| 24 May 2025 |
 emily | like ok yes I get that there'll be ops overhead from running anything self-hosted… in which case we could also get the free FOSS cloud plan instead? | 10:39:00 |
| emily | but I figured self-hosted was a desideratum rather than a drawback | 10:39:07 |
| emily | they have data export/import so we could move from cloud to self-hosted and vice versa | 10:39:26 |
| emily | I know nothing is perfect and that any move would be a big decision but we could pick the nits of Matrix's flaws for days like this too. I'm just trying to figure out what the actual hard constraints are. if there's no end to these Matrix abuse issues in sight, it seems to me that it is really worth spinning up a test instance of something that seems to plausibly meet requirements and just feeling it out to see what the experience is like in terms of onboarding, mobile, desktop, what tools the moderation team will have, … | 10:44:10 |
 uep | an experiment with zulip was done for the discussions around setting up the SC | 10:44:59 |
| uep | i don't know what the results of that were, in terms of infra and hosting and moderation facilties, etc | 10:45:26 |
| uep | or user feedback | 10:45:30 |
| emily | right. though I think there were a whole bunch of confounders about that situation | 10:45:34 |
| emily | wrt what the user experience was like | 10:45:40 |
| uep | people tend to either love or hate zulip as a chat platform | 10:45:52 |
| emily | (since it was playing host to some of the most contentious discussions the project has had) | 10:46:05 |
| emily | (and also was invite-only etc.) | 10:46:18 |
| emily | I dunno. it just seems to me that we could easily set up "unofficial not the NixOS Zulip" and get the mod team on there and just sort of play around it with it a bit to see if we can imagine it replacing the Matrix. (I realize that this requires someone to actually do it and that I am dangerously close to volunteering myself.) | 10:47:21 |
| emily | and again I'm not married to Zulip here, it could be Mattermost or Rocket.Chat or whatever else | 10:47:33 |
| emily | it does seem like Zulip is one of the best options for various needs we have and maybe more likely to handle the scale of discussions and rooms we have | 10:48:02 |
| uep | i think it does just need someone to do that, more or less (several someones, but still) | 10:48:20 |
| uep | I think some hesitation just comes from the fact that it won't do anything to change the matrix issue for some time, no matter how interesting the experiment might seem. That's inertia, but real. | 10:49:26 |
| emily | I definitely don't have the capacity to do it all but if you're also volunteering then I can try to squeeze something in :p (if we do it, we should probably just set up a cloud thing so that we can test the experience before worrying about infra?) | 10:49:34 |
| emily | honestly I think this is self-imposed fatalism? | 10:49:50 |
| emily | we moved from freenode to Matrix really quickly, I was there at the time | 10:49:57 |
| emily | the crisis forced action | 10:50:03 |
| emily | that was before we even had proper decision-making; the RFC for Matrix was kinda lumbering to the finish line IIRC but I think it could still have died on the vine | 10:50:20 |
| emily | if we need a body to make this decision the SC has the authority… obviously we should only do something that actually seems like a good idea and that active users of the Matrix are happy with, I'm not saying we should replace everything overnight by fiat | 10:51:00 |
 Cat | i have heard the concern in some context that what happened on matrix will just follow you to Zulip | 10:51:30 |
| emily | but we did just spend a long time trying to establish the ability to make tough decisions as a project in a way that has legitimacy… we ought not to assume we are incapable of that when we are in a tough situation | 10:51:33 |
| Cat | and you will be in even deeper shit over there because nobody is ready. | 10:51:50 |
| Cat | But i dont know if this is true or false. | 10:52:00 |
| emily | yes, I think it's totally true that someone could attack a Zulip/Mattermost/whatever | 10:52:07 |
| emily | my impression is that on a purely pragmatic level, nobody is currently interested in doing so | 10:52:15 |
| emily | the current attackers are pretty clearly deranged about Matrix specifically | 10:52:29 |
