On Thu, May 20, 2021 at 11:59:31AM +0000, Andy Nichols wrote:
The chat channels are fragmented these days. There’s the Qt discord channels,
QtMob on Slack, Qt and Advanced C++ on Telegram.
Are any of these channels endorsed by the Qt project? The IRC channels are,
that's
why I'm raising the question here.
They probably should be. We list those in our "Online Communities" wiki. I'm
active
on the Qt Discord and its quite lively and interesting.
Not to mention freenode ones, that no one uses anymore,
This is a falsehood (they're active both in terms of traffic, and importance of
the
discussions happening there -- like the release meetings).
IRC has been relatively "dead" for a while now compared to how it used to be.
Even
now that we are doing everything remotely IRC is pretty useless compared to
other
chat services for collaboration because everything is so manual (sharing code,
sharing images, sharing video, having voice calls, sharing a screen).
And IRC can't make coffee and doesn't fix your bike either.
If you have some tool that happens to have some chat functionality does not
make other
functionality of that tool a requirement when looking for a chat service.
To get any history you have to run another service, or look at an archive
(which I
can't even seem to find now for the Qt freenode channels).
Works as designed. Freenode never endorsed public logging.
Chat is for ephemeral contents, like normal speech.
You don't run around with a running voice recorder all day, or require public
logging
of everything you and the people around you ever said in real life, do you?
I expect to be able to log Into chat on any of my machines (and my phone or
table)
and see push notifications when I've been mentioned.
_I_ expect online chat to work similarly to offline chat: when I am in some
room, I can
hear stuff, when I am not in some room, I don't hear anything, and most of the
things
I hear will be forgotten a few days later. If I hear something important, I
might
take a note, in an explicit, extra step. Under no circumstances I will be able
to
"remember" something someone said in a room I wasn't in a year ago, my only
chance
is to talk to someone who was. And this is a _good_ thing.
All of these things we have now with Slack, Discord, Teams, etc. Those services
have set a new standard of what we expect for a chat service. Dealing with IRC
has
the same level of experience now that it did when we dialed in with modems.
Please don't use "we" unless you are sure you voice a consensus opinion.
I can't say anything about Slack or Discord, as I don't use them, but I do have
an
opinion about Teams which I am requested to use at work.
For me, Teams has the worst chat-like functionality I've ever used, and that
includes
'talk' or even telnetting into someone's machine and using 'write' there (so
yes,
it's been a ride...):
There is no sensible way in Teams to keep up with what people said in various
discussion in various channels without excessive (and time consuming) mousing
around.
Even individual messages are collapsed if they are "long". There's no way to
arrange
things to be read linearly without interruption. And even if you expand stuff it
will be collapsed next time you come back. I am quicker browsing "useless" lines
for interesting information than to click around and then to browse that anyway.
And thanks to having no public protocol I don't even have a theoretical chance
to
get a client that does what I want. So: Thanks, but no, thanks.
And that is just the usability aspect. The deep disrespect of anything in the
vicinity
of privacy is another sore spot. Ever tried to control your "own" data there?
Like,
cleaning up your "own" call history?
As far as what chat service we *should* use that is harder to say (having
previously
did battle inside of tQtc over this very topic for our internal chat and getting
nowhere).
[...]
I expect that something like Matrix would be the only thing the more outspoken
members of our community could handle, and I think that would probably Be a
reasonable compromise as it does seem to be quite good. I personally like
Discord
but I can understand why people would have hesitations about that. I did
notice that
the Godot (open source Game engine) community have recently officially moved
there
development chat to Discord from Freenode (IRC) and The server is very active
and
vibrant.
I would like to get back to doing more of our development discussions out in
the open
(like it should be), but right now IRC is not something I want to go back to for
that.
I also think that having development related discussions in internal Teams
channels
is counterproductive not only for the parts of the community that cannot
participate.
Using IRC would already (re-)enable that participation. If there is something
better
than IRC which provides at least IRC's feature that _I_ use, than fine with
_me_, I
do not insist on IRC exactly, let alone on a particular network.
I would also like the follow up on one of my previous points. IRC *is* a
barrier to
entry when contributing to a project. It is a pain to setup and use because it
is
archaic. One more papercut in the list of challenges to contributing to Qt.
There
are students now (born after 2000) who are interested in being more involved in
Qt,
but have Never used an IRC server.
Also there was a point about: "do require no registration". I find that to be
an
unreasonable thing to require.
It's my #1 requirement for things that I do take part in voluntarily. If a thing
has _optional_ registration - fine. I might even use it. Voluntarily. But as a
_requirement_ it's an absolute no-go.
If anything we should have more verification in our chat. We run Qt Project as
a
meritocracy where it is important that someone is who they say they are (like a
maintainer).
I don't think someone's position in the hierarchy should matter in a _chat_. If
people
think if their status matters for personal communication - fine, let them
register and
brag with their titles. But what's wrong when John Doe simply answers your
questions
even if you don't know his CV by heart?
If we choose to just move to another IRC service, then it's likely that I'll
just
continue to ignore it as irrelevant like I do now with Freenode.
Looks like the both of us won't have much of a chance to chat casually online.
Andre'
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