| 20 Feb 2024 |
|  @mjm:beeper.com left the room. | 16:24:19 |
 adamcstephens | i'll actually bow out here. i don't hang out in off topic at all, partially because of some of this kind of discussion, so i'll let y'all decide how to run it. | 16:24:45 |
 @lillecarl:matrix.org | I'm with adamcstephens 🐝. Anyone could create unlimited matrix accounts and ragebait people into these conversations that you're trying to preserve. But yeah I also agree on his last point, can't really hang out there because of what's being discussed | 16:26:16 |
 @piegames:matrix.org | Okay, let's try to bring this back on topic. A no-politics policy is absolutely off the table, as is a dedicated politics room. The problem at hands is that discussions in the Nix room are drowned by support requests. I also think that it has been exhaustively discussed why simply allowing non-Nix topics in the off-topic room is not a solution to that problem | 16:40:44 |
| @lillecarl:matrix.org left the room. | 16:49:11 |
 @joepie91:pixie.town | the suggestion has been brought up a few times over the past year or two to have a support question room separate from an on-topic discussion room. has that ever been evaluated before? | 16:52:57 |
| @joepie91:pixie.town | I know that one of the objections is that we already have topic-specific rooms, but a) those don't seem in wide use for one reason or another (though maybe that is a discoverability problem?) and b) this would not be a solution for cross-topic discussions that touch on many points, although I am unsure how frequent those are | 16:54:27 |
|  @apcodes:matrix.org joined the room. | 16:55:59 |
| @piegames:matrix.org | I'm frustrated because like way too often, I feel like Matrix is our technological bottleneck here. We are currently finding social solutions to technical problems. | 16:56:27 |
| @piegames:matrix.org | A lot of this would not be an issue if we had proper support for threaded discussions | 16:56:56 |
| @joepie91:pixie.town | yeah, I share that frustration. but given that Matrix has its own governance issues, I don't see an upstream technical solution appearing to this problem any time soon, so I do think we need to have the conversation about what we can do on a social level, and/or with bots and such | 16:57:49 |
| @joepie91:pixie.town | because it is a recurring complaint | 16:58:04 |
| adamcstephens | In reply to @piegames:matrix.org
A lot of this would not be an issue if we had proper support for threaded discussions are we unnecessarily punishing ourselves by trying to support the lowest client feature set? | 16:59:43 |
| @joepie91:pixie.town | one other community I am in has a sort of informal policy to welcome new members, ask them to introduce themselves, and tell them where to find the code of conduct and to check out the space [link] to find the different rooms for different topics. I don't know that that approach would work here as-is, both for social reasons and because of the relatively large amount of people who might only briefly come in to ask a question | 17:00:32 |
| @piegames:matrix.org | In reply to @adam:robins.wtf
are we unnecessarily punishing ourselves by trying to support the lowest client feature set? No. We would if threads were great and usable with the clients that do support it. But even in Matrix' flagship client, Element, they are an unusable pain | 17:01:12 |
| @joepie91:pixie.town | In reply to @adam:robins.wtf
are we unnecessarily punishing ourselves by trying to support the lowest client feature set? threads are broken even in element, and there are design-level issues with it - the threads problem is complex and I'm concerned that talking about the details of that problem might strand the conversation in technical minutiae with no actual short-term solution | 17:01:37 |
| @joepie91:pixie.town | (seen that happen a couple times in various places already) | 17:01:59 |
| @piegames:matrix.org | In reply to @joepie91:pixie.town
the suggestion has been brought up a few times over the past year or two to have a support question room separate from an on-topic discussion room. has that ever been evaluated before? Where and how would you draw the line between these? | 17:04:43 |
| @joepie91:pixie.town | piegames: if I am understanding the complaint correctly - support questions getting drowned in discussions that are orders of magnitude bigger than the question/answer process of a technical question - then I don't think that an exactly-defined boundary would be necessary; it could be defined as "please move the discussion if someone asks you to" | 17:06:17 |
| adamcstephens | would you need to even draw a line? or would just having a channel named support inevitably steer most of the discussion there | 17:06:28 |
| adamcstephens | though i'd wonder what the point of the nix room would be then.... | 17:06:56 |
| @joepie91:pixie.town | (the "orders of magnitude bigger" being the reason I think this could work, and it would be identifiable to people as a problem without exact guidelines) | 17:06:59 |
| @piegames:matrix.org | One idea I have in mind, not sure if it would work out, is to see the #nix:nixos.org main channel as a "hub" and entry point to the community. Discussion in there would be discouraged, while eagerly redirecting people to smaller topic-specific channels. However this would require a bit of human support | 17:07:03 |
| adamcstephens | what if #nix is a read-only room that has a message that guides users? | 17:07:51 |
| @joepie91:pixie.town | piegames: I think that is unlikely to succeed, based on past experiences; when people try to implement this in technical communities, the usual issue they run into is that people who join to ask a question often don't have much time or energy to spend on understanding the details of how the community fits together (they are just looking for help) and so it tends to just be a source of conflict, that repeats itself a lot because there are so many 'drive-by askers' | 17:08:40 |
| @joepie91:pixie.town | it would probably work a lot better for communities where people join for reasons other than "I need an X now" | 17:09:02 |
| @joepie91:pixie.town | same reason I think that "make the main channel a support channel and have a separate channel for discussions" would work better than the other way around | 17:09:34 |
| @piegames:matrix.org | In reply to @joepie91:pixie.town
piegames: if I am understanding the complaint correctly - support questions getting drowned in discussions that are orders of magnitude bigger than the question/answer process of a technical question - then I don't think that an exactly-defined boundary would be necessary; it could be defined as "please move the discussion if someone asks you to" Another issue I see is that we may still have this problem within support questions or within general Nix discussions. I don't know how it is here since I don't really ask for support, but I made this experience in other FOSS communities. Sometimes my questions get drowned in other unrelated questions, or they'll get lost in the backlog as soon as the next person asks a question etc. | 17:09:42 |
| @joepie91:pixie.town | yeah, the question volume is always a tricky one, I have not really seen any good solutions to that anywhere | 17:10:17 |
| @piegames:matrix.org | In reply to @joepie91:pixie.town
same reason I think that "make the main channel a support channel and have a separate channel for discussions" would work better than the other way around Oh I see. Yeah, agreed on that. The same way we already split out the Dev channel | 17:10:27 |
