| 24 May 2025 |
 emily | I don't think we should aim to blur them too much :) | 11:08:29 |
| emily | (thankfully the Matrix mobile apps also suck…) | 11:08:46 |
| emily | like, you can stay up to date with the Discourse and read every post if you want to. you absolutely cannot keep up with the Matrix firehose | 11:09:10 |
| emily | both modes are important to the community and I think we should let them continue to coexist | 11:09:22 |
 uep | the latter point is .. fascinating. I really don't see it that way, and I think the idea that 'forums' get replaced with 'chat' (as is usually done very badly with discord) is a terrible outcome in general. But I also can see the point, even if I don't think it will work for new user and search accessibility in particular | 11:09:26 |
| emily | yeah I think we should really just assess things on the basis of being a chat replacement | 11:09:51 |
 infinisil | Yeah it's debatable :) | 11:09:59 |
| infinisil | I also like that idea because it means one less thing to maintain and moderate | 11:10:18 |
| uep | (i mean external search, of course) | 11:10:28 |
| emily | I think threading that actually works would be beneficial if it's a sensible threading model though. Matrix's threads kind of suck and also have bad client support but people try to use them here anyway and it usually goes badly | 11:10:37 |
| emily | I think we'd want a separate instance from governance probably? | 11:10:51 |
| emily | oh you mean merging Discourse and chat | 11:11:04 |
| emily | maybe yeah, though I think the moderation tasks for the two are pretty different | 11:11:15 |
| uep | zulip does threading really well, at least for highly technical and highly organised discussion. So much so that it's too structured for most people to use as "chat" | 11:11:44 |
| emily | right… I would count that against Zulip, if it does in fact make realtime chat harder | 11:12:10 |
| emily | (I haven't really used it much myself, to be clear. or Mattermost, or Rocket.Chat) | 11:12:20 |
| uep | though they have recently added a generic "no topic topic" that makes this somewhat better for ui and new users | 11:12:21 |
 Dylan | Zulip looks to be oriented towards teams not communities and the pricing seems like a non-starter considering nobody can get mobile notifications if that route was taken. I see nothing wrong with having live chat and less-live forums? | 11:12:27 |
| emily | the pricing is $0 | 11:12:38 |
| emily | for both cloud and self-hosted | 11:12:42 |
| Dylan | No? | 11:12:47 |
| emily | self-hosted we get access to their push notifications for $0 because FOSS | 11:12:49 |
| emily | cloud we get standard plan for $0 because FOSS | 11:12:54 |
| Dylan | https://zulip.com/plans/#self-hosted | 11:12:56 |
| emily | I have read the pages you are linking to | 11:13:01 |
| Dylan | Didn't know about the FOSS exception | 11:13:07 |
| emily | the server is FOSS | 11:13:07 |
| emily | the paid self-hosted stuff is for their push notifications server and support | 11:13:14 |
| emily | we would want push, but it's free for FOSS anyway | 11:13:22 |
| Dylan | Still, putting all the eggs in one basket essentially | 11:13:31 |
