On Wed, 19 May 2021, Ben Gamari wrote:
Hi all,
As you may have heard the Freenode IRC network, long the home of #ghc and several other prominent Haskell channels, appears to be in the middle of a rather nasty hostile takeover [1,2,3,4]. As a consequence, it seems it will be necessary to migrate the #ghc community elsewhere.
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Consequently, I think it would be wise to expand our search space to include other FOSS platforms. At the moment, I can see the following options:
1. Remain on IRC and move to Liberachat, the spiritual successor of Freenode
2. Remain on IRC and move to OFTC, another widely used network
3. Move to [Matrix]
4. Move to [Zulip]
My sense is that of the non-IRC options Matrix is the truest successor to IRC, being a federated protocol with a wide array of (if somewhat immature) clients. I know some of our contributors already use it and in principle one could configure an IRC-to-Matrix bridge for those existing contributors who would rather continue using IRC.
Zulip, while also being FOSS, is far more centralized than Matrix and appears to be more of a chat web application than an open protocol.
Do you know of any other options? Thoughts?
Ben, Thanks for starting this conversation. I don't have much standing here as up until now, I've only been an observer, but I did notice one option missing from the list, and that's an XMPP [0] MUC (multi-user chat, a chatroom). Like Matrix, it is also federated and has many client and (unlike Matrix) many server implementations. I also noticed that the cheogram folks are offering to host free and open source projects [1]. [0] https://xmpp.org/2021/01/instant-messaging-its-not-about-the-app/ [1] https://cheogram.com/freedomware-muc/ I can't advocate for one path or another. However, I'm still charting my one way, and am interested in seeing this option evaluated. A closing thought: it might be nice if #haskell and #ghc end up at the same place, although that might be difficult if the two groups have different needs. Best, Jack