(I'm a little ashamed that I lurk on this list but the thing that brings me out of lurking is a post on communication technologies) Not Zulip. Please not Zulip. I've used Zulip once many years ago, and once this year. Both times, its interface felt clunky, and it felt like it was trying to get the best of IRC, Slack, and a BBS and instead getting the worst of all the worlds. Synchronous communication was confusing, asynchronous communication was limited, and topics and channels didn't really do anything to organize things. I have two alternatives to add to consideration: * Mattermost: it's an open-source clone of Slack, which has its advantages and disadvantages, but at least it's familiar and heavily used UI * Discourse: it's an asynchronous communication tool, but that may acceptable or preferable, and there is already a Haskell Discourse set up ( https://discourse.haskell.org/) On Wed, May 19, 2021 at 11:59 AM Ben Gamari wrote:

Carter Schonwald writes:

...

I personally vote for irc. Perhaps via Libera.

What are some example vibrant technical communities on matrix? I’ve experienced such on irc but less so via more recent / newer platforms

I know that many subcommunities within the Rust community use Matrix. I have had quite good interactions in this context. Frankly I think that most of these newer options are technically much more conducive to technical collaboration than IRC.

Cheers,

- Ben

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Speaking as a *heavy* user of the Rust and Lean zulip instances, I find it a huge improvement over the alternatives of Gitter and Discord, and I think IRC although I have not used IRC much. It takes some getting used to, but the topic threading is absolutely essential once you reach a certain size. Looking at other chat platforms, overlapping conversations are a major problem when you have more than around 10 people online at once. Rust routinely has 50 or more online at once, and channels help but even then you will have multiple topics in a single channel, and that extra level of organization is absolutely warranted. It also helps when you want to look back at the discussion (or even just find it again!) or continue an old conversation from a year ago. Most of these activities I couldn't even imagine doing in a Gitter/Discord style chat platform. I have no stake in this discussion, but I thought I should balance out the Zulip downvotes with some positive experiences. (Also, I would definitely be more likely to participate on a haskell Zulip than an IRC or Matrix instance, FWIW.) Mario Carneiro On Wed, May 19, 2021 at 9:58 PM Carter Schonwald wrote:

I definitely find Zulip confusing and have failed to use it every time I’ve tried

If normal threading is lasagna layers, Zulip threading is like trying to hold cooked spaghetti in your ha d.

On Wed, May 19, 2021 at 2:40 PM Alex Rozenshteyn wrote:

...

(I'm a little ashamed that I lurk on this list but the thing that brings me out of lurking is a post on communication technologies)

Not Zulip.

Please not Zulip.

I've used Zulip once many years ago, and once this year. Both times, its interface felt clunky, and it felt like it was trying to get the best of IRC, Slack, and a BBS and instead getting the worst of all the worlds. Synchronous communication was confusing, asynchronous communication was limited, and topics and channels didn't really do anything to organize things.

I have two alternatives to add to consideration: * Mattermost: it's an open-source clone of Slack, which has its advantages and disadvantages, but at least it's familiar and heavily used UI * Discourse: it's an asynchronous communication tool, but that may acceptable or preferable, and there is already a Haskell Discourse set up ( https://discourse.haskell.org/)

On Wed, May 19, 2021 at 11:59 AM Ben Gamari wrote:

...

Carter Schonwald writes:

...

I personally vote for irc. Perhaps via Libera.

What are some example vibrant technical communities on matrix? I’ve experienced such on irc but less so via more recent / newer platforms

I know that many subcommunities within the Rust community use Matrix. I have had quite good interactions in this context. Frankly I think that most of these newer options are technically much more conducive to technical collaboration than IRC.

Cheers,

- Ben

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I've been using the recently created Types Zulip (for academic PL) -- my first experience with this platform -- and also found it unusual at first but then quite liked the dynamic topics thing (exactly for reasons Mario describes). Zulip or anything from 21st century would be a huge improvement on status quo (i.e. IRC) in terms of attraction of new contributors. Think the Phabricator –> GitLab transition but in the IM space. -- Best, Artem On Wed, May 19, 2021, 10:26 PM Mario Carneiro wrote:

Speaking as a *heavy* user of the Rust and Lean zulip instances, I find it a huge improvement over the alternatives of Gitter and Discord, and I think IRC although I have not used IRC much. It takes some getting used to, but the topic threading is absolutely essential once you reach a certain size. Looking at other chat platforms, overlapping conversations are a major problem when you have more than around 10 people online at once. Rust routinely has 50 or more online at once, and channels help but even then you will have multiple topics in a single channel, and that extra level of organization is absolutely warranted. It also helps when you want to look back at the discussion (or even just find it again!) or continue an old conversation from a year ago. Most of these activities I couldn't even imagine doing in a Gitter/Discord style chat platform.

I have no stake in this discussion, but I thought I should balance out the Zulip downvotes with some positive experiences. (Also, I would definitely be more likely to participate on a haskell Zulip than an IRC or Matrix instance, FWIW.)

Mario Carneiro

On Wed, May 19, 2021 at 9:58 PM Carter Schonwald < carter.schonwald@gmail.com> wrote:

...

I definitely find Zulip confusing and have failed to use it every time I’ve tried

If normal threading is lasagna layers, Zulip threading is like trying to hold cooked spaghetti in your ha d.

On Wed, May 19, 2021 at 2:40 PM Alex Rozenshteyn wrote:

...

(I'm a little ashamed that I lurk on this list but the thing that brings me out of lurking is a post on communication technologies)

Not Zulip.

Please not Zulip.

I've used Zulip once many years ago, and once this year. Both times, its interface felt clunky, and it felt like it was trying to get the best of IRC, Slack, and a BBS and instead getting the worst of all the worlds. Synchronous communication was confusing, asynchronous communication was limited, and topics and channels didn't really do anything to organize things.

I have two alternatives to add to consideration: * Mattermost: it's an open-source clone of Slack, which has its advantages and disadvantages, but at least it's familiar and heavily used UI * Discourse: it's an asynchronous communication tool, but that may acceptable or preferable, and there is already a Haskell Discourse set up ( https://discourse.haskell.org/)

On Wed, May 19, 2021 at 11:59 AM Ben Gamari wrote:

...

Carter Schonwald writes:

...

I personally vote for irc. Perhaps via Libera.

What are some example vibrant technical communities on matrix? I’ve experienced such on irc but less so via more recent / newer platforms

I know that many subcommunities within the Rust community use Matrix. I have had quite good interactions in this context. Frankly I think that most of these newer options are technically much more conducive to technical collaboration than IRC.

Cheers,

- Ben

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On 19 May 2021, at 11:48 am, Carter Schonwald wrote:

I personally vote for irc. Perhaps via Libera.

Perhaps I'm too much of an IRC noob, but I still found it it rather surprising to be banned from libera.chat (my IP is blacklisted) for pasting a 25-line build script for building GHC via hadrian on FreeBSD into the #ghc channel. This was in response to a discussion about issues with the bindist, how the port is built, ... and while perhaps I'm expected to use a paste bin, the abrupt ban was rather a harsh response. The ban appears to have been "temporary", an hour or so later I am able to reconnect, but this does not leave a good impression. -- Viktor.

And this is a good example of how both using libera.chat and having an official matrix bridge with a nice name can help more people use IRC too! On 6/6/21 2:10 PM, Brandon Allbery wrote:

Pasting directly into the channel is generally a no-no on IRC. Things like Matrix or IRCCloud convert to pastebins automatically.

On Sun, Jun 6, 2021 at 2:07 PM Viktor Dukhovni mailto:ietf-dane@dukhovni.org> wrote:

On 19 May 2021, at 11:48 am, Carter Schonwald mailto:carter.schonwald@gmail.com> wrote:

> I personally vote for irc.  Perhaps via Libera.

Perhaps I'm too much of an IRC noob, but I still found it it rather surprising to be banned from libera.chat (my IP is blacklisted) for pasting a 25-line build script for building GHC via hadrian on FreeBSD into the #ghc channel.

This was in response to a discussion about issues with the bindist, how the port is built, ... and while perhaps I'm expected to use a paste bin, the abrupt ban was rather a harsh response.

The ban appears to have been "temporary", an hour or so later I am able to reconnect, but this does not leave a good impression.

--         Viktor. _______________________________________________ ghc-devs mailing list ghc-devs@haskell.org mailto:ghc-devs@haskell.org http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ghc-devs http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ghc-devs

-- brandon s allbery kf8nh allbery.b@gmail.com mailto:allbery.b@gmail.com

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On Tue Jun 15, 2021 at 3:18 PM CEST, Janek Stolarek wrote:

Apparently, Freenode deleted all registered users and channels several hours ago.

I guess that should solve the problem of communities being split between Freenode and Libera. If I may add towards using IRC, even though it may seem archaic towards newcomers: - it allows them to join without registration (via web.libera.chat), and - it allows them to use a client of their choosing (I am not aware of any stable Matrix clients beside Element).

From my own experience, Electron-based clients (Element included) consume unreasonable amounts of RAM: Element is consuming ~700MiB of RAM just to stay idle on my machine. To give a fair comparison, the tab for irccloud tends to consume ~300MiB.

-- Jakub

Hello, I am not a heavy IRC user, but I'd say it makes most sense to just use Libera. It is essentially the same people that were running free-node running pretty much the exact same service, and I believe they are trying to make it extra easy to just switch, so this should be the least effort transition. I believe IRC has served the GHC community quite well so far, and there is a reddit post by Ed Kmett that the normal Haskell channels have already been transitioned over, so I think it makes sense for GHC to stick with the rest of the Haskell community. -Iavor On Fri, May 21, 2021 at 4:38 AM Moritz Angermann wrote:

Fair point. From a view over the last few days, I’d say it’s closer to 100% on libera. Lots of people just switched. Quite surprising.

On Fri, 21 May 2021 at 7:14 PM, Jens Petersen wrote:

...

My vote goes for Matrix.

I am not a heavy user yet, but I hope this episode helps to drive more people to it away from irc. Having half the people on Freenode and the other half on Libera seems the worst possible outcome in the short- to mid-term. The Fedora project also has plans to move to Matrix as its main group chat messaging platform.

Jens _______________________________________________ ghc-devs mailing list ghc-devs@haskell.org http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ghc-devs

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As I said, I am not a heavy IRC user, for my online chatting needs I mostly use Mattermost, Discord, and Slack. So I don't have an informed opinion on the technical merits of the various platforms---mostly I've heard that the Matrix clients and servers are quite a bit less robust than IRC ones but I've never personally used them. If there is a feeling that GHC wants to use a new chatting platform, by all means we should try it out. I just don't think that the unfortunate situation with free-node is a good reason to drop IRC entirely. Despite its flows, I think it has served our community well, and while it may look "old" to "young" users it does have the benefit of being pretty stable, unlike the myriad of chatting services that seem to be popping up all the time. -Iavor On Fri, May 21, 2021 at 10:41 AM Ben Gamari wrote:

Iavor Diatchki writes:

...

Hello,

I am not a heavy IRC user, but I'd say it makes most sense to just use Libera. It is essentially the same people that were running free-node running pretty much the exact same service, and I believe they are trying to make it extra easy to just switch, so this should be the least effort transition.

I believe IRC has served the GHC community quite well so far, and there is a reddit post by Ed Kmett that the normal Haskell channels have already been transitioned over, so I think it makes sense for GHC to stick with the rest of the Haskell community.

The problem is that, in order to grow (or even merely not to shrink), the community also needs to adapt to the preferences of younger users.

The fact of the matter is the younger users tend to be, at best, unfamiliar with IRC. In the worst case, the need to leave a browser/sign up for a new account means that they simply won't participate. Of the new contributors I have had approach me in the past year, less than half have had any familiarity with IRC.

Matrix has the advantage of being accessible to "web-native" community members while being open enough to (at least in principle) allow community members who are accustomed to IRC to continue to participate via a bridge.

Cheers,

- Ben

No, unfortunately, this is not resolved. The link here is a fictitious whitewash of events posted by the person who conducted the hostile takeover of Freenode. At the moment, the state of Freenode is that it's still operating as an IRC network, but the volunteer staff who have operated the network for many years have resigned and at least many of them have moved to operating irc.libera.chat. The network is completely controlled by one person, who wasn't involved in running it at all until a few days ago. On Sat, May 22, 2021 at 2:31 AM Imants Cekusins wrote:

Was this a temporary issue with Freenode IRC, resolved by now?

https://freenode.net/news/freenode-is-foss _______________________________________________ ghc-devs mailing list ghc-devs@haskell.org http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ghc-devs

As Ben and others say, Matrix provides many modern features new users will expect, while preserving the spirit of IRC. Without wading into the details, the design of Matrix I find impressive and to my liking, and it has seemed to get steadily better over time for quite a while now. Re Zulip, in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27202838 one of the lead Matrix devs says their up-and-coming threading model aims to support what Zulip does and they've been discussing deeper integration with Zulip. Granted, It would be better to hear about those discussions from the Zulip side as Matrix aims to assimilate everything and Zulip could have some reservations, but I remain hopeful. (I certainly would like to see culled the current explosion of mutually-incompatible chat applications, leaving us with fewer protocols but as many competing implementations.) What I recommend for now that we make some official Matrix channels, but also bridge them with the libera.chat ones once the bridge is up (should be a few days). Creating a matrix room and bridging it is a bit different underneath the hood than using a channel generated by the bridge on demand. We can give them nice names on the matrix side, and basically keep both options open of being "IRC-first" or "Matrix-first" down the road. For reference, see https://matrix.to/#/#community:nixos.org?via=nixos.org which is the Matrix "Space" (room that is a directory of sub-rooms, filling the role of a Discord "server") that Nix community created while they debate what to do next. See also https://github.com/NixOS/rfcs/pull/94 where this same discussion is playing out. John On 5/21/21 4:00 PM, Iavor Diatchki wrote:

As I said, I am not a heavy IRC user, for my online chatting needs I mostly use Mattermost, Discord, and Slack. So I don't have an informed opinion on the technical merits of the various platforms---mostly I've heard that the Matrix clients and servers are quite a bit less robust than IRC ones but I've never personally used them.

If there is a feeling that GHC wants to use a new chatting platform, by all means we should try it out.  I just don't think that the unfortunate situation with free-node is a good reason to drop IRC entirely.   Despite its flows, I think it has served our community well, and while it may look "old" to "young" users it does have the benefit of being pretty stable, unlike the myriad of chatting services that seem to be popping up all the time.

-Iavor

On Fri, May 21, 2021 at 10:41 AM Ben Gamari mailto:ben@smart-cactus.org> wrote:

Iavor Diatchki mailto:iavor.diatchki@gmail.com> writes:

> Hello, > > I am not a heavy IRC user, but I'd say it makes most sense to just use > Libera.  It is essentially the same people that were running free-node > running pretty much the exact same service, and I believe they are trying > to make it extra easy to just switch, so this should be the least effort > transition. > > I believe IRC has served the GHC community quite well so far, and there is > a reddit post by Ed Kmett that the normal Haskell channels have already > been transitioned over, so I think it makes sense for GHC to stick with the > rest of the Haskell community. > The problem is that, in order to grow (or even merely not to shrink), the community also needs to adapt to the preferences of younger users.

The fact of the matter is the younger users tend to be, at best, unfamiliar with IRC. In the worst case, the need to leave a browser/sign up for a new account means that they simply won't participate. Of the new contributors I have had approach me in the past year, less than half have had any familiarity with IRC.

Matrix has the advantage of being accessible to "web-native" community members while being open enough to (at least in principle) allow community members who are accustomed to IRC to continue to participate via a bridge.

Cheers,

- Ben

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The libera.chat IRC bridge is up, so one can go to #ghc:libera.chat to give the bridging a spin. To make my recommendation from before more concrete, we would *not* use that "portal room" (one spawned on demand by the bridge), but instead make a #ghc:haskell.org. One should be able to then "tombstone" the portal room telling people to go to the manually-bridged instead, which can preserve history across bridging changes like e.g. libera.chat and Freenode are reunited later, adding slack/discord bridges, etc. John On 6/3/21 3:52 AM, Matthew Pickering wrote:

I have been trying out Matrix a bit recently. It seems the best of the options in my opinion and has the advantage of being able to bridge to IRC (and other platforms).

The NixOS community rapidly moved over without any ill effects after the demise of freenode.

As with all these things, who feels willing to make a decision for us?

Cheers,

Matt

On Sat, May 22, 2021 at 7:52 PM John Ericson wrote:

...

As Ben and others say, Matrix provides many modern features new users will expect, while preserving the spirit of IRC. Without wading into the details, the design of Matrix I find impressive and to my liking, and it has seemed to get steadily better over time for quite a while now.

Re Zulip, in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27202838 one of the lead Matrix devs says their up-and-coming threading model aims to support what Zulip does and they've been discussing deeper integration with Zulip. Granted, It would be better to hear about those discussions from the Zulip side as Matrix aims to assimilate everything and Zulip could have some reservations, but I remain hopeful. (I certainly would like to see culled the current explosion of mutually-incompatible chat applications, leaving us with fewer protocols but as many competing implementations.)

What I recommend for now that we make some official Matrix channels, but also bridge them with the libera.chat ones once the bridge is up (should be a few days). Creating a matrix room and bridging it is a bit different underneath the hood than using a channel generated by the bridge on demand. We can give them nice names on the matrix side, and basically keep both options open of being "IRC-first" or "Matrix-first" down the road.

For reference, see https://matrix.to/#/#community:nixos.org?via=nixos.org which is the Matrix "Space" (room that is a directory of sub-rooms, filling the role of a Discord "server") that Nix community created while they debate what to do next. See also https://github.com/NixOS/rfcs/pull/94 where this same discussion is playing out.

John

On 5/21/21 4:00 PM, Iavor Diatchki wrote:

As I said, I am not a heavy IRC user, for my online chatting needs I mostly use Mattermost, Discord, and Slack. So I don't have an informed opinion on the technical merits of the various platforms---mostly I've heard that the Matrix clients and servers are quite a bit less robust than IRC ones but I've never personally used them.

If there is a feeling that GHC wants to use a new chatting platform, by all means we should try it out. I just don't think that the unfortunate situation with free-node is a good reason to drop IRC entirely. Despite its flows, I think it has served our community well, and while it may look "old" to "young" users it does have the benefit of being pretty stable, unlike the myriad of chatting services that seem to be popping up all the time.

-Iavor

On Fri, May 21, 2021 at 10:41 AM Ben Gamari wrote:

...

Iavor Diatchki writes:

...

Hello,

I am not a heavy IRC user, but I'd say it makes most sense to just use Libera. It is essentially the same people that were running free-node running pretty much the exact same service, and I believe they are trying to make it extra easy to just switch, so this should be the least effort transition.

I believe IRC has served the GHC community quite well so far, and there is a reddit post by Ed Kmett that the normal Haskell channels have already been transitioned over, so I think it makes sense for GHC to stick with the rest of the Haskell community.

The problem is that, in order to grow (or even merely not to shrink), the community also needs to adapt to the preferences of younger users.

The fact of the matter is the younger users tend to be, at best, unfamiliar with IRC. In the worst case, the need to leave a browser/sign up for a new account means that they simply won't participate. Of the new contributors I have had approach me in the past year, less than half have had any familiarity with IRC.

Matrix has the advantage of being accessible to "web-native" community members while being open enough to (at least in principle) allow community members who are accustomed to IRC to continue to participate via a bridge.

Cheers,

- Ben

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