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#off-topic
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2019-02-14
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sbronner08:02:28

Interesting blog post on switching from slack to spectrum - a lot of the criticisms of slack for public forums and community rang true for me: https://blog.apollographql.com/goodbye-slack-hello-spectrum-8fa6b979645b

Mattias08:02:46

Does Spectrum run a similar business model? Thinking of data and integrity issues.

dominicm08:02:23

> Apollo team members have been big Spectrum fans since its inception, not just because it’s using the Apollo platform (that helps! 😍), but also because its founders, Brian Lovin, Max Stoiber and Bryn Jackson, have been awesome Apollo community members. A little bias in place :)

👍 5
dominicm08:02:00

This discussion might be better in #community-development

sbronner08:02:03

Good call - looks like this subject has been breached previously, I should have checked first.

sbronner08:02:33

TL;DR; slack is “good enough”. I don’t necessarily disagree.

borkdude08:02:55

How does this compare to clojureverse?

orestis10:02:28

I would much prefer if people wrote questions in ClojureVerse instead. Forum answers can be vetted, refined over time, can be much more complete etc etc. We should promote that more.

sbronner10:02:51

First time I've checked it out - excellent forum, thanks for bringing it to my attention.

10
cvic14:02:32

A community needs a real time chat platform, be it Slack... or IRC, a forum, Stack Overflow, reddit, etc

eggsyntax14:02:59

^ Agreed; there's clearly a place for both. I've been liking Zulip, and would happily make the move there if we could get critical mass. https://clojurians.zulipchat.com See also Sean Corfield's recent blog post on Slack alternatives for Clojurians: http://corfield.org/blog/2019/02/11/clojurians-slack-alternatives/

cvic14:02:16

I remember someone setup a Mattermost instance, but I don't remember th link

eval202014:02:50

to get critical mass for a Slack-alternative it’s important to attract users for which Slack is not working - Slack is indeed popular but for a select group of users. For eg. local usergroups and smaller oss-projects the synchronous dynamics without option to search is not beneficial.

borkdude15:02:39

I didn’t read the entire post, but an important question is: did those local user-groups succeed elsewhere? it’s really easy to create a channel for your user group/country and then not look at it again

eggsyntax15:02:46

"to get critical mass for a Slack-alternative it’s important to..." and I would add that it's less, er, critical to reach critical mass when you have at least one-way mirroring of Slack, as Zulip does; that way it's less important that everyone agree to move at once.

👍 5
mpenet15:02:03

slack works when you can pay for it, that's about it

eval202015:02:43

indeed and I think when small oss-projects just start their own stream and have their own ‘pace’ (which might be even less than a handful messages a week) it’s fine: for (core) contributors it means that an explanation is always retrievable by future users.

eval202015:02:22

@borkdude it seems that a lot of usergroups succeeded initially on slack - but when the main-channels got more popular it shrunk the history (in terms of days), and slowly the ‘abandoned channel’ kicked in

borkdude15:02:24

but did they succeed in other platforms that did have history? if not, maybe the channels weren’t that important to begin with? 😉

borkdude15:02:25

casual data point: in my Slack instance at work where we do have history, I rarely search for something. maybe once or twice every quarter.

eval202015:02:33

what I got from contacting localgroups and looking them up on meetup is that they often have a separate Slack-team.

eval202015:02:46

@borkdude for local-groups search might be not that important but seeing that something is going (even when that’s about the last meetup, 3 weeks ago) on is important: an empty channel looks abandoned

borkdude15:02:51

an empty channel waiting to be filled

eval202015:02:27

the conversation-starter-bots are ideal for that 😉

andy.fingerhut15:02:40

I have never yet done the invite thing to add one-way mirroring of a Slack channel on Zulip. What is the incantation again?

eval202015:02:04

it’s /invite @zulip-mirror-bot

andy.fingerhut15:02:58

And you send that message in the Slack channel of interest?

eggsyntax16:02:24

> casual data point: in my Slack instance at work where we do have history, I rarely search for something. maybe once or twice every quarter. Counterexample: I probably search in my work slack at least once a day. Maybe your memory is better than mine, or your team does a better job of translating slack discussions into other forms of documentation, but I tend to forget the details of conversations that happened months ago, and find it really useful to search back. Of course any searchable-history forum would be equally good for that; not talking it up as a point in favor of slack in particular.

borkdude16:02:11

We don’t do many discussions on Slack. We usually do those in a Zoom meeting using screen sharing and then document the decisions in a GH issue

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eggsyntax16:02:27

Both of my last two teams we've done a lot of our discussion in slack, which I like exactly because of the searchable history (as well as, in public channels, providing transparency to other interested parties in the organization, which means less time spent having to communicate that stuff outward).

borkdude16:02:41

Both can work. In OSS people usually don’t do these Zoom meetings, AFAIK

dominicm16:02:30

I can't even run zoom 🙂 I got it working for a while in debug mode, and then couldn't update, then that RCE exploit came out & I won't touch it.

borkdude16:02:46

Zoom / Hangouts / whatever. I have two colleagues running on Linux who were able to use it btw 🙂

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eggsyntax16:02:34

We do use Zoom fairly regularly (works for me on Linux also, although exploit ick), but most of the day-to-day decisions on the ground are made in slack. One other thing I like about that approach is that it's asynchronous-ish; I don't have to interrupt for a scheduled meeting as often. YMMV of course, just saying it's worked well for me.

dominicm16:02:06

it works on linux under certain systems, it won't work if you're not using systemd.

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dominicm16:02:13

It's basically designed around a few popular distros.

Richard Smedley16:02:22

Yes, works fine on Ubuntu (Zoom is mandatory with our distributed workforce), and on Android of course.

dpsutton16:02:18

i think zoom used to have issues with wayland (like fedora) but the last time i used it it worked flawlessly

dpsutton16:02:29

was able to share my whole desktop, not just a particular application window

5
Raymond Ko17:02:10

semi-offtopic clojure question: what is everyone's preferred code line length limits? 79-80, like Python? 100 like Google Common Lisp conventions? 88, like Python black formatter? or none?

dpsutton17:02:45

aesthetics. you know it when you see it

eggsyntax17:02:28

80, so I can fit more windows side by side 🙂 (I don't mind going over now & then when it's clearer, but I aim to hit 80 on ~95% of lines)

👍 20
pberganza17:02:53

Same, for the same reason.

lilactown17:02:42

80 or die

😆 25
vemv19:02:32

130, it's the rounding of github's limit (it shows 127 characters before horizontal scrolling is triggered)

avi19:02:32

huh, I would have rounded down to 120

avi19:02:45

(generally 100 for me)