Clojurians Log v2

I was just looking into this. Can we try Gitter? https://medium.freecodecamp.com/so-yeah-we-tried-slack-and-we-deeply-regretted-it-391bcc714c81#.vnvw23shb

I feel like something is better than nothing considering the size of the Clojure community is growing exponentially.

@keatondunsford There’s been a bunch of Clojure rooms on Gitter since early January https://gitter.im/clojure/general?utm_source=share-link&utm_medium=link&utm_campaign=share-link

I’ve posted the link several times. It’s terrible from an admin point of view however.

Huh weird. When I’ve been searching via Gitter nothing has been coming up for me.

I bet.

There’s clojure/general, clojure/clojure, clojure/java.jdbc, clojure/tools.cli

That’s why I commented about it, but hell yeah I’ll join these now.

(I created the last two based on the GH repos since I maintain those)

The CIDER folks and Onyx folks have fairly active communities around their projects there

Awesome! Thanks!

Regarding the growth of this Slack — it has actually slowed down a bit lately.

Yeah Gitter sucks.

Go Slack. 💯

What about Mattermost? To self-host it some of us could chip in.

https://www.mattermost.org/

Nevermind, it also sucks

Has anyone used telegram? It has groups (200 members), supergroups (5k members) and "channels", which apparently aren't places where you discuss with your own name, rather you make announcements "as the channel". If a group/supergroup is similar to Slack's channels (like #community-development ), they could work for us - but if they're like Slack's teams (Clojurians), then they won't

I have to say I was surprised that nobody talked about Telegram here, the problem about history is still there though (and no search whatsoever)

The rest is pretty much akin to Slack (at least the features I am using)

Those would be nice, true, but hardly a priority IMO. Accessibility is priority #1, and then price (free as in free beer).

accessibility is the reason irc doesn't really work, there's a bunch of people who use it (me included), but a growing number of people can't be bothered with it. It even has full history and search if you know how to grep your .irc_history 😉

From what I gathered, but i might be wrong, the history search is a priority as Slack is basically free if you don't want to use...I think. Braid chat was a thing and probably it still is, but I don't have more info on it.

I think an alternative platform will be used as soon as enough people are bothered with problems in Slack and don't want to continue using it. What are the problems with Slack, though? Limited number of users has been quoted primarily, and the issue with that is that is that it only bothers people who want to join the community, not the community itself. Is this a real problem, though? Are a lot of people denied access to the Clojure Slack because it is full?

Or are there other problems with Slack that I'm not aware of?

The Scala team on Slack was shut down by Slack because it grew too big

Once that happens, a new platform needs to be chosen, that I understand. How big was the Scala Slack when it was shut down? Was it shut down without notice? Can people who try to go to the Scala Slack find the new home easily?

Well, I think I understand the purpose of this channel now. It is good to see people care for the future in which Clojure is really big 🙂

I tried looking for info on the scala slack thing, but couldn't find anything. Maybe I'm mistaken?

@kauko: do you have links to that information about the Scala community and Slack? Hah... Yeah I couldn't either.

I remember there was a github repo discussing the future of this community - things like alternative chats etc., and there was a mention of it

slackapocalypse, scalapocalypse, it was called something epic like that

😄

It's linked in the channel topic.

oh right, that's it

https://hackpad.com/Slackpocalypse-GRIaf1RgP5D

it was reactflux, not scala 🙂

Looking at their post about it, they moved to Discord (the gaming server network). It didn't have search and channel management / discovery seems to be poor.

I'm pretty sure someone set up a Clojure server on Discord for folks to try. Let me see if I can find it...

Ah it was just a #clojure channel on the main http://matrix.org server. I tried it for a bit. I thought it was horrible but maybe that's just me.

Some more digging turned up a number of channels on http://discordapp.com

This link should lead there https://discord.gg/013yANFmEABVfBjgI

I'm going to leave my usual link here: http://whatthefuck.computer/blog/2015/11/01/on-the-balkinization-of-my-chat-communities/ and mention my vote for http://matrix.org, as it seems like what we really want (IRC for the modern age)

@seancorfield what issues did you have with matrix?

I don't remember the specifics of why folks didn't like http://matrix.org as a replacement for Slack. I wasn't driving this rodeo so I assumed others were writing down the objections being raised.

The problem here is inertia. Folks like Slack so there's no real effort put into trial runs on other platforms. It's why the question keeps coming up but nothing gets done about it.

The folks who like various platforms tend to just drop a link in here, say it's "the solution" but never put in the effort to encourage a decent trial including admin / moderation functionality.

I don't know why I even bother getting involved with discussions here, except out of a sense of trying to help folks address the "Slackopalypse" worries they have.

All that usually happens is I get drilled about why I don't like a particular solution being offered. Like my opinion matters? I'm not driving this!

(This occurs for any giving communications-oriented platform; it's the same thing that keeps people trapped in Skype, even though as a communications app it fails utterly in terms of reliability)

So, yeah, @dominicm I'm pretty annoyed at your response because we've been round this several times.

Yea, it sounds like @seancorfield is keeping people from switching to matrix which could not be farther from the truth

I'm going to try to ignore this question in future so I don't keep getting dragged into the endless (and rather pointless) back and forth on which platform we should move to.

I didn't mean to imply that sean was blocking any kind of switch

@seancorfield I didn't remember a specific problem you had with Matrix. I would have asked anyone who'd said they found Matrix horrible. Sorry if I've asked before, my memory isn't the greatest.

If you care about Matrix and think it's a good solution then set it up properly in terms of channel management, moderation, discoverability etc -- all the things that make Slack work -- put in some effort, rather than just dropping in a link to it. And document people's reactions.

Otherwise you're being part of the problem.

I'm tired of hearing drive-by comments about "We should switch to XYZ because it's great" without folks doing a proper follow up.

@seancorfield Ah, I've never considered trying to set up Matrix as a working replacement for Slack, until the slackocalypse seemed imminent. I understand your annoyance with my comment now. I didn't mean to drill you, it's a genuine interest (that never ends because my memory really is that poor)

The platform needs to be slick, fast, free to users, have good quality apps for desktop, iPhone, and Android at least, be commercially supported, have good discoverability of channels, have solid admin / moderator features in terms of user permissions and integrations. Probably other features are key too. Like I say, I'm not driving this, just trying to list what folks said they needed back in... January? Whenever the HackPad was written and most of the trails occurred.

@seancorfield I previously thought the Clojurians moderation team wanted to take on moderation role, and were using this channel to gauge community interest in various platforms.

We (the admins) have never been the ones driving Slackopalypse. That was all started by a few vocal community members. Most of whom have left the community by the way.

We created this channel mostly as a place for those passionate few to duke it out about platforms. They were clogging up the technical channels.

They fought about platforms for a while. Mostly rejected everything they collectively came up with. Then they gradually went quiet / went away.

About once a month someone asks "what happens if we get kicked off Slack" and I direct them here to "rally the troops" :simple_smile:

Thanks a lot for doing that @seancorfield! I was aware of the potential danger of being kicked off Slack, and would like to help find an alternative, but so far I had completely missed all the past discussion.

Unfortunately having a 10,000 message cap on history means old discussions are lost (and therefore repeated, sometimes over and over and over).

Another feature to add to the list above: unlimited, searchable message history.

(Although that would be a bonus new feature -- it's certainly a desirable one)

I’m still here!

But I kind of don’t care. I’m curious and interested, to be certain, but I literally have no dog in the race.

Something IRC-based would be fine for me, I’m a veteran of the EFNet split wars of the late 90s. And it’d be nice to be able to just pipe it into Spacemacs. But really. [shrug]

What is it that makes IRC a less viable option these days? Lack of archives? Not as discoverable? Not as likely for folks to have good clients?

@fellshard Even my fellow colleagues look surprised at me when I tell them that I still use IRC today. And some of them only remember the offensive language they encountered.

I understand the desirability of Slack for an enterprise setting, where many users will not be comfortable with using IRC. But for a software community...

Especially one such as this, with a focus on simplicity 😉

That was my thinking too, but, like I said, none of my real life programmer friends use IRC, not a single one

It's a rarity, yeah. But maybe all that is needed is the right reasons, the right publicity. To make it discoverable again.

Which is why I'm wondering why it's lost its edge, and if it were to be introduced, which vectors would be the most effective for propagation.

well, of course it has to have a fancy web ui

like slack

and integration in the major phone markets

Hmm, good call. Wonder how friendly IRC is for mobile use.

I think it falls hard on the UI. I mean, really, Slack is just IRC v2 with pretty bits in.

Yep. It even borrows from the sigils of IRC (@, #, /)

Incorrectly, even!

With curated channels and less distributed administration.

The only thing I’d really miss from Slack is the code formatting.

To developers focused on community, though, I think we'd put up with a fair amount of bare-bones UX if the community was seen as more important

Honestly, the best thing we could do is write our own in Clojure.

There was an effort to make something like that iirc

People have talked it up a bit, yeah.

Found it lying around abandoned from a year or so back

No one’s going to care until we’ve gone past our expiration date, really.

And by that time the community's fragmented, too late to make a coordinated shift

Hence the attempt to forestall here :T

But yeah, I agree.

What should happen vs. what will

I mean good grief, Skype is a sinking ship and people will cling to it 'til it sinks

And Sean’s right; we’re already fragmented. One of the admins has totally disappeared, etc.

Fragment further, though

A few of the channels for major libraries have been pretty key

This is where Twitter should be going, honestly. A Twitter version of Slack? Hello.

Ew.

Char limit / microblogging is not a proper conversation framework

Two different goals

Nah, that’s not what I mean. I

er I mean literally Twitter’s framework with Slack’s UI and capabilities.

I get a ton of interaction about of Clojure on Twitter even at 140 characters.

Seriously, I swear, I know English.

IRC is unmoderated and has no way to make it a safe space for a community. It’s also a flat collection of (unrelated) channels — unless you run your own server, just for Clojurians.

Mozilla run their own server for Rust folks (or did?) and it was always being targeted by trolls and spammers. IRC is pretty much impossible to admin / moderate from a community p.o.v.

Alright, gotcha.

I agree. IRC requires 24/7 babysitting.

So the administrative concerns are high.

That’s what I meant when I typed about the EFNet split wars. It was a constant battle just to even keep your channel.

I used IRC heavily for decades...

Never been deeply involved, so not aware of the frustrations and pitfalls

Yeah. There’d be a split and suddenly you’d lose all of your ops and someone else would take over.

…in fact I was still using it heavily up until early last year when I finally gave up, as communities were moving to Slack.

"Time to re-reinvent community communications."

I’d be totally down with Slack injecting ads or whatever they need to do. The fact that they’re just shutting FOSS communities down… I dunno.

I mean we could go back to mailing lists :V

Seems a bit wrong-headed but they’ve got to make money so I get that too.

Just like OpenJDK's 😉

Actually, I’d like to see GitHub to step up.

Maybe they are. The recent updates are pretty compelling.

I wonder if it would help if the community itself had to cover its own costs, e.g. $1 a person per period

Mailing lists have their place too — for async communication. I like mailing lists and use them heavily too. I do not like "web forums" where you have to go to a web site and navigate around to take part.

It’s absurdly expensive.

Design a new system that lets us operate at a low cost

Not Slack, just thinking system constraints

@fellshard You know that Slack’s pricing is about $7/person/month right?

Something individual FOSS communities could set up on their own ad hoc

Gitter supports that around — for projects on GitHub.

Yeah, but that's single channel isn't it?

And it's for projects, yeah, not communities

If anyone is thinking about rewriting in Clojure, it's worth listening to http://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2016/09/12/slacks-architecture-with-keith-adams/ - a lot goes into slack that didn't cross my mind at all the last time my hubris got a hold of me and I thought about rewriting it 🙂

I thought that Gitter was just IRC.

Nice, I'll check that out

I’m guessing you haven’t checked out the Clojure Gitter setup I posted a link to earlier / yesterday? @fellshard

And I don't doubt it's crazy difficult.

I've seen other Gitters before, but it's been a while. I'll check it again

@akiva No, although Gitter does have IRC protocol support directly, as I recall?

Okay, rooms present.

If there was a community I'd expect could pull it off though... this is one of the few 😉

https://gitter.im/clojure/general — if folks want to try it (also clojure/clojure and clojure/java.jdbc etc), but it’s pretty horrible from a community admin perspective

We are quite awesome, aren’t we?

And this community has tried to design and build its own chat service… which got as far as a talk at Clojure/West I believe…?

Basically, someone just has to do it and then everyone else will glom on, I imagine.

(although I believe that talk never actually happened in the end)

Saw that. It would probably take a bit more to compel folks to pursue that all the way to a viable product; maybe all it'll take is time, pressure, or passion.

Meanwhile we’re all just waiting for those folks to volunteer and build it 🙂

"Trapped inside this Octavarium"

…and then some company has to pay for the hosting / infrastructure / ops side of it.

Would it be possible to adapt IRC as it exists now to give the community management tools needed?

Some sort of wrapper around an IRC server, an additive modification to the protocols?

Seriously tho', we’ve been all over this discussion several times — including the idea of building on top of IRC…

Heheh I'm sure

…it never goes anywhere because the folks who make the suggestions tend not to be the folks who can / will actually build all of this.

I’d like to do it but I’ve just launched an offline IMAP->maildir thing.

> Running forward > Falling back > Spinning round and round > Looking outward > Reaching in > Scream without a sound > > Leaning over > Crawling up > Stumbling all around > Losing my place > Only to find I've come full circle

But yeah. Almost need a more structure / concerted effort. Folks who can take the lead for product vision, set design goals etc.

That was what #braid-chat was supposed to be...

Forgot all about that.

It would be a shame to see the community go, give it's one of the best resources for Clojure out there...

…and it is being worked on https://github.com/braidchat/braid

@fellshard If Slack restrict us, the most likely approach would just be cutting off new invites — so we’d remain, say, 7,500 strong… so it would stay a great community for those already here but it couldn’t grow any more.

So then it would be a matter of a new, unlimited community needing to grow organically somewhere else to overtake it.

I still lean on Twitter for that. I often see things on Twitter before they percolate up here.

New version announcements, etc.

And quite a bit of Clojure hate but, y’know, it ain’t Twitter if someone isn’t being mean about something.

btw. the clojure community consists of more resources than slack: http://clojure.org/community/resources

Good point.

Yep, this is just one particularly strong resource.

Well, before slack I also got all my questions answered

FWIW, there are (currently) 630 folks on the #clojure IRC channel (on freenode).

Here, I can look and see new libraries and discussions about them immediately. It's a really neat way to discover new resources on the fly.

(and 7,349 here — although not all of those are "active" user accounts)

It's one subtle benefit

It's one of the upsides to Twitter and Slack - conversations are preserved when offline

I’d say there are probably less than 500 active accounts. And I’m being generous here.

Even Gavin’s rarely about now. No one knows where PK O’Brien is.

Pretty sure I spelled ol’ boy’s last name incorrectly. Heh.

I think he was investing his time in braid chat

Although braid-chat was never intended for these masses of users, IIRC

@akiva there are 1,347 users active for billing purposes on this Slack (as one of the admins, I have access to that data)

And to give you an idea of volume, nearly 12,000 messages were posted in the last seven days (which is why the free 10,000 limit gets us so hard).

@seancorfield: Do you know if there's any official position from slack on our archiving of the chat data? I've heard it's not really allowed, but if it's fine with the slack rules I'd like to put some effort into improving that experience - there are a bunch of concerns I'm sure I haven't thought about (such as privacy, ability to delete, etc.) but those aren't being handled that well now anyway.

I’d say "Go read their Terms of Service" and see what it says.

In summary: no

Given that's one of the keystones of their monetization

It would be pretty silly of them to allow archival, even if it is self-hosted

Yeah, that's kind of what I got from others (and my extremely inexpert reading of the ToS). Hoping I was wrong though.

There’s still an active bot logging everything, though, isn’t there?

shhh!

It only logs in channels to which it’s been invited (but, yeah, def. a grey area).

[zips lips, mimes throwing away key]