We actually had a specific situation last office hours where we simply couldn’t use Zoom to have Alyssa on the call, and we also tried a different type of discussion that was more observational.
(none of us thought Jitsi Meet would scale properly for Office Hours with many participants, sadly)
We still use zoom, but hosting an instance of Jitsi Meet or using BigBlueButton is something I’d like to have.
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I just want to say this is so great! I understand some people have ideological concerns, but having a support channel for mortals is extremely important so that we’re inclusive of those that are conscious of their time.
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Doing a quick search, I didn’t see any mentions of mumble/murmur, which in my rather limited experience, with very few users, has been pretty easy to set up. Of course it’s more effort than if someone already has a browser and a discord account. Also, it’s voice only.
I think the discord is a good place to start, but moving to matrix is a good goal.
I had issues from Android using matrix and not discord, so that tells me they don’t have usability parity even if they have feature parity.
In the short term that likely makes discord the better choice for new people scrambling for direction, how to ask questions, ability to screenshare, etc.
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Jon via NixOS Discourse nixos1@discoursemail.com writes:
Personally I try to avoid IRC, because i found that the rooms are
relatively inactive even when there’s many people sitting in there
(I’m assuming so they have chat history).
Is this an experience you’ve had with #nixos?
Is this an experience you’ve had with #nixos?
When I would come home from work, and jump on for an hour or two, yes. Given I only tried doing it for a week, but the lack of a chat history between session was a bit disappointing.
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Jon via NixOS Discourse nixos1@discoursemail.com writes:
Is this an experience you’ve had with #nixos?
When I would come home from work, and jump on for an hour or two,
yes. Given I only tried doing it for a week, but the lack of a chat
history between session was a bit disappointing.
Wow, that’s surprising to me. Thank you for answering. I usually find
that for most of the day there’s a message every few minutes!
I’m not sure if you know this or not, but chat history is saved at
https://logs.nix.samueldr.com, so it is possible to catch up if you miss
something.
I’m also GMT-8, so I’m not active when Europe is. Yes, I could parse through the logs, but it’s just an ecosystem of little pains. Discord will show me where I last read on each channel. You can do proper mentions, you can have many channels within a given server, you can move to voice chat if needed, you can do screen sharing, you can do emoji’s to acknowledge that something was read, when I log in, all recent chat history is downloaded.
Like @domenkozar mentioned, for us mortals, it solves a lot of issues I don’t want to spend time fixing.
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A lot of us use the matrix bridge that offers stuff like a comprehensive chat log (when the bridge isn’t down) and stuff like mentions and emoji. So with that IRC becomes an almost always online experience. It also seems we’re in the exact same timezone, I haven’t had issues with activity either. #nixos-dev has been essential to my development experience.
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Fwiw there is also BigBlueButton which is an LGPL license.
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Yes, from what i hear it should scale better.
Here is a succesfull test with up to 200 participants: Zoom Alternative BigBlueButton™ im Praxistest | Hostsharing eG – die Hosting-Genossenschaft (in german)
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I’m not sure I understand what you mean here - in my experience voice chat tends to be possibly more effective for those asking questions, but at the expense of taking much more time and energy from those answering them - so I’m not sure how it is more ‘inclusive’ in this sense.
That said, anyone is free to decide for themselves whether or not to join such a channel, of course, so I wouldn’t have an objection to it.
Discord allows text and voice, anyone can decide what would work better for given discussion.
I was referring to suggestion of using an alternative open source platform over some other established and well working communication platform.
Yes, there’s a risk of those platform going crazy, but as with most real-time communication platforms switching somewhere else is not that painful as there’s little to migrate.
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