morning

good to heat that the hiring at Nedap is progressing!

and for our new joiners, there is a #clojure-europe channel as well, feel free to join (less traffic than this one though)

morning, thanks for the info @thomas

Speaking of channels and traffic: together with some other guys I recently started an initiative to create a more suitable home for smaller communities within the Clojure community to have conversations. Reason is that we’re seeing that while local groups setup their slack-channels and subscribed en-masse (~65 of them, all starting around 3,5 years ago), currently hardly any of those channels is active (clojure-nl and clojure-uk are the exceptions btw). To get these subcommunities back again, we setup https://clojurians.zulipchat.com/ . It’s an opensource-Slack that allows for a more asynchronous conversation (messages are preserved instead of being deleted within 6 days and discussions are topic-based). Read about their vision here: https://zulipchat.com/for/working-groups-and-communities/. We’re curious what you think, so please give it a spin! For further discussion (and the slack-statistics) please see https://clojurians.zulipchat.com/#narrow/stream/151155-community-development/subject/slack-stats/near/147551380

why should subchats becomes more active on a different platform? devil’s advocate here

Because we think that the pace of Slack is not favouring smaller communities, that typically have a lower pace: meeting once a month, subscribers checking in once a week maybe and want to read up on what’s being discussed.

Having interesting content/topics will keep the conversation going - currently though this content needs to be produced fairly quickly in order to prevent the ‘empty restaurant’ problem

why not use clojureverse for that? more chat platforms, more spread, less active? (DA still speaking)

It’s very likely that in the beginning when all these channels started this was simply more viable (ie messages stayed up longer). With the popularity of #beginners, #clojure and #clojurescript the ‘sliding window’ shrunk and is no 6 days. Hence, the conversations stopped.

there already have been some initiatives to move it to this game chat thing (don’t remember what it’s called)

this is not perse about moving chat - this is about serving different needs. There’s nothing wrong with Slack. But it’s not working for smaller communities - they simply left.

Discord, is the name of that game chat thing

I have the impression that Slack is still the most active, but Discord is used as well indeed.

On the other hand, I would love to see a move away from Slack, so any initiative is welcome.

Yeah, various other things were proposed.

I don’t mind where the action is happening as long as it works

But again Slack is serving the community: walk into a channel, ask question, and get some answers

I mean, if everyone moved to Zulip, I’d go there. But how do you get people to do that?

that will stay as Slack is ubiquitous. But for other purposes this synchronous way is not perse handy/wanted

@borkdude to solve this specific problem, I think it would require less of a ‘total migrate’ (that hampered the other initiatives maybe) but more like: let’s connect to local groups and see if they can get the conversation going again. And offer them a place within the large community.

Slack just needs to slack and donate history to this awesome community

And not eat gigs of ram on my macbook...

for a meetup-group it would be interesting to be able to search for the last presentations that were done (some weeks ago) and how they were received, what topics are interesting to discuss in future meetups etc.

yeah 1200MB memory seems a bit much…

@eval2020 for such long running conversations I think clojureverse is perfect

or the forum on http://meetup.com

I heard that various initiatives tried to pursuade slack into donating that but it failed. And even with history: given the current (unstructured) conversations of Slack people are not catching up

@borkdude would clojureverse be suitable for a meetupgroup-specific hello/goodmorning thingy like we do here?

isn’t this channel already that thing?

A single tool for both kinds of chat/discussion would be best. Maybe Zulip's streams and topics help with this. Flowdock has a similar approach (all chat messages are written in the context of a thread), but alas, Flowdock didn't win the race. That way, you can quickly get answers, have longer discussions and find both types of conversations in the history.

yeah - that’s what I mean: that’s chat. And chat is good. But Slack’s chat has a very specific dynamic (because unstructured, and free plan) - and it’s failing slow pace communities

I handle this chat a bit like Twitter. I don’t read back more than a day. if It’s important, it has to be on Github, Clojureverse, etc.

I think Slack can be what it is. It isn’t going anywhere. Even how Slack is used within the Clojure community: quick answers in the larger channels 👍

Back in the day, you had IRC and the Clojure Google Group (which is also still somewhat active today)... simpler times 🙂

Current situation

@arnout yeah, and maybe these still serve a purpose.

Also as a support-channel for opensource projects, Slack is not suitable: I want to point users of my library somewhere where they can help themselves to start with. If that fails they can open a topic (slightly low barrier than opening an issue on github) and others can join the conversation

correction: clojurians-Slack is not suitable

stats of clojure-russia (the largest localgroup in terms of subscribers)

Even when sharing this figures, Slack is telling me to pay 😉

Hmm, I remember something about some local guys making their own web framework in Clojure. Can anyone remember what it was called?

man there are so many clojure subcommunities right now, i think we must rank very high on the amount of communities / active user

and then looking at the Go and Kubernetes communities makes me very jealous, where Google just foots the bill for premium for all members

I guess the solution space clojure tries to tackle is bigger than those of go and kubernetes. So it makes sence there's more subcommunities. I don't know if that's a problem. Maybe is harder to find your specific group and when you've joined a couple, keeping up in different platforms.

About slack not being a perfect match, it's irc, even with history and search capabilities, it's still a messy pile of chat. So either go mailing list (of one if it's web incarnations) or chat.

> About slack not being a perfect match, it’s irc, even with history and search capabilities, it’s still a messy pile of chat. So either go mailing list (of one if it’s web incarnations) or chat. Exactly. So Slack is working great like this in the larger channels. But looking at the stats we can see that folks that used it for somewhat slower pace conversations removed themselves from the platform (despite high subscribers, and Slack being ubiquitous etcetc). So this initiative is not about addressing needs of people that use Slack (though they can also benefit from a more structured converstation), but targeted at people that moved away from Slack.

@occamin was it braid?

For slow pace, I'd say, go for mailing lists, forums or whatever; structured conversations with a topic and threads. Using a chat platform for slow paced conversionations (with a large-ish group of people) like slack doesn't make sense, I think. Unless it's just a case of FOMO, than go for one of those chatlog solutions which have been around forever for irc. And yes, I am one of those old guys, who still doesn't get what extras slack offers over irc apart from a clicker-ti-click-interface to add chatbots.

@remco it's because you are not a gif conneisseur 😛

you guys and girls are aware of https://clojurians-log.clojureverse.org/clojure-nl are you?

I sympathise with the sentiment remco, but I think with a different medium (not tool, I mean chat vs email) you get different dynamics/conversations. So this standup/coffeetalk that is done in this channel, is probably not working over email.

@borkdude yes. And the community became also aware that we can’t do a lot with those logs, because privacy and possibly because it’s not inline with Slack’s TOS

apparently I’m not the community then 😉

https://clojureverse.org/t/ideas-for-clojurians-log/3060

again, the logs have their use. But to further use that pile of data (ie remember the Q&A that Rich did when Ions came out?): it seems hardly likely unfortunately.

I still feel people are trying to bridge the gap between a mailing and a chat platform. Slack doesn't solve this, not with threads, not with history and search, but it's fine for standups. But nobody is taking notes on standups. You take notes at meeting and meetings have an agenda (topics!). They are two different things and sometimes a chat triggers a topic, which might as well be a link to a mail/forum topic.

When you read Zulip’s vision they’re trying to get the best of both chat and mail-worlds: > In Zulip, streams determine who gets a message. Topics tell you what the message is about. https://zulipchat.com/help/about-streams-and-topics

oh, that could work.. 😁

kinda like twitter?

@eval2020 Nah, it was more like a web framework

Having full markdown with syntax highlighting is a nice bonus… 🙂

Anyways, for those that want to give Zulip a try: there’s a clojure-nl stream! https://clojurians.zulipchat.com/#narrow/stream/151154-clojure-nl First topic: tomorrow’s meetup!

Kinda feel like an asshole for not joining after complaining about slack but I don't need yet another platform, sorry. I'm here for the watercooler talk. :thinking_face:

coffee @remco?

I have joined. if you need me, @ me.

@remco I don’t blame ya 😉 :hug:

will tomorrow’s streaming link also be shared?