| 24 May 2025 |
 uep | all true | 09:48:36 |
 emily | (because of code architecture issues, or design decision?) | 09:48:46 |
| uep | as is the fact that any of this faff is letting the spammers win | 09:48:53 |
 Gnuxie 💜🐝 | there's no "letting the spammers win" please stop. Yes Matrix is unsafe, yes the people making decisions were irresponsible and stupid. None of that is new and spammers didn't change it. | 09:50:43 |
| Gnuxie 💜🐝 | In reply to @emilazy:matrix.org
(because of code architecture issues, or design decision?) both sort of | 09:51:02 |
| emily | well, letting them post CSAM is also letting the spammers win. we do have to respond in some form | 09:51:57 |
| emily | but I agree with what I think Gnuxie 💜🐝 means, which is that ultimately this is Matrix project failures | 09:52:09 |
| emily | but it is also true that I am sure that if we had someone intent on spamming a Zulip with CSAM they'd succeed and we probably wouldn't have great tools to deal with it there either. | 09:53:11 |
| emily | so there is certainly a cat-and-mouse, pragmatism element: so far nobody seems to actually want to target NixOS that badly, only Matrix | 09:53:28 |
| uep | the spammers are (to the extent we can guess any motives) trying to drive users away and make matrix a worse experience. To the extent that we make the new user joining experience harder in response, is some sort of success for them. That's all I mean. | 09:54:19 |
| emily | OTOH, insofar as Matrix's failures are exposed by spam waves that cause projects to make a pragmatic decision to use something else to dodge them, that seems like basically the correct thing to happen to Matrix because of those failures. | 09:54:20 |
| emily | I mean, of course ideally the pipeline from bad project management to people not using your thing doesn't involve abuse spreading illegal imagery to hundreds of servers… the spammers can go to hell regardless :/ | 09:55:16 |
| emily | but I don't think we should have an attitude of "we need to stay on Matrix to not let them win". (I don't think anyone has this attitude though… so maybe what I'm saying is pointless) | 09:55:46 |
| uep | right | 09:56:12 |
| emily | we moved off freenode awful fast when it turned out a certain sysop had made the dubious decision of selling the network to the Crown Prince of Korea :p | 09:57:53 |
| Gnuxie 💜🐝 | We are developing the gradual access control protection for draupnir. But it is slow and we aren't actively working on it because we also hold the burdens for homeserver admins at the moment (to stop invitations for one thing). And there are lots of other things that need immediate attention. So I can't actually promise anyone when it will be ready. | 10:04:22 |
| emily | thanks for your work. sorry you don't get more resources for it than I'm presuming you do | 10:09:27 |
| emily | I've kind of resigned myself to being a Matrix hater for years at this point but I still hope things get better because a lot of people rely on it and will do even if we move off. | 10:10:16 |
| emily | (but god I would be happy to take Element out of the dock.) | 10:11:08 |
 f0x | In reply to @emilazy:matrix.org
but also this sucks – people can join the unofficial Discords in two clicks. do we really want to cede the ground of a place people can actually quickly ask a Nix question to them? a lot of (project) Discords are also harder to access, either having to wait 10 minutes before you can say something or requiring a phone number linked to the account (not sure how guild specific the latter is) | 10:19:46 |
| emily | right. | 10:20:02 |
| emily | I think that's not true of the Nix Discords, but I haven't been in them so I wouldn't know. | 10:20:09 |
| emily | I'm just saying that's our "competition". I don't think it's strictly a competition but I think it's a deliberate decision that the Discords aren't official and we probably don't want unofficial spaces to be strictly more accessible than official ones. | 10:20:37 |
| emily | previously Matrix's federation has been a boost to the accessibility of our official space because of people being less likely to need to make accounts; compensating somewhat for Matrix's vastly lower popularity than Discord. now it seems like Matrix issues are poised to more than cancel out that federation advantage and make our space less accessible than something with a registration form. | 10:21:56 |
| emily | does Zulip support SSO integrations? could we allow anyone with a Discourse or GitHub account to join without registration? | 10:22:11 |
| emily | yes for GitHub: https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/production/authentication-methods.html | 10:22:43 |
| emily | and it does SAML/OIDC, so I assume we could reuse Discourse accounts, but that might not matter as much (if you are okay making a Discourse account you are more likely to be okay making one for chat) | 10:23:21 |
| emily | I don't know. I really think we should consider it. if we're going to spend a lot of time setting up a more permanent Matrix entryway, mightn't it be a good idea to try spinning up a demo Zulip and asking the SC what they think? | 10:24:03 |
| emily | (or Mattermost, or whatever.) | 10:24:16 |
 K900 | The big downside for Zulip is no mobile push on selfhosted | 10:24:43 |
