I mean, for people working daily in nixpkgs with Matrix, they don’t really get the job done in the same way IME. The amount of issues encountered is on a completely different scale for the last months we have been implementing this decision.
Absolutely agreed, but, I dare to say that the cost of switching is important to compare with the cost of not switching and letting the experience be as-is without any recourse for contributors who workarounds every day and every time and then with Matrix deficiencies.
As you proceed to list, I would also list:
- What is the extra coordination cost incurred by people not being able / refusing / giving up on dealing with Matrix?
- What is the amount of frustration caused by Matrix by people working daily?
- How many notifications lost in Matrix?
- How many discoverability problem do we create / encounter everyday in our NixOS space because it’s hard to work on things like “building a page of every Matrix channels” or “curating a list of answers for our support channels” because we lost our factoid automation and we are doing everything by hand?
That’s one time cost.
Correct, but, as everyone is learning and relearning how to improve workarounds in the Matrix world as Matrix experience slowly degrades along with the announces of “here’s sliding sync, you will never have to wait again in a channel”, etc.
That’s an interesting one, since we switched to Matrix, I lost at least 6 or 7 times my DMs with fellow contributors because Matrix is not able to fulfill this feature alas. Losing more and more history is happening on a larger scale anyway and expecting people to save their own history actively against Matrix woes (or asking them to run the Electron desktop application to workaround application bugs) shows the absurdity of the situation.
Furthermore, no one has bothered building a proper log viewer for our chat history, like we had one for IRC, and the Matrix archive viewer is… suboptimal.
Plus, search usually doesn’t work in Element.
So… well, do we even have history in this project beyond people joining our NixOS space and all the channels via weechat-matrix… ?
Correct, some people even switched back to IRC after a while, some people stayed in both but are more active over IRC. The question about whether it is important to please people who doesn’t think that Nix is important enough is an interesting one though.
In this discussion, I have been focusing the angle on working daily in Nix, I agree this is a tough one because I would like to have all the nice things: have the people who just want to hang around in Nix, people who want to get support on Nix, people who work sometimes on Nix, people who work daily on Nix. But the reality is that this current situation is possible because people can tolerate a certain level of problems of a platform.
As this level of problem is increasing, the need for a solution is increasing. I don’t think it’s a good idea to not discuss the elephant in the room w.r.t. to our chat collaboration platform.
People have been explicitly saying no to join the platform but still contributing and this deprives us from ways to collaborate efficiently, increasing friction in the GitHub platform for no reason.
We can ignore that problem and say this is their problem of not joining the Matrix or that it should not give raise to friction, but the reality is that there are contributors for whom we cannot go down in a synchronous platform, have a chat with, solve problems quickly and move on to async on GitHub.
Maybe this problem is too small to care about? I don’t know, but I definitely see that having no solution is forcing people to find their own solutions and it appears to me that fragmentation is happening nevertheless.
Well, here’s the thing, I don’t think we need to all agree on that, the Matrix switch was done in a hurry and was authoritative: hey, let’s go over there. No one was consulted, we just all hurried over and said meh OK. No offense to the folks who made the decision, they tried too.
Today, there’s no reason to re-question this as the situation is not-so-good without any clear plan in the future to address it.
I politely disagree, I think caring about the well-being, the comfort and the efficiency of the tools that everyone uses on a daily basis is extremely important and is structural for tackling the bazillions of the other problems and this is especially important given that people spent an absurd amount of time in this platform doing those more important things.
Again, we can say that we don’t care about this problem, but it only means that people will find their own solutions at some point. My belief is that not addressing this (that could be: OK, here’s our strategy, let’s not move for now, let’s evaluate X or Y) will probably force us to address at an inconvenient time as it is with all the things that are basically growing unsatisfaction with working conditions for a group of people.
And to be frank, I have been bottling up this feeling about how Matrix was broken for at least a good year, a lot of fellow contributors know how I am tired of Matrix, and I have spent all my time every moment I could discussing with Matrix folks to see what can be done and what can be hoped. At some point, we also have to cut on losses and move on.
Maybe it does not mean moving all the community, I don’t know, hence this discussion.
I think given that other people seems to be echoing some sentiment about the frustration, I would say this is not such a “far down the list” problem, in my personal opinion.
Also, I think that @delroth raised interesting points on how to lean more on GitHub, I don’t think they are wrong, I just don’t know what are our realistic options over there, increasing our reliance on GitHub has always been frowned upon, I like the idea of redundancy and having copies of our data / stuff over two platforms at least, but maybe this is the right direction to go.
It’s an exciting time, but also overwhelming; I think threads would really help.