GHC and the future of Freenode

[Matthew Pickering]

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
<john.ericson at obsidian.systems> 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 <ben at smart-cactus.org> wrote:
>>
>> Iavor Diatchki <iavor.diatchki at 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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