[QGIS-Developer] Revolt Chat Community Server

Fri Nov 4 13:40:07 PDT 2022

Thank you all for your feedback and responses. I will try to get to them all, but may be through several emails (due to time and length).

Regis:

        Thank you for your thorough reply. I do greatly appreciate the effort you put in to your response. For sake of clarity, I will quote just the beginning portion of large sections, but my response will be for the entire section.

        1. First, before jumping to a tool, I would like that we discuss globally the communication challenges that all those new tools bring for all online communities - QGIS included.

        Yes, I agree. I had a QGIS Open Day announcement and discussion that happened a couple of months ago (you can watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrvTnkGNzSw). I wanted to not only "complain" about the existing platforms, but also provide a solution. I had worked with Tim Sutton on this Revolt server, and after it's "launch" at the QOD session, I had some feedback from Amy and Alexandre.

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        2a. Mailing lists are dying...

        Yes. It was actually shortly after the email I originally sent out, that GNOME was dropping it's own mailing lists (GNU Mailman 2) and porting them over to Discourse (as you mention later). Discourse is a forum solution (not a chat solution) that many other organizations and project use. GNOME isn't replacing everything with this one solution. They have 3 different platforms in place for 3 distinct roles/purposes.
        1. Discourse to replace Mailing Lists as the threaded discussion platform
        2. Matrix to replace IRC (which the Matrix room(s) are bridged to IRC) for use as a chat  platform
        3. GitLab for all development, patches, feature requests, etc...

        We could also aim for this kind of platform. It maybe worth while discussing with OSGeo whether they want to migrate all the mailing lists to Discourse instead (as Nabble is no more). (Discourse also has an email-able interface to still have that "mailing list" experience for those who need it (i.e. screen readers) or insist on it). Another "issue" with the mailing lists are that we (as in QGIS) do not manage it. The mailing lists are handled by OSGeo, so if we need anything related to mailing list administration, we have to go through OSGeo for that. (For instance, I had to go through OSGeo to even get me added to the mailing list in the first place as the sign-up didn't work; and even now, I'm still not fully getting the proper emails I should for this mailing list). Just a minor inconvenience with mailing lists, is the archive does a hard break between months. This thread, for instance, spans two months, October and November. One can't navigate to the October message from within a November one with the previous message by thread link.

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        2b. And let's not forget that some people just don't want to use apps, and would like to stick to mail forever.

        Yeah, there will always be those people (see xkcd 1782). We are in a technology field that is moving forward (thankfully we aren't all still using GRASS CLI right?) We can't appease everyone. Usually in doing so, we end up offending everyone. I would think that the people who insist on still using mailing lists (and IRC) are in a vast minority. Our focus should be on the community as a whole who would rather have a more user-friendly way of interacting with this great community, than a few people who use Arch BTW, emacs or vim, and live solely in the command line (this is a bit sarcastic and humorous, and not degrading or insulting. I myself use vim (neovim) for programming and do like the command line for certain things.) As mentioned earlier, Discourse does offer an email solution for interacting with it for those people. Also, bridges to exist to bridge platforms over to others (mainly developed for those who do prefer to live in IRC). What I'm trying to say here is that we have to way the pros and cons, and who our "target audience" is for a community site.

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        3. Chats are fun, but messy, and they break our community in sub parts.

        Yes. Chats are fun. It's great to be able to say hi to fellow QGIS members, ask for help, show off really cool maps (i.e. we're in the 30-Day Map Challenge right now). And yes, they can be messy, but organization is key. One of the purposes for choosing a platform like Revolt (and this does also include Discord) is the ability for multiple rooms for various topics to keep the chatting more organized and less messy. This is meant to unify the various groups under one umbrella (i.e. the various QGIS mailing lists are disjointed), but yet have their own space (either by a single room to themselves, or a group of rooms depending on the needs). In Revolt, all rooms are visible (unless you specify otherwise for things like a moderator chat to discuss internal things like disciplinary action against a user not following the rules). Matrix on the other hand, not so much. As mentioned earlier, it would be nice to eventually phase out some of the platforms in order to bring everyone together and keep the fragmentation minimal and purposeful (some platforms like the Facebook group would remain for the reasons why it was created and given official status). I initially created a PSC chat that only members with the PSC role could see and access. I later changed that such that only PSC members could use the room, but gave the "general public" read-only access so they can see the PSC discussion in transparency. The setup I have is not set in stone, and can be changed and adjusted as we need.

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        4. Chats aren't efficient and generate too much traffic

        This is really subjective. QGIS has a fairly large community (but not as large as Blender for instance). Chat's have their purpose, and for the purpose of replacing a mailing list, forums would be a better alternative (Blender has an in-house forum, plus their Rocket Chat instance). Revolt wishes that people not self-host in order for their users to be able to have one login and one app for all their communities on Revolt. Maybe, OSGeo projects may also want to join Revolt? That now allows one user to have one app and access (for example) QGIS, GDAL, and GRASS all in one place (the Revolt app), similar to Matrix with Element, but with more features and space. Servers and rooms can also be muted in Revolt, so you only see or get notified for what you want. With QGIS being as large as it is, there aren't that many QGIS Masters per say that know everything in every part of QGIS. People who have expertise in certain areas can focus on the rooms that relate to their expertise and help others, and maybe even hop over to one they want to learn to expand their knowledge.

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        5. Discord / Revolt are organized chats, with topics.

        You're not the first to mention the search engine aspect. Honestly, none of the current chat platforms are indexed by search engines anyways (maybe Facebook, but you need a FB login). If we really wanted to, a bot could be written to dump the chat out to something that can be search and indexed by a search engine. Each room does have it's purpose stated, and the mods can keep conversations on topic if they deviate. It's interesting that you think we have too many rooms. I would like to hear your suggestions on what we should have and what to remove. I made the various rooms mainly to show what we can do with this platform.

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        6. We also have issues, Pull requests and potential GitHub discussions to not forget here :)

        GitHub Discussions are a relatively new feature to GH. Some projects like their existing infrastructure (i.e. already existing forum sites). All of the GH stuff (issues, pull requests, etc...) would obviously remain on GH (maybe remove the QEP discussion room to keep things on GH). We could use the discussions as a forum solution, however the feature is not enabled right now (it might be a paid feature, but I don't know that much about it).

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        7. Adding a new communication channel without stating officially...

        I totally agree with this. The PSC discussed the Revolt server, and wanted to try it out before marking it as "official". This is both a blessing and a curse. The blessing is that things can rapidly change, and even be dropped under the reason of "We’re just testing it out". The curse is that it makes people hesitant to use it since its existence is "unstable". As it is not promoted officially, many don't know it even exists (hence the lack of use). I believe if more "official QGIS people" used it, it would gain more traction within the community. As for the source of truth, there is even a bigger issue between the mailing lists and GitHub. There may be a discussion on the mailing list, and another (and diverging discussion) on the GitHub issue/feature/pull request/QEP/etc...

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        8. Side note, I didn't have a good user experience with Revolt

        I'm sorry to hear that. Yes, Revolt is a bit young, and is still in active development. Given time, yes it will mature.

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        9. Last but not least, after discussing this issue in the French OSGeo local chapter and with open data groups, I discovered (yet) another option, which is Discourse.

        Yep (see response for 2a for details)

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        10a. Discourse as one organized and persistent place...

        I agree. Discourse is a great replacement for the mailing lists and provides a great forum experience.

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        10b. We choose on main chat tool for instant messaging.

        I also agree that we should choose a platform. Matrix and IRC already exist (but not managed by us, QGIS). Revolt gives far more feature and benefits than Matrix. I also agree that we should prefer Open Source as the primary choice. I disagree about the Discourse/Revolt overlap. They are very different platforms with very different purposes. Discord, on the other hand, actually implemented forums within a Discord server. However, as mentioned earlier, this is not accessible from a search engine (a forum really should be).

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        10c We let community driven channels be impulsed by groups...

        I'm not totally sure what you mean by this. There were some discussions regarding creating a group of rooms for regional user groups within Revolt where each user group gets just a single room (Open Street Map does this with their Discord Server). This would be great for coordinating meetups and such and have other QGIS users (who may not know about the User Groups) find out about them. But, as I stated earlier, nothing is set in stone. These are details that can be hashed out later and changed if they end up going south.

Thank you for your response, I really do appreciate it. I will get to the others later (this alone took an hour to write).

Ethan Snyder
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