[QGIS-Developer] Revolt Chat Community Server

[Johannes Kröger (WhereGroup)]

+1000 for a QGIS* Discourse! Discourse is fun to use and to administer. 
Easy to automate with scripts and bots. Login is possible with openid 
and all that modern bling. As others said, it has a mailing list mode 
that should cater well to those who prefer that method. Etc etc.

I meant to set up a proof of concept during FOSS4G but ended up 
discarding that for personal reasons. Actually I had meant to make a PoC 
three years ago already https://trac.osgeo.org/osgeo/ticket/2306 but 
back then I was demotivated by too much (understandable and reasonable) 
effort required around with SAC, another mailing list etc. I would be up 
for *joining* a maintenance and moderation team any time, as long as 
responsibilities are well spread and shared. :) Also I'd probably be 
able to help on the initial setup and importing of mailing lists I guess.

It would be fantastic to have a friendly, open and modern, persistant, 
search-index, intuitive communication platform next to the emphemeral 
chat, focused Q&A (StackExchange) and developer exchanges on GitHub. 
Imagine people being able to e. g. showcase their work-in-progress 
GIS/mapping projects or discuss ideas and concepts in-depth, with 
illustrations and graphics.

I agree about Régis' points about chats being kind of subdividing to 
communities, requiring lots of attention and being kind of silos of 
information (no one will "discover" information that was shared in a 
chat later, it is just for the moment and thus often a waste). On the 
other hand, people clearly want and use such modern chat systems so if 
there was a unified one, potentially for all OSGeo projects, it would be 
a good thing.

While I am a fan of Matrix on principle, the bridges are always broken 
and its UX, at least with Element and any other client I have used so 
far, is really *really* awful. I am not a fan of Revolt, if only for 
their "please don't self-host" approach which is anti-FOSS to me, but it 
was way nicer to use when I tried it in Firenze. Too many options make 
everything worse. I'd probably scream and kick, but if IRC was killed 
of, it would probably effect 5-10 people, for Matrix maybe a couple 
more. If it would mean that 50 others might join in on a better 
platform, then it would be worth it.

<rant, please don't take it too seriously if anyone feels offended by my 
tone>
By relying on mailing lists we ignore the vast majority of users out 
there, who would never touch a system that looks like 
https://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/qgis-user/2022-November/thread.html , 
where every message is on a separate page, text lines are as long as the 
browser window is wide, monospace font rendering makes everything look 
nerdy and >50% of the page is the previous message above or below or in 
between the actual content of the post. It could just as well be hosted 
on gopher://

To me mailing lists are utterly outdated, user-unfriendly, confusing and 
a pain to use. You cannot edit your messages if you made tiny mistakes. 
Message threads are unwieldly messes of different quoting styles and 
signatures. There are no highlighting or formatting features. There is 
no inlining of images and people often have their attachments dropped. 
Search options are nothing compared to well search-engine-indexed 
webpages. Discoverability is zero. Following messages means having to 
submit your mail address instead of just being able to subscribe to a 
RSS/Atom feed. Using mailing lists in your mail account pollutes a tool 
for communication with an information store with (usually) pretty bad 
indexing and search capabilities. Separating actual mails from mailing 
list messages would require extra effort on the user in setup of their 
mail client, if it would even be possible. Access to older messages 
requires manual imports. Participating in mailing lists exposes your 
mail address to everyone and their spam bot neighbor. People sometimes 
reply privately by accident. People sometimes cannot easily configure 
their mail program to not send HTML mails when they are using them by 
default and with great success and happiness for the rest of their daily 
mailings.
And that's just the incoherent stream of thoughts from the top of my 
head right now...
</rant>

Hannes

PS: *or even better: OSGeo! Just imagine if there was a central, common 
place for people to talk about proj, gmt or geoserver easily and with a 
modern interface.
PPS: I do use Arch btw! Archlinux users against mailing lists unite! <o/