Chat channel for cloudron app packaging
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@nebulon @girish I stumbled today on some interesting reading regarding the articulation between a chat and a forum in a community, and you might find it interesting:
https://forum.mautic.org/t/using-the-community-forums-with-slack/12011
https://blog.discourse.org/2018/04/effectively-using-discourse-together-with-group-chat/
Admittedly we're using neither slack nor discourse (which I sometimes feel is a lost opportunity as it's more mature in most way than Nodebb), but the main points are still valids.
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For interest, I work with a team of 12 developers and around 20 others across departments every day, we're a fully remote team.
For the development team we're about 90% discussion in GitLab tickets, the rest through Discord (not Discourse). The Customer Services team is about the same. Generally, all the chat is FYIs, attention-needing stuff, alerts or idle gossip for a break.
We just get more done in the ticket/post/thread asynchronous stuff when we're all multi-tasking.
I'm not against chat and the forum does have that available, but for development the ability to search threads and read the discussions that led to a commit is valuable, and there's no real limits to storage of that when thoughtfully categorised.
Every single time I've seen a Discord "Community" created for something, it goes from lonely hearts to distracting noise pretty quickly and I have to mute the whole thing.
I like a chat, and always open for DMs but to me work is something that needs the organisation and openness of topic-specific threaded conversations, and searchability for those evolutions. It helps focus the mind when knowing conversations are becoming a historic record and keeps the noise and interruptions factors limited when trying to focus on developments.
Web Design https://www.evergreen.je
Development https://brandlight.org
Life https://marcusquinn.com -
For interest, I work with a team of 12 developers and around 20 others across departments every day, we're a fully remote team.
For the development team we're about 90% discussion in GitLab tickets, the rest through Discord (not Discourse). The Customer Services team is about the same. Generally, all the chat is FYIs, attention-needing stuff, alerts or idle gossip for a break.
We just get more done in the ticket/post/thread asynchronous stuff when we're all multi-tasking.
I'm not against chat and the forum does have that available, but for development the ability to search threads and read the discussions that led to a commit is valuable, and there's no real limits to storage of that when thoughtfully categorised.
Every single time I've seen a Discord "Community" created for something, it goes from lonely hearts to distracting noise pretty quickly and I have to mute the whole thing.
I like a chat, and always open for DMs but to me work is something that needs the organisation and openness of topic-specific threaded conversations, and searchability for those evolutions. It helps focus the mind when knowing conversations are becoming a historic record and keeps the noise and interruptions factors limited when trying to focus on developments.
@marcusquinn If you look at the Discourse guide (Discourse is just an opinionated modern and extensible forum platform) I posted, you'll see it actually mirrors quite a lot your working experience of communication.
It's definitely not a binary situation where X or Y is better.
I started this thread here with a specific angle (I suggest a chat space for app developers), and here's a summary of what I learned:
- Chat is not scalable after a hundred of users
- Forum is better for knowledge discovery and retention
- Chat can create a better community and create links stronger than in a forum (but it's not scalable when you reach thousands of users)
- Chat and forum can both provide value as long as policies are set and followed
So it seems to me the main blocker for me in this situation is that @girish and @nebulon don't have the time and resource to provide that experience for the community more than anything.
And I absolutely don't mean this as a negative critic.
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@marcusquinn If you look at the Discourse guide (Discourse is just an opinionated modern and extensible forum platform) I posted, you'll see it actually mirrors quite a lot your working experience of communication.
It's definitely not a binary situation where X or Y is better.
I started this thread here with a specific angle (I suggest a chat space for app developers), and here's a summary of what I learned:
- Chat is not scalable after a hundred of users
- Forum is better for knowledge discovery and retention
- Chat can create a better community and create links stronger than in a forum (but it's not scalable when you reach thousands of users)
- Chat and forum can both provide value as long as policies are set and followed
So it seems to me the main blocker for me in this situation is that @girish and @nebulon don't have the time and resource to provide that experience for the community more than anything.
And I absolutely don't mean this as a negative critic.
@ruihildt Sure, and aware of Discourse, been online since modems where a thing you placed your Bakelite phone on
TBH, sounds like a thing for you to do privately with any fellow acquaintances you make here that can afford the time, so the forum still finds you those connections, and it seems you already found those to chat with when specifically needed.
I just can't see myself being able to get involved in yet another chat channel among many commitments, so guessing others may be similar.
Kinda feels like what we already have from @girish and @nebulon in his answer already serves everyone very well, and I've been through the multi-channel comms issues with collab work so many times now I'm shy of anything that presumes attention, when most people I work with are more productive when collab is at their asynchronous leisure.
Web Design https://www.evergreen.je
Development https://brandlight.org
Life https://marcusquinn.com -
@ruihildt Sure, and aware of Discourse, been online since modems where a thing you placed your Bakelite phone on
TBH, sounds like a thing for you to do privately with any fellow acquaintances you make here that can afford the time, so the forum still finds you those connections, and it seems you already found those to chat with when specifically needed.
I just can't see myself being able to get involved in yet another chat channel among many commitments, so guessing others may be similar.
Kinda feels like what we already have from @girish and @nebulon in his answer already serves everyone very well, and I've been through the multi-channel comms issues with collab work so many times now I'm shy of anything that presumes attention, when most people I work with are more productive when collab is at their asynchronous leisure.
@marcusquinn I think it's worth keeping in mind the difference of context (work environment vs community environment).
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If Cloudron had a Discord and a channel for app devs. That’d be pretty cool. But it could be for the whole community if you’d want to start it. I tried Matrix and it wasn’t great so I seriously wander if the community would benefit from a Discord channel.
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Personally I think the best answer to this is to just re-open to new registrations the existing Cloudron Rocket.Chat instance at https://chat.cloudron.io/ (where there are already 668 users, but right now just 6 online, including me who only went there to check)
BUT to make it clear on the homepage that is NOT for official support, just for chat and peer support between the community.
It should be made clear that whilst @girish @nebulon may occasionally chime in and idle there, they shall not be expected to reply nor provide support there, even if mentioned, and the best way to get support is via the Forum.
I'm not a fan of Discord because it is proprietary (I don't really get why so many people use it - I think maybe just because it's popular in gaming?)
Edit: for those who prefer Matrix can probably bridge the two channels and keep everyone happy? Maybe even add IRC too!
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Personally I think the best answer to this is to just re-open to new registrations the existing Cloudron Rocket.Chat instance at https://chat.cloudron.io/ (where there are already 668 users, but right now just 6 online, including me who only went there to check)
BUT to make it clear on the homepage that is NOT for official support, just for chat and peer support between the community.
It should be made clear that whilst @girish @nebulon may occasionally chime in and idle there, they shall not be expected to reply nor provide support there, even if mentioned, and the best way to get support is via the Forum.
I'm not a fan of Discord because it is proprietary (I don't really get why so many people use it - I think maybe just because it's popular in gaming?)
Edit: for those who prefer Matrix can probably bridge the two channels and keep everyone happy? Maybe even add IRC too!
@jdaviescoates I could even bridge discord. I think gamer's ppopularized it, but for me it's the amazing API and customizations...and custom emoji.
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There's no reason not to use the Rocket Chat instance since it's already used. Only thing we may need is an additional channel for #devtalk vs the regular #discussion
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There's no reason not to use the Rocket Chat instance since it's already used. Only thing we may need is an additional channel for #devtalk vs the regular #discussion
@robi said in Chat channel for cloudron app packaging:
There's no reason not to use the Rocket Chat instance since it's already used.
I agree. It's just that at the moment it is closed to new registrations.
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I am not generally opposed to having a chat dedicated for that, but a huge drawback of chats in such a case is the issue of discoverability for new people. So solutions worked out for issues will get lost easily and thus newcomers will end up raising similar/same questions again and again. I do believe the forum is still the best place to ask and work out solutions.
I understand the turnaround time in a forum vs chat is different, but there is no problem using personal chats in our rocket.chat instance or so to quickly get down to an issue, nevertheless for the sake of community building up knowledge, it would usually still be tremendously helpful to then present solutions in the forum.
For support we also sometimes use chat to solve issues quickly and then try to also followup with the solution if any in either forum or even docs.
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There's no reason not to use the Rocket Chat instance since it's already used. Only thing we may need is an additional channel for #devtalk vs the regular #discussion
@robi said in Chat channel for cloudron app packaging:
Rocket Chat
I'm working with one of our dev to understand why Rocketchat Federation doesn't work on Cloudron.
as soon as that is fix, then it should be a really good option.
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@nebulon where is this rocket.chat? I have not found any infos on any official "community" pages… am I missing something? thx!
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@nebulon where is this rocket.chat? I have not found any infos on any official "community" pages… am I missing something? thx!
@grienauer we started out initially with a rocket.chat instance which is still alive and used mostly for internal communication though. Once we had this forum, we essentially wanted the community to move here, since the chat turned out to not be very helpful with issue and solution search-ability. Of course also no public indexing of the channels.
