Daeraxa

Daeraxa , 3 months ago

Magazines are Kbin's name for communities

Daeraxa , 3 months ago

I understand the mentality but depending on the project it can be a struggle. If I was going to set up a brand new software project then sure, I'd be going all in on Fediverse and open source platforms. Forge? Codeberg. Chat? Matrix. Forum? Discourse/Flarum or maybe just Lemmy. Microblog? Mastodon.

However it isn't easy to be that idealistic all the time and sometimes there is a degree of needing to do stuff against your ideals. I'm part of the Pulsar editor team which is a fork of the Atom text editor that got discontinued and we had to get things moving as quickly as possible in the time period that GitHub set until they pulled their services completely (along with their package backend). We needed the least friction possible to get things in motion and get as many people from the community involved as possible.

We needed GitHub - unsurprisingly Atom had close ties with GitHub anyway so moving away wasn't ever going to be quite that simple and we would have needed to migrate an awful lot of repos within the org. The entire Atom package system relies on GitHub - people published their packages to atom.io but the actual code was on GitHub - something not fixable in the short period we had. We also needed it because this is where the Atom community was gathered around - at a period where we needed things to be as simple as possible for people to find out about and get involved with the project, moving to another forge may have just been the end of it.

We also use GitHub Discussions for our forum - as we are already tied to GitHub for the time being we might as well use that platform as well - it is a lot easier than trying to maintain our own forums which wouldn't be seeing that much activity. The team behind Zed found this out; they set up a Discourse forum and barely anyone used it so they just went back to GitHub Discussions.

We needed Discord because it was simply the most commonly used platform. Pulsar split off from Atom-community which was already on Discord so it was a natural move that meant little disruption or friction to anyone wanting to get involved with the new project. We have been looking to make a Matrix bridge but honestly there doesn't seem to be all that much desire for it - we had some initial enthusiasm to create a Lemmy community but when we did it barely sees any activity (other than me posting updates there).

Would I love to move off of these platforms? Absolutely. However we simply have bigger fish to fry at this point in time for the project itself so it is going to be slow.

So whilst I love to be idealistic about what platforms we should be using I also heavily sympathise with those who use those "less than ideal" ones - there could well be some very good reasons behind it that might not be obvious to you.

Daeraxa , 3 months ago

I don't think much in this is specific to Discord so much as it is to chat/IM in general. Honestly we use both chat (yes via Discord although I'd love to move to Matrix) and forums. They just serve completely different roles. Traditional style forums (whatever it is, Discourse, Flarum, Github Discussions) work really well for "long form" topics and asynchronous conversations. i.e. if there is something to discuss that is complex and can attract valid conversation over the course of days/weeks/months then it is ideal.

Chat on the other hand is great for co-ordinating and asking quick one-off questions that will get you an answer really quickly. We use it all the time to just discuss general plans, ideas etc. and answer simple questions like "how do I do x?".

I think most of the (justified) hatred is to those projects that only have a community via chat which is valid - on big projects it can be somewhat difficult to get a word in and get noticed if you have a "simple" question which wouldn't be a problem on a forum.

Daeraxa , 3 months ago

The moment I see the same question popping up more than a couple of times is an indication that it should be documented by somewhere that is actually indexed by search engines, normally the website/faq/docs/wiki as it is clear there is something missing.

To me, as part of a small team/project, it feels so much better to be able to use chat for every day communication just as I would at work. It allows a lot more expression in communication than forum posting. It has really helped us have a good sense of community and teamwork we might have not otherwise had.

Daeraxa , 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

No but I do understand where they are coming from. Can I read it? Yes. Is it hard to read? No. However for me it is oddly... uncomfortable... to read. Thats the best way I can describe it. I normally scan read the text and the way I understand it is that when people read like this they are looking for the overall shapes of words, not the individual letters, which is why it is possible to misspell the middle letters of words without causing too much issue with comprehension. However for me the way the letters are 'weighted' in the font is like a visual speedbump, they draw attention to themselves in a way which, for me, is unwanted and causes me to slow and change how I read each word.

I've noticed it before but I can't say I particularly care, it isn't like I'm reading prose. If this helps others then I think it is great that it is being used.

Daeraxa , 3 months ago

UK too, particularly common in the forces.(For those unaware it is rhyming slang - seppo = septic tank = yank). Somtimes just "septics" too.

Daeraxa , 4 months ago

I get lots of leaves and slugs. Occasionally an alive frog, one loves catching them for me but never even attempts to eat it.