Instant messaging platform for beman

Beman Libraries
1

This is discussed in today’s minutes, but since this request have, by nature, a higher bias on ppl who isn’t participating in the meeting. I will post this here to gather more feedback.

Basic Idea

It would be helpful to have a channel (discord/ irc) to chat with other beman contributors to ask smaller scale questions/ to test out ideas/ hangout. There’s questions that’s too small for discourse and I believe beman regular’s GitHub inbox is already full.

Topics suitable would be: small paper/ wording question, C++ question, infra question.

@dietmarkuehl summarized this beautifully at the meeting, there’s questions with short time span that doesn’t need to stay (as it is here on discourse) for longer than e.g. 2 week, that would be suitable to instant message platforms.

@paul has a discord server that I chat with about inplace_vector, and has already helped me a lot as a non-expert contributor (thanks!).

This would also be an alternative avenue for contribution to build knowledge surrounding beman community, and would be a good way to gather feedback outside of GitHub threads.

Having an instant messaging platform is common in similar community

LLVM has a discord server. Boost has an IRC channel on freenode. I personally prefer a discord server over IRC/ mailing list any time of the day…. It’s 2024 after-all.

Argument for discord

Folks (like me) hear about beman from conferences like CPPCON and CppNow, which I believe is the one of the main avenue for contributor inflow. They both use discord for conference logistics, I think it is safe to assume big enough portion of contributor/ interested individuals have a discord account.

Discord is feature-full with good support across all platforms, and is well tested for community building.

Alternatives

Discourse

@InbalL tested instant messaging native to discourse, but she’s happy with Discord as well :slightly_smiling_face:
@bretbrownjr suggests the main problem with discourse is that there isn’t a good notification system and thinks discord is feature full for this use case.

Other platforms

There isn’t a particular reason to not use slack/ teams/ telegram functionality wise if not popularity.

Concerns

Moderation obviously.

If the current size of beman community is big enough to support a discord server. This would be wasted resource if this does not encourage more participation, no one like another instant messaging app on their phone with no messages/ a dead discord server.

Asking questions to other maintainers is the main motivation for me, but I am not sure if other routine maintainers share this need. Maybe @dsankel , @dietmarkuehl , @neatudarius , @ednolan , @maikel can give more input regarding this.

Logistics

I am also open to attaching ourself to some pre-existing discord community, this would be an extra avenue to advertise ourself (also to come-up with more library ideas), and may be more reasonable for our current size. We could grow into a separate server afterwards. Though its unclear which community with a discord server would be a good choice here.

I can set something up for beman directly as well, but I cannot guarantee I will be moderating every single messages.

A general consensus on approach here would be preferred before I invest time in setting the system up.

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Hi,

I’ve been pinged, so I feel like I should share my opinion. I’m already using Discord for various C++ related servers, such as the #include server. In the past, I’ve also been on the cpplang Slack server but I stopped following it, because it was too much for me at some point. Consequently, I would prefer a Discord solution over yet another platform. Having that said, I can relate with a recent discussion on the boost mailing list: Having too many information channels makes it hard to follow ongoing discussions (or reviews in Boost’s case). I’m okay with just reading Discourse and staying in contact with everyone on GitHub, Mail (and Discord with some of you).

Cheers,
Maikel

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+1 for Discord. I think it will likely be best suited for getting quick feedback and having some discussion regarding specific PRs or implementation questions.

I’ve also used Gitter in the past, and it also works well, but I doubt many have a gitter account already though it does link well with other account providers (Github and the like).

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I am bit worried about this as well, as it seems like most communication are run by emails.

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This was discussed at the 12/23 meeting. There was a general feeling that having more formal information channels (lots of github traffic) would make keeping up more difficult. For me personally, I’m not a fan of discord and don’t want to add it as another thing to track. Also mentioned in meeting that discord isn’t searchable on internet - depending on what you want that’s good or bad.

I’m wondering if some of the discourse notification issues are just settings? Would be nice for someone to run an experiment and see? Like by default this thread is set to ‘tracking for me’ – ‘watching’ is a higher level that notifies on every update.

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Setting up a discord server is pretty easy, in fact I have my own. I could set one up and we can do a trial run on it.

A good thing about it as already mentioned is that many people already have a discord account.

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Understood, but as mentioned the general vibe of today’s meeting was to not create another communications platform. I have a discord account which I only use during conferences that use discord – I don’t want to start needing to check it.

@dietmarkuehl I’ve created a networking chat channel (should show up under channels). I assume people will need to join (I didn’t put automatic add on).

edit: here’s the docs on discourse chat Discourse Chat - Plugin - Discourse Meta

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Where can I find the networking channel?

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For me the channels show up on the left hand side of the page – and as @maikel found he could just join the chat.

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I also think another platform won’t bring more value vs overhead.
I would remind you that the current time for the sync was moved to accommodate people from 3 continents, so maybe an instant messaging app it won’t help much people.

I think our current collaboration via Discourse + e-mail/Github + 1h-weekly sync works and I would not change that.

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I heard @dietmarkuehl express a desire to use a chat-like service to coordinate among that subgroup – which is why I created the networking channel. Which I don’t think has gotten a real test yet.