| 24 May 2025 |
 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 |
| 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 |
