Discussion Platform for community app development

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(this quote is from the other forum thread, but we branched this topic out here, so I will answer here)

Not necessarily, if there is a convenient way to discover channels, even if they are not grouped inside the Talk Chat List seems fine and I would much rather use Talk, than any proprietary platform.

My thoughts on the current list of applications that could be used instead of Talk:

  • Discord:

    • I would maybe use it, but probably not
    • Pros:
      • Easy and Cheap to run (you don’t pay with money, you pay with data, so not really a pro argument)
    • Cons:
      • Completely proprietary
      • Bad Linux client (bad wayland support)
      • Data sovereignty nightmare
      • Only a matter of time, until they introduce ads
      • Will try to sell you useless junk (Disord Nitro)
      • I already have like 7 million unread messges on discord and will never read them, because communities can get very spammy

  • Slack:

    • Basically the same pros/cons as Discord :slight_smile:

  • Rocket.Chat

    • I would use it, but i don’t think it is ideal
    • I don’t see the integration with nextcloud as a strong pro Argument
    • Pros:
      • Community Edition is open source
    • Cons:
      • I personally don’t run a Rocket.Chat server so this is second hand knowdlege, but the Rocket Chat Server can be pretty unstable and sometimes it will just crash and need a restart. This doesn’t give me much confidence in the maturity of the codebase.
      • I use Rocket.Chat at work and therefore have first had experience as a user: The issues seem to have gotten fixed, but there was a time period of about a year until recently, where Rocket.Chat development moved faster than it should have introducing many bugs into the frontend. Ever other update seemed to break something, very often it was impossible to scroll up to messages more than a few days old, because they would not load. The Rocket.Chat seems to have gotten this under control, but it was VERY annoying.

  • Mattermost

    • It would be my second choice.
    • Pros:
      • Open Source
    • Cons: nothing that I can think of currently

  • Element:

    • This would be my favorite
    • Pros:
      • Open Source
      • Uses the Matrix protocol :+1:
      • Is federated
      • Matrix already has good acceptance in many developer circles
      • Good Bridging support
    • Cons: nothing that I can think of currently

Generally I think a Discord-style chat service for nextcloud developers is a good idea, but is also has downsides:

There is a saying: “Discord is a black hole for information” (see this Hacker News Thread about it) that I agree with.
One a discord discussion thread is finished and the issue is resolved, it is gone forever. Nobody will scroll tenthousands messages up to find an answer to a previously answered question and using the search function for this is miserable, especially if multiple conversations happen in the same channel at the same time.
The same thing applies to IRC chats, Email Lists, Telegram Groups …
These groups have admins often get angry, because the same questions keeps getting asked over and over and people should “search before asking” without realizing this is a systemic problem that they themselfes caused by using Discord in the first place.
A forum does not have this problem, but it has the problem of having much higher response times.

There are 2 solutions:

  • If there is a solution found for a problem, that others might have in the future it needs to get added to the documentation.
    But it is pretty clear that this will not work out: Who will do the work for that ? Who checks if the solution in the docs keeps getting updated, when they become out of date ? Which solutions are worth adding to the docs ?
  • Making the chat history discoverable via a regular search engine, similar to Email List Archives like https://lkml.org/
    But this can to my knowdlege not be achieved using any off-the-shelf (open source) software currently available.

In my opinion Discord (and similar) should be used for casual conversations, discussions around current events (applies for example to most work conversations, which is why slack is popular with businesses), memes and gaming voice chats, but not for things, that keep being relevent for a long time to come.

So a Discord-style chat for nextcloud still makes sense for the aforementioned casual conversations and discussions around current events/announcements, but not for answering questions that stay relevant.
This would in practice mean:
“Help my dev environment broke, does anybody know how to fix this” :white_check_mark:

“Why does API OCP/**** throw this error” :x:

“Nextcloud 25 is looking really nice, great work Nextcloud Team” :white_check_mark:

“I want to implement feature ****, which API is best practice” :x:

“Does the community think implementing feature X to popular app Y is a good idea ? Vote in the poll below.” :white_check_mark:

“New Blog post on nextcloud.com what does the community think ?” :white_check_mark:

My production nextcloud instance has issue X, how do I fix this ?" :x:

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