| 24 May 2025 |
 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 |
| 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 |
