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 believe the thread in question is this one. This isn’t the one where a user got banned; that was a bit later in the history, but also in #general: https://app.slack.com/client/T0432GV8P/C0432GV99/thread/C0432GV99-1623240498.102300
Yeah, sorry. It was in #general but I first heard of it in #haskell.
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.
Zulip is my favorite Slack alternative, but this Discourse forum might be even better for the following reasons:
Some more discussion comparing Slack, Discord, Zulip, and Discourse is in: Discussion platform with full message history
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).
No preference on my side, but just wanted to let you know that @i-am-the-slime built a really cool Discord bot that let’s you run Purescript code.
I think having an OSS platform is great, but I also really like Discord because it’s so easy to jump into voice chat/screen sharing.
I personally like Discord because it’s fun. I dislike the UI and UX of the OSS solutions.
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!
FWIW +1 for the mention(s) above about IRC, people can choose their own clients. I have always disliked all these “commercial IRC” applications where a vendor gets your history and holds it hostage. I understand this is not a trendy nor popular suggestion.
Also be wary of “free ABC feature for XYZ users”, those deals can change or be rescinded over time, especially if the provider of such service is bought out and taken over.
I don’t care about the political stuff, but I asked a friend that used Zulip in his team in the past to give me feedback on it. Maybe it’s instructive for some of you:
It’s very different. It has a lot of things which I love and which are what I would design myself in a chat app:
input box is large by default and enter doesn’t send (invites large, thoughtful texts rather than flurries)
notifications are off by default, you receive 0 notifications
These make the app much more work-friendly, lowers disruption. It’s a bit like Discourse in that sense, almost a forum software with real-time updates
Other things are, for me, neither here nor there, but interesting nonetheless:
- there are two levels of tags, main tags and sub-tags. Any text is tagged with a tag. Those act as “channels” of sorts. Imagine if in Discord, clicking on a category would show all the the text from each channel under the category.
- there aren’t many integrations, but there’s a regex engine that allows for custom behavior. So you can have a hook that captures any
#idand links issues from some repo on github for example.Why we stopped using it:
- the tags thing sounds good on paper, but ended up being a bit useless in practice. It doesn’t replace threads, but also makes things more confusing (people often send in a top category when they mean to send in a lower category). It would be more useful if you could nest infinitely, but you can’t
- the UI is good and original, and it definitely has it’s own style, but it is sort of confusing. The shortcuts are also non traditional.
Programmers mostly liked it, but not all. Designers and other people hated it.
I personally love it on paper, but in usage it was really annoying
And later he advises in favor of Matrix or Rocket Chat (it’s the first time I heard of this one).
@ajbarber I agree with you. I am familiar with IRC, as I am already an active member of multiple IRC channels, and although it has its disadvantages, I believe that it is a good option, although I am already aware that as you said, “this is not a trendy nor popular suggestion.”
As Zulip is free software, PureScript infrastructure maintainers should be able to host it themselves, although I understand that this might not be preferable as it might consume more resources than they would like it to.
I like Discourse much better than Slack, but the complaint you mentioned is my primary issue with it, although probably not everybody shares my perspective.
IRC was the primary real-time chat channel until about 2016, if I remember rightly. I preferred IRC to Slack, partially because Slack is not open source, and I stubbornly remained in the IRC channel for quite a long time even after it was clear that the community was voting with their feet (for Slack). I sympathise with the reasons for preferring IRC but I don’t think it is realistic, based on previous experience.
FWIW I am sure we could manage self-hosting Zulip if need be. We already self-host Discourse, and of course we have to arrange hosting for Pursuit and Try PureScript too.
As it happens, for me, the ease of jumping into voice/video chat is actually a downside. I don’t really want it to be normal for people to just jump into voice or video chat, because if I’ve only just met you I don’t want to do that, and I would rather people not ask in the first place so that I don’t have to tell them “no”.
This seems entirely reasonable, but i think it also might be that “ease of striking up conversations” is a win for beginners / enthusiasts / community (maybe) and a downside for core maintainers.
I don’t have any solution to that tho, except that maybe if some candidate platform makes it easy to opt out of this that that would be a plus?
My +2 satang would be for a FOSS option as well (with bring-your-own-client being a nice to have). If Discord was chosen, I would not use it. I’ve stopped joining the Slack because I’m ‘done’ with it as well from a privacy standpoint. I don’t think these closed platforms are inclusive since they require an account for centralized, proprietary system which heightens the barrier to entry, plus we don’t know if we own our data.
Throwing out another idea (not an endorsement) that I just saw fly through my Mastodon feed was Software Freedom Conservancy choosing XMPP. TL;DR: “We evaluated and tested a multitude of options: XMPP, Matrix, RocketChat, Mattermost, Zulip, ircv3, etc and permutations of bridging support” and they chose XMPP because it was open, feature-rich, and the bridge to Matrix & IRC was good while not requiring Matrix (and also having previous experience running servers).
I believe XMPP servers, while can handle a massive amount connected clients, requires more system resources. But XMPP can do a number of other things, like hosting decentralized, federated communication & social networks 🤷.
(I actually really like Discourse BTW; it’s like a mailing list where I can make edits)
Are there any sources to back this up? I imagine that this would differ from implementation to another (I know of Prosody and Ejabberd), but nevertheless I’m curious about benchmarks.