Speaking to my own experience, I have never gotten involved in IRC because I don't want to have pay for a reflector to know who mentioned me, I don't want to maintain a server just to have a reflector for free, and I don't want or have a PC to leave on 24/7 to simply stay connected.
I personally wouldn't want to switch to Slack because I don't think it handles large communities that well. The Dropbox-led projects are on gitter I think because they lack mailing lists -- on purpose -- and some things don't call for a GitHub issue (which is their preferred way to communicate). The last time I looked into this idea the conclusion I reached was Zulip or Discourse. I do worry about the accessibility of IRC for new people, but I also have the same worry about email as more of people's personal communication move away from it and thus people just aren't set up handle any sort of volume of email. Consider the fact that a standard answer to a lack of email threading on any of the major email providers is to use gmane's NNTP gateway. I don't think people realize that anyone who post-dates the '90s has no clue what that acronym represents and thus poses the same barriers as setting up IRC. And then asking folks to install a desktop app like Thunderbird just for their open source email is also an odd request to be making when there are web-based options. So for me, the first question is are we just considering alternatives to the "IRC problem" or are we trying to solve the "new contributors who were born in the 2000s problem" (for which the latter subsumes the former)? My guess is the former as tackling the latter is a major undertaking due to people who will only let go of email when they are dead. And in that instance my vote is for Zulip if we can get them to donate free hosting. On Fri, Mar 30, 2018, 06:36 Brian Curtin, <br...@python.org> wrote: > I would, at least initially, advise against Slack. > > I constantly hear people decry its growing use in open source communities > for a mix of two reasons. The first seems to come from strong IRC > proponents, with the general complaint of "it's not open," and getting into > the whole "your data is not your data" idea, especially with recent changes > to Slack with regards to privacy. The second seems to come from the > inability to really get away from Slack. Their notification system is > pretty rudimentary, in that there's not much fine tuning to be done and > most people I've talked with are either overloaded with things to care > about or mute everything and only manually check channels. There's an > additional problem in that you can never fully be away from Slack. Their > "Do Not Disturb" settings can't stretch for more than 24 hours (something > they do not appear eager to change as they're asked about this quite > often), so you need to go out of your way to do something about the weekend > to get some time away from work. > > > However, I'm not really familiar with the initial problem of people > joining IRC. Rather, one I'm familiar with regards to IRC is the problem of > replicating things like Slack—or at least the ability to receive messages > while offline—such as using/buying/hosting an IRC bouncer. Can you speak > more about what brought you to propose a change here? I wonder if this is > something we can just solve while continuing to use IRC? > > On Fri, Mar 30, 2018 at 6:27 AM, INADA Naoki <songofaca...@gmail.com> > wrote: > >> Hi, >> >> Nowadays, joining to IRC is a hurdle for new contributors. >> There are some alternative, modern web applications: >> >> * Slack -- Most used for tech communities. >> * Discord -- Similar to slack. It is focusing game, but support OSS too. >> [1] >> * Gitter -- Most integrated with Github. typing, mypy, pip use it >> already. >> >> [1] https://discordapp.com/open-source >> >> >> I know adding communication channel is not good always. >> (We couldn't keep https://discuss.python.org/) >> But I think IRC is really high hurdle for young people. >> >> How about trying one of them? (maybe, gitter?) >> >> Regards, >> >> -- >> INADA Naoki <songofaca...@gmail.com> >> _______________________________________________ >> core-workflow mailing list -- core-workflow@python.org >> To unsubscribe send an email to core-workflow-le...@python.org >> https://mail.python.org/mm3/mailman3/lists/core-workflow.python.org/ >> This list is governed by the PSF Code of Conduct: >> https://www.python.org/psf/codeofconduct >> > > _______________________________________________ > core-workflow mailing list -- core-workflow@python.org > To unsubscribe send an email to core-workflow-le...@python.org > https://mail.python.org/mm3/mailman3/lists/core-workflow.python.org/ > This list is governed by the PSF Code of Conduct: > https://www.python.org/psf/codeofconduct >
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