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What's a good setup that couples both informal communication like IRC and more "structured' communication like a web forum of yore? Slack + Discourse? Other combinations?

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optimyze.cloud

@OptimyzeCloud

Jan 29, 2021

We are discussing setting up infrastructure for a community of people interested in performance optimization & betatesting our profiler. Slack is an obvious choice, but we'd want something less ephemeral, too. What's a good choice for that? Discourse?

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the big difference between a chat and a forum is that the forum doesn't send on newline and doesn't immediately notify the recipient, right? ^^

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well, assuming that the chat is threaded

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Matrix has support for replies (quoting) in a way that resolves to the original message and allows navigating to it. It's helpful when replying to a message from a while ago. It's not quite threading, but it's similar. Can also post long messages with newlines and rich content.

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I'd recommend Matrix channels. Host your own server. People can connect via their client and home server of choice. Real-time chat builds a community in a way that a forum or email never will. You can set it up so people can view the chat logs via a browser without an account.

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GrapheneOS had an existing community on IRC so we used an IRC channel with a Matrix room bridged to it. This mostly works well, but github.com/matrix-org/mat is really painful. If we were hosted our own server, we could get rid of this if we convinced freenode to let us bridge...

github.com

users actively reading messages should not be kicked for being idle · Issue #1194 · matrix-org/ma...

Users that are logging into their accounts and reading the messages should not be kicked for idling. Matrix has read receipts and those provide a way to detect that users are actively lurking rathe...

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Matrix is basically IRC where everyone has a bouncer (home server) and can use any server for any channel. Rich text (via Markdown), reactions, E2E encryption, calls, edits, etc. Feels like home if you're used to IRC. Host your own server for employee accounts / channel aliases.

6:40 AM · Jan 30, 2021Twitter Web App

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Killer feature: people do not have to register an account with you or use your chosen clients, etc. I'd just use the self-hosted server for main channel aliases and employee accounts. Everyone else can use their usual server. No new account, no new app, etc. Lots of choices.