Hello and welcome to episode 66 of Linux Downtime.
I'm Joe.
I'm Martin.
I'm Hayden and I'm Gary.
Good to talk to you all again.
So today I want to talk about communication platforms.
Now this is somewhat inspired by the starting of a Discord server for late-night Linux and
the late-night Linux family of podcasts.
So we now have a Discord server, but that made me very aware that some people don't
like Discord because it's not on open platform.
And so we've also got Telegram, which isn't open, but we've got Matrix and IRC.
So we've got all the choices basically.
And it made me think, should open source projects and podcasts about open source things communicate
with their community via open platforms?
Or should you meet people where they are places like Discord?
Now Martin, I know that you are going to say Discord.
That's pretty obvious given that you've got your fancy Discord for your wimpy's world
business.
Gary, you just seem to be inherently into all the platforms.
And so you do believe in meeting people where they are though, because I was quite surprised
that you were so into Discord.
You've paid for the premium and you're like proper into it.
Well, part of that was so that I could use the pigeon emojis everywhere.
This really made a reason to pay for it.
But the bigger thing for me is that we do want to meet our community everywhere because
it makes it easier for us to help them.
Because not everyone is going to know where all discussion happens.
And ideally you would have one central repository for this.
But without community managers or documentation people, there's not really someone to come
and put all that together.
So we just try to triage things as they come.
So Martin, give us the hard sell for Discord.
And you're all in on Discord, aren't you?
You don't even have other platforms for your WinPis world community.
I do have other platforms for WinPis world.
I have GitHub Discord Twitch YouTube, which you like to name any other non open source
platforms that I'm using in order to make all of that work.
I have my own website and that's all hosted through GitHub pages and uses GitHub discussions
for the comment system.
But I think actually there's a more interesting question here.
So there's that whole like meet people where they are.
But I think there's a balance to be struck.
And I'm curious why you decided you don't have to answer this right now.
We'll circle back to this, but why you decided to add a Discord as well.
Because my feeling is you should create a place for the community to assemble as somebody
who's creating a project or a community.
But I think what's not being done well in many cases is, oh, we have an IRC channel,
we have Matrix, we have Discord, and we have Telegram.
But all of those are islands.
I'm not saying that's the case with late night Linux family of podcast.
Well, it is because they're not bridged at this time.
So yeah, they are islands.
Right.
So that's where I think it fails a bit because you don't have a sense of community.
You've just got four places where different fractions of the community congregate.
And so I chose to use Discord for my own community two and a half years ago now, I think
it was because I wanted to have people my age be able to engage with the upcoming generation
of Linux enthusiasts in order to establish those connections with the emerging generation
and people like me that are starting to age out.
So that was one of the reasons why I chose Discord and also a billion gamers can't be
wrong.
It's a very good platform.
But I think the more interesting thing is don't divide the eyes.
Like don't fragment where you are because if you're trying to be in lots of different
places and you're really not in lots of different places, then what's the point?
That's a fair point.
And that's one of the reasons why the ad hotness of me meeting everyone everywhere makes sense
because I'm already connected to all the things, right?
One of the bigger things with that is that the communities are going to pop up where they're
going to pop up.
They don't necessarily need your involvement, right?
So Martin, for your stuff, it's specifically for your stuff.
But there's like Pigeon Twitter groups and stuff like that that aren't related to the
project that are just users putting stuff together and doing their own thing, right?
And for those things, like I can't possibly be expected to go and manage and help create
that or anything.
So I'll participate where I can.
But I'm also not like a moderator or anything there.
Yeah.
And I've certainly seen that happen in the cases of projects that I've been responsible
for.
I've definitely seen like a subreddit get created.
And it's like, well, I don't really frequent Reddit.
But if that's where people want to have a conversation, then that's fine.
I just sort of do a little bit of getting to know the people that are going to run that
Reddit and they know where to find me.
But it's not somewhere I'm going to be to participate.
I think, Gary, you're a little bit of a unicorn in this discussion because of the very fact
that you make a messaging client that has to speak to all of these things.
So I suppose you have a vested technical interest in being in all of these places anyway.
Pretty much, yeah.
So the WSL community that came out of the series of WSL comp events started on Telegram
at the time Discord was certainly gaming oriented.
And I've seen the pivot over the last two years towards being a full fledged community
platform.
And there's been discussion about transitioning to Discord.
In my day job, we have a community Slack.
And the thinking behind that is that many of our users are probably already in a Slack
and adding a community Slack to their list of Slack workspaces makes sense.
But I've been monitoring what some other AIML projects and their communities are doing,
some of whom have made the leap from Slack to Discord.
And they've seen massive upticks.
I mean, they initially lose users.
Sometimes as many as 60% of their users, but they've 4 to 5xed their cross-user dialogue
and usage, and it's gone from being an entry point to interact with the engineers on the
project to being an interactive place where users communicate between each other, more
like the WSL Telegram.
So it's something I'm continuing to watch as Discord, as Martin's community clearly demonstrates,
becomes a platform for community and late night Linux adabs Discord in addition to Telegram.
So I find it interesting that I've got a lot of, I know, you know, people know I've
got an interest in Linux, and there are lots of Discord servers for Linux-related projects
and open source projects.
In my last job, there was basically all of the startups in the cloud native space were
using Discord, and there was a number of the earlier startups that actually went through
that transition from Slack to Discord because it doesn't cost as much, and it is considered
better by many people.
And what I've found is that outside of my Linux interests, all of the other interests
that I have in audio, in PC hardware, in gaming, and a whole stack of others, there are always
Discord servers to satisfy all of those interests.
In fact, I only find Discord servers as the places where these communities congregate now.
All of the open source projects that I want to interact with are all on Discord.
There's a slight splintering within the NixOS and Nix communities in that there are matrix
channels and there's a Discord, and those two are islands, a bit like how I was describing
earlier, which is unfortunate.
But I just see Discord just being commonplace now.
Is it unfortunate that there are islands, though, because the kind of person who embraces
Discord and the kind of person who wants to use matrix, they're not necessarily the kind
of people who want to communicate with each other, are they?
Well, I would say that you probably would want those people to be communicating with
each other.
For example, all of the key players in the Nix and NixOS community are in the matrix
channels, but I don't see many or any of them in the Discord server, which is known to be
an unofficial place, but there's a link to it from the NixOS website.
So those people in the Discord are having brilliant conversations, and I sit idle in
there and watch what's going on, but they're not.
They haven't got the ear of the key players in the Nix and NixOS community, so you would
ideally want everyone to be having a conversation in the same place.
With a Bontumarte, for example, where is your community with that?
Is that one Discord as well, or is that elsewhere?
So the primary place for the community for a Bontumarte is discourse, the discussion forum,
and that was set up in 2014, 2015, sometime like that.
Is the community focus, but I host a Bontumarte channel on my Discord server, and for those
people that prefer to have real-time chat interaction, that's where they are.
But discourse is open source.
It is.
Discourse also has a real-time chat feature, if you're not aware of it.
Yeah, not great though.
Yeah, that's true, very true.
But a truly open platform seems to me to be more appropriate for something like a Bontumarte
which is a desktop Linux distribution for people who either use it for pure practical
reasons or for ideological reasons.
There are far more ideological people in the desktop Linux space than there are in the
kind of wider Linux space.
And certainly when you get to the periphery of the Linux space where you are hate and
where a lot of it is running on Linux and a lot of it is open source, but there's also
a lot of people from outside that world.
It seems like the further away from the purists you get, the more acceptable it is to just
be on Discord.
But if your community has got a lot of purists in it, then surely you have to offer some truly
open platforms for those communities to congregate and talk to each other.
Why?
Because it just feels right.
I don't know.
I don't have any proper reason for you, but it would feel wrong to just say that's it.
The open platforms, they're just unofficial and we're all in on Discord now.
The Bontumarte chat community started on IRC and that was where the project got bootstrapped
and all of the early days like serious contributors did all of the hard work and heavy lifting
and helped me get things off the ground.
But it became more abundant very quickly because once that initial effort had completed, it
just sort of went a bit silent and dead.
And I would argue that I don't think it really matters what tool you choose for anything
so long as it's the right tool that is most effective for what you want to do.
And when it comes to communication, I'll be honest.
I mean, for example, this week I've switched from Element as my client for Matrix to Fluffy
Chat.
Now, both of those clients happen to be open source, but the Element desktop client and
in fact, the mobile client are pretty ropy.
I lose conversations all the time.
They just vanish from view.
It's constantly sending random reconnection things when you get these garbled messages
and I don't know why that is.
And Fluffy Chat just works terrifically.
So I don't know that the quality of the communication that happens via Matrix is actually that good
when you compare it to, in my opinion, a superior communications platform where none of those
issues are present, people just get on with the business of actually talking and conversing
and collaborating with one another.
Yeah, but you're totally locked in.
Your community is totally locked into Discord.
What if it gets taken over by a billionaire who just ruins it?
Well, that's a risky run, isn't it?
You just have to make the best decisions you can at the time.
Right.
But if you are self-hosting Mattermost, for example, then that's not a risk.
If a billionaire took it over, it just gets forked and problem solved.
So I will say that Mattermost is excellent.
It's been a while since I've used it, but I'd far rather be using Mattermost than Slack.
But Gary, I'm about to set your ears light here.
As somebody that runs a project, I haven't got enough hours in the day to be running
all of my own infrastructure to support the project as well.
And that's something I've backed away from more and more and more over the years.
The only infrastructure that I operate for the Ubuntu MARTe project now is the website
and the Discord server.
And everything else that we used to self-host, I have found other ways to facilitate those
capabilities by not having to host it myself because I don't want the responsibility really,
and I haven't got the time to do it.
Right.
But you could pay for someone to host your Mattermost for you.
You could get managed Mattermost.
Who's paying for that?
You could pay Mattermost.
Yeah, but the money's got to come from somewhere, right?
So now it's like, you know, if people want to have something on another platform and it
costs money and time to do that, then there needs to be money and time in order to support
it.
Now, as it happens, the Discord server that we operate, that was what the crowdfunding
for Ubuntu MARTe was for back in the day was to actually pay for a fairly beefy VPS back
then.
We've now got Metal servers as it happens.
But it was to cover the costs of operating a Discord server.
So we've self-hosted all of our stuff since like 2007 or so, which is basically what
you alluded to earlier.
We've had our infrastructure sponsored since 2007 or so.
So that's definitely an option that's out there that's available, but I can definitely
understand where you're coming from and you don't want to self-host everything because
yeah, it is a super time drain.
For example, I spent all last night reworking something and so it works better in our custom
infrastructure.
It gets back more to your point about picking the correct tool for the job when it comes
to communication platforms.
And that's just in general, right?
But part of that also comes down to what I think Joe is trying to say that not all of
your community members are going to agree that the tool you think is right is the right
tool for them.
And this is again where you end up with the islands and stuff like that, which I think
we're in agreement there.
There's pros and cons to both approaches, right?
Yeah.
And I look at it from the point of view of I can try to build the community as much as
I can, but I'd rather try to foster the entire community rather than focus on one small part
of it and grow that kind of thing.
Someone has probably already emailed us.
What about bridges?
Breach the islands together.
And somebody who has written multiple matrix bridges at this point, bridging is not fun.
There's so much that is not that stuff necessarily gets lost in translation, but it's very hard
to keep things straight when they're bridged.
Yeah.
I have left servers and telegram channels and IRC channels when they've become bridged because
they just become infuriatingly noisy and it's impossible to track the conversations in any
meaningful way.
What is inclined to happen is you still have these islands of communication and everyone
can see these communication threads happening, but you're not participating in the conversation
that's actually happening somewhere else.
But I still maintain that it's fine for these islands to exist and for a bunch of real freedom
lovers, old school freedom lovers who want to idle in IRC and occasionally talk to each
other and don't want to be doing with the modern ways of doing things with reactions
and images and all that nonsense.
They just want plain text.
And then you've got the freedom lovers who want the features and so they've got matrix.
And then you've got the people who have either been using Discord for years because they're
gamers or they're younger than us and into the latest thing or telegram is just what they
have discovered and got into.
It feels like the right approach is to just let those communities do their own thing and
just see what happens and you've got with the four late night Linux communities, different
sets of people having different conversations.
And that's fine, I think.
It is fine.
But do you know what those conversations are?
What was the last bit of feedback you got about late night Linux on the IRC channel?
It's not about feedback to late night Linux or any of the shows.
That's what emails for.
I think the more important thing here is that the community isn't there necessarily to directly
benefit the project.
It's there for the users of the project to interact with each other.
And I think that's the difference of the focus here.
Exactly.
And if people want to get hold of the hosts of this show, for example, then they can email
us or they can try on social media or on one of the community platforms.
But for me, the community platforms are to talk to each other as community members.
And the host of the shows will be in some of those sometimes.
But if you want to guarantee that the host of a particular show will see your thoughts,
then send an email.
And similarly with an open source project, if you've got feedback for it, there are proper
ways to do that.
And it's not necessarily through the community channels.
And often, I mean, as open source maintainers, you must get very frustrated with people just
DMing you.
And when we talked about this, DMing you bug reports, it's like, well, no, go to the
Puck tracker, do it properly, please.
That or I'll end up entering it into the issue tracker.
So it doesn't get lost.
Yeah.
And if anyone DM's me on any platform these days, my stock reply is take this conversation
to a public place so everyone can benefit from the conversation.
I simply can't entertain one to one conversations.
It doesn't scale.
But even in the Discord server, say, I don't know, there's a problem with a quick MU or
whatever that they've discovered.
Yeah.
Okay.
They could talk to you about it in the Discord server, but surely you want them to file a
proper bug.
Yeah.
And that's fine.
So what we do is GitHub is where bugs, issues on feature requests get filed and general
support inquiries like how do I get Mac OS to work with this particular release of Mac OS.
That's not a bug.
That's a technical support inquiry.
And you come to the Discord server and the quick MU channel to ask those questions.
And when people raise bugs on GitHub that are general support inquiries, I close them
and say, thanks for your interest in the project.
But for technical support, join our Discord and just close the issues because you can't
conflate the two, you know, but issue trackers are not technical support forums at all.
And the two sit alongside each other.
The all of the channels that I have for projects in Discord are hooked up to their relevant
GitHub projects and you see issues, pull requests and things of that nature automatically reflected
into those channels.
So the developers can see in one place, which is Discord, everything that's going on relating
to that project.
Well, do let us know your thoughts on this.
And like I said, email is the best way to make sure we all see it.
And that email address is show at the next downtime.com.
We'll be back in two weeks, but until then I've been Joe.
I've been discord.
I've been Hayden and I've been Gary.
Stay nice.
Thanks for watching.
Bye.
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