. The most charitable way that I can put this is that based on their comments in and around the Slack thread that @mhmdanas already linked, I would have no confidence in their ability to moderate appropriately where necessary to keep a community healthy.
Of the alternatives I have used so far, Discourse (especially this PS discourse instance) feels the most user friendly. It’s foss, and I can keep track of all the conversations and catch up easily when I’ve been away for a while.
Why not just continue on this platform? Is the complaint that discourse is not the best for realtime conversation?
+1 on moving to a dedicated place for the PureScript community. Even putting the FP Slack situation aside, I think it’d be nice to have a dedicated place.
Although I like the idea of FOSS, I vote for Discord (or Slack) because they have a better UX than Zulip (at least for my taste).
I quit the slack a while ago. Zulip is just so much better and open source (but to be clear not much PS chat happens there unfortunately). I personally find srid to have problematic views, but I also think it’s important to be exposed to people outside of your echo chamber. I have yet to see him exert power inappropriately nor have I felt like I’ve been forced into conversations I didn’t want to have. That being said, if it would stop people from joining, my vote would be to make a PureScript Zulip. If you’re not very familiar with Zulip and why it’s awesome, they do a great job selling themselves: https://zulip.com/why-zulip/
Also very much worth noting that they give free standard plans to open source communities, so we would get unlimited history!