Clojurians Log v2

Created the #pr-welcome channel

I'm now in a Discord channel for a specific open source project (non-Clojure related). It's actually pretty nice. I would not be sad if this community eventually migrated over there, although I don't know the trade offs very well.

there is a Clojure discord channel

https://discord.com/invite/v9QMy9D

I think I was already in there, but never had it open, cause most of the folks are here I guess

I believe the admin for that Clojure Discord server has been MIA for a while (unless something’s changed).

Last time the Admins here took a look at Discord (admittedly a few years ago), it didn't seem to have much in the way of moderation controls and it didn't seem to support integrations with other services... I assume it has improved since then...

I guess gamers are likely to already be using Discord, but despite quite a bit of promotion here and elsewhere, not many Clojurians ventured into that Discord server.

It's quite similar to Slack from my impression

Unfortunately it isn't open source and I don't know about the unlimited history. Also there's a limit of 5000 concurrent active users on the free plan

Not sure how many we have here on peak moments

one difference I'm noticing: it doesn't show the timezone of users

Given that ZulipChat has only a tiny fraction of Clojurians using it for chat, and that it is open source, free $$ for unlimited users, unlimited searchable history, I don't think it is having a few nice features, or even a lot of nice features, that would convince a majority to switch to a different chat system. I don't know what it would take to cause such a switch, but it hasn't happened since the Google group and IRC have declined in use in favor of Slack. I think some engineering/technical-focused people have a wrong idea that all it takes is demonstration of a few features that are clearly superior, in their mind, and everyone else will see the light and switch.

I've heard from several people that they find Zulip's UI confusing. Discord is pretty similar to Slack, Zulip is not

Zulip's UI can certainly be annoying, but so can Slack's. TBH, I don't use Slack much anymore as pretty much all the data science discussion has moved to Zulip.

I really like that Zulip can be navigated entirely via the keyboard (unlike Slack) -- even in a web browser. I find Zulip's UI with streams & topics really helpful since it's sort of an "enforced threads" model whereas with Slack you can end up with long conversations all merged together in a channel when folks don't use threads. But, yeah, there are some folks who seem to think free, open source, with unlimited search history ought to be enough to migrate nearly 20k accounts from Slack to "whatever" -- or even just the 2k folks that are "active" -- but inertia seems to keep most people here on Slack. From a management p.o.v. Zulip seems to be closer to Slack than anything else that the Admin team have looked at...

@andy.fingerhut Are you one of the mods on Zulip?

I am, but mainly because I volunteered over a year ago, and haven't done very much in the way of work on that myself. Gert Goet (sp?) is the driver there, mostly.

Another service that hardly gets a mention now is Gitter which is also free, open source, and has unlimited search history. I liked that a lot and directed several of my OSS projects to rooms (channels) there for primary support for a while. But, again, very few Clojurians joined it, although I think a handful of Clojure projects do still use it as primary support...

For a while, I used to have half a dozen clients open for all the different chat services that had an active Clojure presence. Now I only use Slack and Zulip (both via a web browser).

I find good old Invision Power Board the most engaging and well organized way of conversation for the large audiences (w/paging). Surely Slack is good for a chit-chat and internal company communications, but I still find old IPB superior for the rest of purposes. Even discourse feels too minimal and structure-less. Discord UX feels much too overloaded and lesser quality of Slack.

For terminal boys and girls there is: slack-term (slack for terminal) cordless (discord for terminal) zulip-terminal (I'm actually author of docker image of it)

As an alternative to Slack there is Mattermost, which has some nice capabilities, like irc bridge and other bridges too...

Pretty there was an attempt to setup a Clojurians community on Mattermost but I don't think it saw much traction.

Good to know about Terminal clients for Slack and Zulip!

I tried to use some kind of Slack text client, but they all seem to need 'a token', and I couldn't get it for clojurians

@jason358 You can "sniff" your own auth token (from the web version of Slack) and use that in an API I believe. There used to be "legacy API tokens" but those went away. I don't believe we can issue app API tokens without integrating an app and those are limited on the free plan...

@seancorfield thanks, maybe I'll try it sometime