On IRC #devuan: <golinux> hellekin: Can we PLEASE move on from Discourse. Very few people are using it and those who are loathe it for the most part. It's holding back Devuan's community growth!
Let me state it one last time, by email, so that it can be read by everyone and we can have a discussion about it, instead of a persistent and frankly annoying counter-productive attitude regarding talk.devuan.org. No, we're not moving on from Discourse. Yes, very few people are using it. Yes, *some* people insist on loathing it, and although I have tried to address every single of their arguments, they keep coming at it without even trying (e.g., to *not* use the Web after their account is registered.) Maybe there's some missing documentation about how to use Discourse as a mailing list only. I don't think anybody here as much to say against mailing list apart from the well-known issues: - threads casually explode as people's MUA don't keep the thread reference (e.g., when replying from a digest) - multiple threads talk about the same thing, adding "where?" to the archaeology of remembering what was said. - titles are not consistent within a thread (drifts happen before the title is changed) - archives are very much an accumulation of dead letters that require reading sometimes entire threads to figure out pertinent content. - mailing lists can get invaded by trolls - etc. For each of these issues, Discourse provides an elegant solution: - 'categories' (I prefer calling them 'conferences') and topics are malleable and can be transformed at will without losing the URLs. - posts and topics can be merged into a single *long lived* topic to prevent many threads repeating themselves - 'drifts' can be selected-out of a conversation into a new topic, to keep the discussion consistent and encourage on-topic contributions - some contributions (preferably the opening post in a topic) can be made a wiki page so that information accumulated during the time of a conversation can be turned into accessible knowledge. - actual participation *over time* provide an effective defense against trolls, spammers, and other undesirable 'participants' that infest mailing lists. *Most of these wanted features* are *not available* in other forum software, that: - use CAPTCHAs or external anti-spam services susceptible to harm people's nerve and privacy - accumulate an infinity of repeating topics that often end up in dead-ends polluting search engines with useless contents - promote a reactionary culture of 'self-expression' and novelty (because people prefer "opening a new topic" rather than searching for existing contents--also because searching existing topics is a pain) rather than a long-term conversation towards collective intelligence and collaborative knowledge management So, I understand that Discourse is not for everyone, its web interface requires some heavy Javascript that can be slow, and it doesn't look like you would like, and certainly not like any forum out there, where you just sit and shout. But you need to understand that: 1) we're thinking of a *tool* towards a *goal*: knowledge management 2) it can be *used by email* (as a mailing list, requiring very few interaction with the Web at all) 3) nothing prevents anyone from *setting up another forum software* Which brings me to the last argument: "It's holding back Devuan's community growth!" Really, golinux, do you think it does? FriendsOfDevuan has a wiki that is mentioned in the official documentation page on devuan.org/os/documentation while it's not operated by the VUA, so be my guest and make a popular forum that will help grow the Devuan community. I think the two objectives are orthogonal, and certainly not incompatible. I know you've been arguing the talk.do was a threat to the mailing lists. Yet, officially, DNG has been replaced by devuan-discuss and devuan-announce mailing lists, which see seldom traffic so far. That means we're not in an univocal world where "the VUA decide" and "the community follows". I urge you to look around and watch the hilarious Ethereum fork story that unfolded this summer. In fact, we can just *propose ways*, and some people will understand and participate, and some will prefer keeping using what's there *and there is no problem at all with that*. We live in a complex, multipolar world, where *one vision does not exclude other visions*. With Devuan we're trying to give another take on what an universal OS means, and for that we want to have a compact set of tools that enables more diversity in the expression of what is, how to make, and who makes "a distro". *In my opinion*, talk.do has an important role to play in this strategy, as does the devuan-sdk, and Amprolla and build automation, etc. But I certainly do not support the idea that my opinion is the only valid one. I'd rather not have *another* forum software under devuan.org to avoid dissipating energies. But I certainly cannot prevent the community from deciding that my vision is moot and go on setting up something that may eventually replace it. Devuan is not Python: there's no one-true-way here. <3 == hk P.S.: I'm tempted to post this to devuan-discuss and talk.do, but hey, let's not cross-post :) -- _ _ We are free to share code and we code to share freedom (_X_)yne Foundation, Free Culture Foundry * https://www.dyne.org/donate/ _______________________________________________ Dng mailing list [email protected] https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng
