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An observation that no-one asked me to share. The ...
# random
j
An observation that no-one asked me to share. The way we use this workspace, with the well disciplined single idea thread use, fit the discourse model for discussions: https://www.discourse.org/ They don't have an Open Source hosted version so the software would need somewhere to run; this probably stops this observation dead in its tracks. Unless someone else has thought this, please forget I've spoken.
h
Interesting point! I don’t think we’ve ever thought about Discourse in particular, although we’ve considered other platforms. One concern I’d have with Discord is that the additional structure might make things feel less accessible. I think there’s higher activation energy to start a formal new thread than to send a message in Slack
please forget I’ve spoken
Regardless of if someone has already said something or not, that’s okay! No need to say something like this 🙂
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h
@jolly-midnight-72759 I definitely think it's a good idea to think about potential alternatives to slack for pants-related communication. it's never sat well with me that pants uses a closed-source commerical product like slack as an official commnication channel
there might be an open-source product that has a similar model to Discourse that we could investigate
j
@hundreds-father-404 I was riffing off an Audre Lorde poem, A Litany for Survival, but I think I messed up the wording a bit. The last lines are "So it is better to speak/remembering/we were never meant to survive." But thank you for the encouragement. This is a welcoming community.
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@hundreds-breakfast-49010 Discourse is open source. Their business model is making the money off hosting (at least that's what I can tell from their website). If we had a server we could run our own instance.
h
oh even better. but yes self-hosting introduces some logistical complexity
j
My main problem with Slack, besides the close source, is that you can't search back to everything. It can't be a knowledge repository.
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Since there is some interest, I have a mailing list I've run for 20+ years that the new members keep asking for a slack like experience. I'm going to stand up a discourse for it and I'll report back here about how difficult it was, etc. I'll also do a cost analysis.
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h
thanks @jolly-midnight-72759 that sort of insight would be helpful
@jolly-midnight-72759 did you ever end up setting up a discourse for your mailing list group?
j
The docs are heavily docker focused and my hosted box doesn't support it. I've started translating the Dockerfile for my box, but have not got it up and running.
@hundreds-breakfast-49010 Its dependencies are Ruby 2.6+, PostgreSQL 10+, Redis 4.0+, which all seem cromulent. How much compute, storage and network it will need I still need to figure out.
h
https://blog.zulip.com/2020/07/16/zulip-3-0-released/ might also be an option of interest
j
I forgot about Zulip. They have free hosting for Open Source projects.
The mobile app doesn’t seem to suck. Want me to investigate?
Create an account on https://chat.zulip.org/ to see what it is like.
I just explored the chat.zulip.net community a bit using the mobile app. Definitely improves the thread experience. Browsing is a little harder because things are organized by threads, but I don’t think that is different than how this slack organizes itself. Code quoting and other formatting seems comparable. I think with Zulip search would be more important.
Just to revive this thread before slack sends it off the cliff. I believe Zulip would be a great place to have our community chat be located. The free for open source projects means we'd have full history search. @hundreds-breakfast-49010 have you used Zulip for other communities?
h
Playing around with Zulip right now, will see how it feels!
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j
@happy-kitchen-89482 Worth the pain of moving over to it? Not having deeper search in the chat is a missed "documentation" opportunity.
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h
I'm not sure TBH. It's cool, and it's got all the features as far as I can tell, but people are so used to slack... I worry about disruption. Maybe that's not a big deal though. Will see what some other people think.
h
One of my concerns is that we everywhere say “Join our Slack!“. Although, I suppose it’s easy for us to fix that. And we can have a pinned message in the Slack saying “Switch over to Zulip” Also, we’ll still monitor this Slack of course to help people to know to switch
Normally, I’d be concerned about losing all the history of Slack. But, that’s not applicable here and kind of the point of switching the tools 😂
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h
I think it's relatively easy to change "join our slack" to "join our official chat" in the documentation
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(and I think it makes sense to refer to "official chat" rather than whatever specific program we use for that chat, even if we do decide to remain with slack)
h
I somewhat disagree because Slack is ubiquitous. By saying “Join Slack”, it lowers the barrier to entry because it’s very unlikely they have to download a new program Just For Pants. It’s only adding a new org.
h
as long as a chat program works in a browser window, I don't think there's a significant barrier to entry
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