| 24 May 2025 |
 emily | I imagine they'd see a project moving off Matrix as a victory if anything. I don't like that of course. | 10:52:50 |
 Cat | I can tell you while this attack might not follow | 10:53:00 |
| Cat | i have seen attacks that did follow | 10:53:05 |
| Cat | when people moved from matrix to discord | 10:53:12 |
| Cat | the attack just followed | 10:53:15 |
| emily | NixOS has made a lot of people miserable over the years but so far none of them have reacted with this level of abuse | 10:53:21 |
| emily | in the long run… ideally we have a platform with great moderation and tooling and can react super easily to attacks and everything is perfect… in practice we have a Discourse and a GitHub and this kind of thing never happens | 10:53:54 |
| emily | and the pain of this abuse on Matrix is here right now | 10:54:08 |
 infinisil | On Zulip:
- The governance instance is still used, mostly for board/SC comms, we could also easily make it public again
- The instance is hosted by Zulip itself, free for us as an open-source project
- It is a bit tainted from the governance discussion mess, but we're past that now
- The model of Zulip messages is really nice, the ability for anybody to easily create topics and to be able to move messages is top
- The only problem with Zulip is that the mobile apps suck a bit
| 11:05:45 |
| infinisil |
- Conceptually Zulip is right between Matrix and Discourse. I can see it replacing both!
| 11:06:31 |
| emily | I don't think we should think about replacing Discourse. IMO chat and forums are very separate things | 11:08:05 |
| emily | I know Zulip blurs the line to some extent, but some people really like chat and some people really like forums and some people like both for different things (I'm in that camp) | 11:08:22 |
| 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 |
