GHC and the future of Freenode

[Iavor Diatchki]

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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