Future of Coding is an online community with a welcoming, cooperative, and revolutionary spirit. We are unified in the belief that the common practice of programming is tragically less humane than it could be.

Future of Coding

Yeah, it seems like they give us a free trial every year around this time. :shrug: 

this is your time to have thoughts referring to things that happened more than a month ago!

Wow so much great stuff in <#CCL5VVBAN|> 
Shame it will be lost

There's also <http://linen.futureofcoding.org|linen.futureofcoding.org>

And Mariano's <https://history.futureofcoding.org|https://history.futureofcoding.org> and <https://search.futureofcoding.org|https://search.futureofcoding.org>, and Kartik's <http://akkartik.name/archives/foc/|http://akkartik.name/archives/foc/>

Is there some searchable member directory somewhere, other than Slack search on <#CC2JRGVLK|>?

If you're on the desktop slack client, there's a UI element at the top that shows the number of members in the current channel. Click it to open a view that lets you search. I believe <#C5T9GPWFL|> has the most members.

Hmm, that only seems to filter by name.

I was thinking it would be nice and useful to be able to search for people near me, with certain interests, skills, etc. I suppose searching `in:#introduce-yourself` works but I haven't always had the best luck with Slack search. Also I imagine it could be useful for people to be able to signal that they're looking for a job, looking to hire, or looking for a co-founder.

I'd be happy to help with discussing/looking for/building a solution if there's interest.

We have a handful of channels for different locales, to organize meetups and such. But this is the first time the idea of a proper _member directory_ has come up, at least in this exact form.

<@UE6EFEPTQ> <@UCUSW7WVD> <@UBN9AFS0N> — what sort of stuff do we have that might intersect with what John's asking about here? Maybe that list of projects that you made, Duncan? And Kartik, you've been a big advocate for organizing some effort to get people collaborating on projects.

_I've_ been a big advocate for organizing some effort to get people collaborating on projects, too! :grin:

I think in practice just going to your local meetup is the base activity.

<@UC2A2ARPT> life on earth is a contest, dude :joy:

John's "with certain interests, skills, etc" is the new factor here, I think. I find that interesting, though perhaps a bit of a maintenance burden (ie: how do you make sure that the only people who are listed in this hypothetical directory are people who are, you know, still active here? Or perhaps there's other ways to keep the value high, even if the directory had a bunch of people who filled out their profile and then ceased being active.)

(Perhaps treating it like a "guestbook" would work?)

&gt; I think in practice just going to your local meetup is the base activity.
Ok… that begs the question, is there a directory of local meetups? :slightly_smiling_face: I'm not aware of there being one for where I live (Stockholm). I'm happy to volunteer to organize it.
But I imagine lots of people don't live in major metro areas where there would be meetups, plus (as much as I appreciate in-person interaction) there's also value in connecting people virtually, i.e. around interests rather than locations.

&gt; Or perhaps there's other ways to keep the value high, even if the directory had a bunch of people who filled out their profile and then ceased being active
I think it would still be valuable if you could contact them somehow (via email or social media), as long as they're still interested in whatever they said they were interested in. I can easily imagine that people get busy with work/life and their interest in chatting on here waxes and wanes, but they would be delighted if someone comes along and wants to discuss some topic of mutual interest.

As for the directory of local meetups, the way we do that is we have channels for different locales. You can see a list of all of them at the bottom of our member handbook: <https://futureofcoding.org/member-handbook#location-specific-channels>

It's up to the people active in those channels to organize their own meetups. They aren't organized in any official capacity by the community admins.

But I do like this idea of having some sort of member directory. Info I can imagine wanting to see:

• name
• location (optional)
• personal site
• interests (maybe picked from some predetermined list — with an easy way to request new ones — so we can make this more tractable?)
• short bio / description

+1 to that. I was thinking about this when <@U06MT7U6W84> originally posted. What I have so far is a member -&gt; intro lookup (see the final FAQ at <https://github.com/akkartik/foc-archive>)

Another thing that might be marginally more useful than Slack search is <http://akkartik.name/archives/foc/introduce-yourself/index.html> which has the entire history of <#CC2JRGVLK|> on a single static html page. Might be easier to browse.

But yeah, neither of these quite covers the reverse lookup of clustering by various bits of metadata.

<@U06MT7U6W84> We’re having a FoC meetup June 1st in Berlin, which isn’t Stockholm but isn’t very far by plane. :slightly_smiling_face:

There's this, it's most of the people that posted something that ended up in the newsletter, it's not up to date but it's a good start: <https://people.futureofcoding.org/>

<@UC2A2ARPT> I can easily do a list of accounts that posted by any sorting (post count, last post etc), we could DM a link to fill the details or something

<@U06MT7U6W84> what would be most useful for you?

I think the main use case was "show members within x distance near me" followed by "show members anywhere interested in x". I can get a rough approximation of that stuff by searching Slack and/or Kartik's introduce-yourself archive, so I guess I'm good for now. Though I recently just joined another Slack in another community and they have the same problem, which is annoying, almost to the point of waiting to build something to solve it. Almost :slightly_smiling_face:

I seem to remember seeing talk of a FoC wiki somewhere. Maybe it was on GitHub. Maybe the wiki would function as a directory if whoever wants to just creates a personal wiki page about themselves?

Thanks for all your guys' your hard work in organizing and building this community, BTW! I think it's really great to bring us crazies together.

Screenshot_20240429_210634.png

<@UBN9AFS0N> Just appreciating how your emoji'd titles make my feed reader look:

<@UC2A2ARPT> stop that now, don't be so silly :rolling_on_the_floor_laughing:

I'm backfilling old ones for the archive, the old archive at tinyletter is no longer online. I will continue doing one month per week starting this week

People lend me your ears, let's move to Craigslist.

<https://forums.craigslist.org/?forumID=3178|https://forums.craigslist.org/?forumID=3178>

The last piece of the old internet still standing just might be the one place left with a wide open future.

Looks so ugly, has no embedded images or video, etc.  No ability to react to posts.  Feels like the past.

minimalistic, fast, efficient, flat design, accessible, SEO optimized :eyes:

image.png

I appreciate the minimalistic feel, I really do; and perhaps I'd use it.  I feel like contribution/interaction would drop though.  People have moved onto more aesthetic tools, with more flexibility.

I do feel constrained if I can't add reactions anymore..

<@U6KQ2S410> You should be receiving a like for that from Jack Rusher in 3.. 2.. 1..

Met up with <@UNCP67JSK> this morning and we're excited to organize FoC meetups locally! Could we kindly request/propose the creation of an #in-sweden channel?

Hey quick admin question, I accidentally added a personal channel as an ‘external connection’ to this slack organization. Now, it doesn’t seem to let me remove this organization from the channel? Any help would be appreciated!

I disconnected it. I was wondering what that was. No worries. 

[moved from <#C01932BJGE8|>, original post by <@U03DNFDFYDA>]

also, <#C01BKSG4ZFT|> but no #in-british-columbia?

I'd be happy to make one if we have a handful of BC members.

Slack wants to use users's conversation data for training its foundational models: <https://twitter.com/QuinnyPig/status/1791220276350390575>

I recommend we opt out of this.

Oh, yes! Did so immediately. Here was their reply:

&gt; Thank you for reaching out. We’ve processed your request, and your workspace/org is now opted out of training Slack’s global models. As a reminder, Slack does not train LLMs or other generative models on customer data, or share customer data with any LLM providers.
&gt; We want to provide additional clarity on what your experience will be after this opt out:
&gt; All data associated with your workspace will only be used to improve the experience on your own workspace. You will still enjoy all of the benefits of our globally trained AI/ML models without contributing to the underlying models. No product features will be turned off, though certain places in the product where users could have previously given feedback will be removed. The global models will likely perform slightly worse on your team, as any distinct patterns in your usage will no longer be optimized for.
&gt; If you would like more information on how Slack protects your data when using machine learning and AI, please visit our blog: <https://slack.com/blog/news/how-slack-protects-your-data-when-using-machine-learning-and-ai>
&gt; Over the next week, we will remove historical de-identified model training data from opted out teams such that this historical data will no longer be used for training global models.
&gt; Regards,
&gt; – The team at Slack

Thanks <@UC2A2ARPT>!

Beyond this immediate reaction, I think we should start preparing for the ongoing enshittification of Slack. Yes, I know, we have discussed moving elsewhere may times, with no result. But my crystal ball tells me that in the not-so-distant future, people will leave this community because they don't want to deal with Slack any more.

Slack is going to delete data more than 1 year old. This means I can't download a single archive containing everything, I have to stitch things out of multiple archives. Which introduces the possibility of history slipping through the cracks into oblivion.

I vote we switch to Zulip: <https://merveilles.town/@akkartik/112666113683429314>

I'm willing to bet we could get on their community plan. So that's nice.

Is there some sort of web interface to zulip? I'm interested in both of the following:

1. All posts and replies are publicly viewable and indexible by search engines
2. People can log in and post via the web

I also like the idea of Zulip being open source with a robust API, since that would give folks something to hack on with their FoC tools. But I have no sense whether Zulip's API would be any good for that.

IIRC there are also mobile apps, but that they're a bit clunky. Don't love that, but at this point I'm in general agreement that Slack's focus on being a tool for the enterprise is harming our community.

I use Zulip exclusively through the web interface. On both computer and phone. No idea how hackable it is, though. Open Source in itself doesn't mean much.

We all know how these community plans work. You'll have to fill out some invasive, debasing form. Then you'll have to do it again in a year. And every year you'll wonder if you'll get rejected. And one year you will be, when you're least prepared for it. (And of course, you know it'll be YOU doing all this.)

Probably privilege, but I personally have no patience for that sort of arrangement. Life is too short, and I have enough interactions with bureaucracies as it is.

Is <https://www.discourse.org|Discourse> off the table?

I've found discourse's SPA-ified approach to forums to be a bit grating. The lazy loading hinders find-on-page, and it forgets my scroll position.

I'm open to all options… but I'm biased toward just making a choice and executing rather than trying to build broad consensus (because that failed last time)

I sense some qualified questions incoming from <@UC2A2ARPT>, so let me preemptively say that I know nothing about Discourse hosting, APIs, or plans. I just like using it in several communities and it feels like a good fit for this community. I’m not a fan of Zulip. Recurse Center uses it and it’s the single most effective reason for me to not connect with that lovely community as much as I should.

Full disclosure: my usage of Zulip isn't very heavy so far. One private 3-person group and some weak links with the Pijul community.

I'm just really enamored lately by their late-binding approach to forum organization.

It doesn’t meet my ideals. But I feel like if we are going to switch, we might as well go where people are, which is discord. 

I took this as a reason to log into RC *Zulip* again. I find the mobile web version… functional, but not great. And the mobile app is hard for me to find words for that aren’t offensive; let’s just say I’m pretty sensitive about mobile app design. :slightly_smiling_face:

Immediately cross-checked with Malleable Systems Collective, which I believe uses *Discourse*. Have nothing to complain. (I mean, that’s a lie, but come on, compare those for yourself, if you can, it’s night and day, and I don’t mean one of them supports night mode and the other doesn’t. (They both do. :wink:))

I use phone, tablet, and desktop platforms in equal proportions to access FoC, probably biased towards tablet/mobile at this point. I assume that’s still unusual, which would explain why so many “Future” of Coding projects still design for mouse & keyboard interfaces first.

FWIW, I’m also actively using *Discord*, including hosting a community there. I don’t think the way threads/forums work is a good fit for this community. My feeling is also that if we switch to Discord we are basically just arriving in a similar situation that we are trying to get out of here. There’s a lot of buttons there lately that try to upsell people to something.

I’m confused on how zulip is a better situation. Unless we self host, looks like the same kind of terms as slack for free users. 

It’s true that theoretically the structure of the business relationship with all three is probably close to identical, making us vulnerable to the same issues. However, if there’s one good thing I have to say about Zulip then that there is a reason why RC uses it, and that is the close relationship to the founders and developers who clearly seem to have aligned values in terms of openness and conduct and support for communities like ours.

<@UK3LH8CF5> I don't follow. Does Zulip have limited history? I wasn't aware.

My idea is that since the sources are open it's harder for them to "change the deal further."

Another idea: the market leader has leverage to change the deal. But if you use 10%-market-share #2 or #3 they're usually more careful about losing users. They just have less headroom. Zulip as a new entrant is unlikely to dethrone Slack or Discord. You can get a sense for this perceived leverage based on the upselling actions <@U5STGTB3J> mentioned. (On the other hand, the way we think about industry segments might change, causing Zulip to think it has 99% market share of some category that doesn't include Slack and Discord. It does happen from time to time.)

So yes, there are no ideal solutions. Or rather, I have an ideal solution but then I'd be using it by myself :joy:

It says 10000 messages. Admittedly I have no idea how many messages we have. But we will hit that limit at some point and then be in the same position where we just need to incrementally archive. If slack cut off all access that would make more sense to me. But having to do things incrementally doesn’t seem like a huge deal. 

In my view, switch will just mean we lose some percent of casual lurkers/posters and not gain a whole lot. I think there has to be a real inciting incident for it to be work it for us to leave. 

Re real inciting incident: yes, this is me trying to incite a real incident.

I mean one that affects everyone who chats on here. One that the casual person here feels and makes it hard for them to participate 

Yes. I'm biased, but I think this affects everyone who chats on here. The ability to resurface old threads shapes the character of the community for the better, IMO.

(As I grow older I grow aware of many things that I thought didn't affect me, but really do.)

For discourse we’d have apply as a “creator” to get a free plan. Their limitations are based on storage (5gb) and page views (50k a month). Eligibility is based on either listeners or patreon money we make. 

But we can still download the history. It just doesn’t come in one chunk. I’m happy to help to make sure to preserve that content if we need help. 

Ohh are you at Discourse? That's a plus (albeit temporary on the timescale of these things).

I don’t know how to interpret that last message. I was just giving the terms for discourse. Not personally a fan on the contingency of that arrangement. (Of course all of these arrangements are contingent. I just don’t like the idea of entering into a new one)

Sorry I interpreted you to be saying you have an in with the company, maybe that you work there.

Absolutely agreed on not liking the contingency of the arrangement. I said at the top of this thread that I don't like applying for special plans that a company gives out out of the goodness of its heart, so :100: there.

No I know nothing about discourse. Just looking their terms. Seems like the only way we could not have a special plan or a plan with limitations is to self host. I’m not sure we want that burden. 

My message about downloading history was about slack. If we need to make sure we preserve that history and we have to do it incrementally, happy to help make sure we get that history preserved 

Ohh got it. Appreciate it. Yeah, we could take on a little more pain with reminders and whatnot to preserve history. I'll subside from inciting.

It's possible to upgrade, temporarily, to a higher-tier plan and then perform the export.

Even with an export, though, you won't get any files people have uploaded.

Yeah, that's been a known pain point. We just don't share files here in response.

&gt; It's possible to upgrade, temporarily, to a higher-tier plan and then perform the export.
From the email today:

"If your team chooses to upgrade to a paid plan after the policy goes into effect, you will not be able to recover any content that has been deleted under our new policy."

It'd be impossible to upgrade as I imagine with several thousand users, you'd incur an incredible cost.

You'd spend $10,000 migrating away at $5/person.

Mattermost and Zulip are attractive options.

Ivan, Kartik, if y'all wanna test out and/or break a Zulip instance, I have one functioning at <https://foc.paradigital.org> for this occasion.

Yes! I saw your message, plan to hop on there in a few hours.

I noticed today while trying to kick the wheels on the Zulip community plan application that there's apparently already a <https://futureofcoding.zulipchat.com>. Looking in our archives it seems to be a test we created back in 2019. I never got on it. I don't know if anybody here has ownership over it. We can ping Steve Krouse if we need to.

Then again, it might also be _fine_ to create a new name on Zulip if we decide to go beyond a test instance. Do a mild fork. Still give Ivan, Lu and Mariano admin privileges but let the community decide over time if we want to:
• Remain in Slack
• Move over entirely into Zulip
• Use both but in different ways.
One thing that makes a cutover difficult is imagining we have to do it atomically in a single big bang. I think there may be something to keeping a Plan B in our back pockets and keep feeding it some engagement. Insurance against things getting even worse with Slack.

(We also have an IRC channel, but that's probably Plan D :smile:)

If Zulip is the desired destination, it'd definitely make more sense to push towards a self-hosted instance of it to circumvent all limitations but push notifications.

`<http://chat.futureofcoding.com|chat.futureofcoding.com>`

I think it's a trade-off:
• Somebody has to be willing to sign up for indefinite thankless maintenance of a self-hosted instance. I don't know how frequently they put out updated versions and so on. But if there's a volunteer this really does seem quite excellent.
• A community license lets us offload the maintenance, and also seems pretty limitation-free if we trust Zulip to not do a rug pull at some point.

If a "Free Standard Plan" is possible, I'd say go for it. Provided they don't kill the export options..

Yeah, exactly.

(I just went to Discord and saw your ping there, BTW. Thanks for hopping on here.)

I'm not at all concerned about the hosting cost, that'll be in the noise compared to ongoing manual maintenance burden with most software. (I don't really know anything about how easy Zulip is on this score.)

Zulip is.. actually quite easy to maintain from the perspective of upgrades. The instance I have is running on DigitalOcean with daily backups, running on a $12/mo droplet.

That should be plenty: <https://akkartik.name/archives/foc/administrivia/1680041884.022849.html>

The downside is that we won't get mobile push notifications without that community plan, but that's something we can negotiate after the fact.

<@UCUSW7WVD>
&gt; I noticed today while trying to kick the wheels on the Zulip community plan application that there's apparently already a <https://futureofcoding.zulipchat.com>. Looking in our archives it seems to be a test we created back in 2019. I never got on it. I don't know if anybody here has ownership over it. We can ping Steve Krouse if we need to.
I am the eggman. I am the owner. Goo goo g'joob.

Oh wait I'm wrong! I just have an account. Steve is the owner.

That was my impression from reading the old thread.

I have a positive impression of Zulip, and a neutral to negative impression of everything else (including staying on Slack). I'm also biased toward action. So I think at this point I'm going to do the following:

A) More research about Zulip and other options. (Discourse has already soured me because they list 2 types of AI at the top of their feature matrix.)
B) Put together a short write-up stating my findings, and reflections on Slack, to be shared here.
C) Determine whether this is a "vote on it" sort of thing or a "we're doing it" sort of thing or a "god dammit, we _still_ can't shake Slack, what the hell is wrong with us?" sort of thing.

(Can you sense that I'm unhappy with Slack? :) )

Buying Slack Pro for a month would be roughly US$2500.

If file uploads are rare/nonexistent, you wouldn't need it to do the export. I re-read their export feature table.

<@U079K6YUFT5> you might be interested in the solutions we currently have for archival: <https://futureofcoding.org/community#tools>

I'm poking around more and more in Zulip and it's _really_ good.

It has so many little nice touches. For instance, you can tag code blocks with a specific language, and then also specify which playground should open if you click a link on that code block. (Eg: you could set it up so that JS code blocks open CodePen.)

The most painful thing seems to be that it's _ugly_. It's super duper ugly. It's just so hideous to look at. The iOS app is painful. (The iPad one is _slightly_ better.)

Perhaps Mattermost is an option? It's more Slack-like.

We ruled it out last time we were thinking about moving off Slack. I believe it has all the downsides of Slack, and few to no upsides. (I'm open to being wrong about this — I only looked at it for a few minutes today, so I'm going mostly by memory.)

(I've only had cursory glances at Mattermost and it was a pain to self-host, which turned me away. You're more than likely right.)

Zulip also has some really neat extension features. Web channels are also a solution to the public visibility problem.

They're working on a long-term redesign. Some of it shipped in 8.0 back in Dec. <https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissue+label%3Aredesign|Some of it> is coming in 9.0 (presumably launching soon, looking at their release history).

Here's an <https://terpimost.github.io/zulip-sidebar/#narrow/dm/7,5140,9-group|interactive preview> of some of the upcoming redesign. It's certainly an improvement.

^ The fact that I can link to an interactive preview of their upcoming redesign is _fantastic_. Like, I'm so fucking tired of closed-off enterprise SaaS.

Seems like a big feature of 9.0 will be adjustable information density. That addresses about half of my GUI complaints (for the web client).

Here's their board for 9.0: <https://github.com/orgs/zulip/projects/9/views/1>

Target release date is July 10th.

Interesting. I can fuzzily make out that the preview is somehow better. But I can't articulate why, and 'uglier' or 'prettier' aren't the words I immediately reach for. This is what it's like to have no taste.

Loosely resembles a tiling window manager.

Interesting. When I compare side by side I only see the similarities between them.

I do notice the font size is larger in the redesign. And that is appreciated.

Like, if you asked me which looks better, Slack or Zulip, I'd say Slack. But the question doesn't arise unbidden for me. The look of Zulip doesn't bother me like it clearly bothers <@U5STGTB3J>.. :thinking_face:

Here, Tantacrul has you covered: <https://youtu.be/4hZxo96x48A?feature=shared&amp;t=395>

(It's like a little 10 min segment of the overall video. You can watch at 2x, it's fine.)

That video was delightful. Kudos to him for trying to teach engineers some design.

Yeah, <@UCUSW7WVD>, we might represent opposite ends of a spectrum. I can’t really understand how people can’t see it. Then those people can’t understand why I’m so worked up about something so clearly completely irrelevant.

But <@UC2A2ARPT>’s comment sums it up best: “Look how hideous this is! Oh, feature!” Even if you can see it you’re immediately distracted by some tiny detail of functionality which somehow snowballs into the most important thing ever, just because there was this one time in 1998 where you really missed it, and it was this traumatic experience that took over your life, turned you into an alcoholic, destroyed your family, and you’re still going to therapy because of it, but now you can get closure and have code blocks tagged with a specific language and the universe is finally back in balance. A still hideous looking universe, but finally back in balance. Thank god!

Meanwhile, I can’t unsee how hideous it looks. And how the mobile apps are clearly an afterthought. Which is obviously a much more important issue, because let me tell you, back in 1993…

Discourse has been straightforward to self-host (speaking as the admin of the Malleable instance). Happy to answer any questions if that's something you're interested in for this community. :slightly_smiling_face:

It's true they do seem to be adding AI features lately for some reason, but they are all off by default. In general, Discourse is heavily customisable through settings, plugins, etc.

I suppose something to ponder here is what sort of "medium" you want to have... Chat (Slack, Matrix, Discord, etc.) in general is more suited to shorter messages. Forums (Discourse, etc.) allow more space for longer topics that get replies over stretches of time. But then there are hybrids like Zulip that are kind of "topic-focused chat". This community's usage of Slack threads is also forum-esque as well. Anyway, worth considering this before making a move.

Zulip is quite friendly to communities. In fact, it is probably the last standing group chat platform that still serves communities. Everyone else found it more lucrative to serve small business teams. Including all the open-source ones like MatterMost, RocketChat etc. This is why even open-source communities have been moving to Discord.

I am a user of the Lean language community's zulip instance at <https://leanprover.zulipchat.com/>

A few tidbits about Zulip that I know from a few months ago:
• Their paid plans are gated by # of users who will have mobile push notifications enabled. This was important to me, but was able to sidestep this because they provided free hosting for my community.
• They have two Android apps. One is old and a new one is being built in Flutter. Screenshot for the new one is attached.
• A small annoyance I felt (I was comparing it with Discord which has both threads and forums) was that <https://chat.zulip.org/#narrow/stream/101-design/topic/Automatic.20Topics|every thread needs a manually entered Topic>. Discord generates thread topics automatically. This might not be a problem for us.
• They are responsive to feature requests and bug reports. <https://chat.zulip.org|Their own Zulip> is public and things are discussed openly. I asked for some improvements in custom profile fields and a reasonably solution was implemented.
Overall, I felt that Zulip can work for technical users where density of content is important.  If low friction for non-technical users is needed, Zulip will feel quite sub-standard compared with bigtech consumer apps like WhatsApp / Discord / Telegram.

In terms of “what sort of medium do we want to have” I find myself more and more open to fragmenting this community into a chat and into a proper forum. What I’m really craving for is a proper forum, which I believe is how most people here (have been conditioned to) use this Slack instance.

I host my own chat community on Telegram, which I deliberately wanted to have the lighter and less structured feel of a chat, so I’m not against that medium in general. But in my mind FoC is more of a forum than it is a chat, and what I would like to see more than just migrating away from some potential issues is migrating towards something that makes this characteristic of FoC come out more.

Perhaps that is why I dislike Zulip. To me it seems like another one of those things that wants to be both and therefore isn’t really either. To a certain extent that applies to Slack as well, but it seems that we have made it work somehow. Perhaps we can make it work with Zulip too.

Despite loving Discourse, I find myself more involved here than <https://forum.malleable.systems/> in part because here is a chat, and somehow that works... well?

I feel a lot of the momentum here is driven by people sharing "here is something I did / obsessed over today, or this week", and the "most recent" nature of chat works well with that.
A proper forum might encourage a long-lived thread about a project, with the downside that only people who subscribed to that thread even see one's "this week" update.
Of course it's possible to normalize "start a new thread every week" or something like that, but that feels _wrong_ in losing the thread benefits of having a forum in the first place?

I think the quality I'm trying to question here is does a forum force "premature structuring"?  In slack you don't exactly decide "this deserves a new thread"; you just post a single top-level message and leave it to people who'll respond to you whether it deserves promotion to a thread.

In theory, I appreciate Zulip's attempt to "be both" and seek some middle ground.  In practice, I'm occasionally visiting <http://Oilshell.zulipchat.com|Oilshell.zulipchat.com> for over a year now and I'm still foggy on how zulip "topics" work and what's the etiquette :laughing:

Oddly enough, this feels pretty much like a forum to me given our fairly strict requirement to respond in comments.

So is the only difference between our usage pattern and a forum the requirement that new threads in forums receive a subject line? :thinking_face:

<@U02QC0PPER3> I totally agree with you about the problems of premature structuring: <https://forum.merveilles.town/thread/86/%5bmeta%5d-forum-utilisation-16/#1654>

But it's interesting that you think this Slack doesn't have that problem.

There's also some precedent here for nudging people to add more structure to their posts -- even if it costs something in engagement: <https://futureofcoding.slack.com/archives/C5U3SEW6A/p1715659640206519>

So this is a two-sided problem. We don't just want the solution that engages people the most. There's some value in adding friction.

May be worth codifying, in a bulleted list form, the desired traits of the tools the community uses to organize, and then find loose approximations of those traits in existing tools.

<@U02QC0PPER3>:
&gt; In slack you don't exactly decide "this deserves a new thread"; you just post a single top-level message and leave it to people who'll respond to you whether it deserves promotion to a thread.
Yes, this!

<@UCUSW7WVD>
&gt; So is the only difference between our usage pattern and a forum the requirement that new threads in forums receive a subject line?
Yes, and you see that subject line from the index page (rather than the whole post).

&gt; Yes, this!
I don't follow this enthusiastic agreement :slightly_smiling_face: Your preferred rules are for people to be careful about what they post at the top level. We do each of us in this Slack have to explicitly decide "this deserves a new thread" before we post. So to that extent we're already a forum. (Just not with mandatory subjects, but I get the sense you'd also prefer that?)

I don't think of somebody choosing to comment on a post as "promoting it to a thread." It's already a thread!

Perhaps this seems nitpicky.. I'm just trying to get at what we each like and dislike about forums vs chat. And I feel like there's a disagreement lurking beneath the surface here.

I support whatever decision <@UC2A2ARPT> makes :saluting_face:

Subject/Topic are now optional in Zulip. All such messages without topic get collected under "No Topic" (and can be moved later).

However they still don't do automatic subject/topic detection like Discord does.

Taking some time to deal with work/family stuff. Will weigh in on this issue again next week. Thanks everyone for all your input and ideating so far! If I've (re)learned anything from this (re)exploration, it's that slack, despite all the crummy enterprise nonsense, sits at a fairly unique point in the possibility space and thus replicating what we have here will be difficult or impossible. There's no easy choice, including the choice to stay.

I'm also looking for a self-hosted chat app for a project I'm working on because reasons. I was intrigued to see that Campfire from 37signals has come back from the dead and is available from their "Once" campaign (buy it and own it forever) for only $299. <https://once.com/campfire>

This looks like a really strong option.

Hosted?! They do still have a reputation that makes this plausible :thinking_face:

Ah, self-hosted. I had no idea 37signals sold their source code.

>  ONCE ™ products are designed, built, and backed by 37signals ™. Copyright © 37signals LLC. All rights reserved. Anyone buying, using, or receiving a ONCE ™ product is subject to our software license agreement.
I imagine folks would have objections to using a 37signals project especially paying them for it (even if just once). The library system at Duke published a <https://blogs.library.duke.edu/blog/2023/11/30/why-were-dropping-basecamp/|blog post about why they moved away from 37signals> .

Adding to the "slack is growing increasingly unfit for our needs" pile: I'm getting multiple reports that longstanding members are now getting permissions errors when trying to post to certain channels. I've changed nothing. So this is either a bug or a change by slack that I can't figure out how to remedy.

IMG_0193.png

Check this out <@UCUSW7WVD> —

The other day, I launched Slack on my iPad and it just sat there with this blank screen. I could flip to other views (DMs, Activity), and they were only partly functional. Just stayed like this until I force-quit.

Also, belated update on putting together some options:

All the options have painful tradeoffs :face_with_diagonal_mouth:

I'm _still_ exploring.

Have you been making a list of features we'd have to add to cerca? I suppose mobile notifications would be a big, hard one..

<https://blog.zulip.com/2024/07/25/zulip-9-0-released/>

Screenshot_20240624_103047.png

Screenshot_20240624_103113.png

Is <https://futureofcoding.linen.dev/> working for anyone else? I unfortunately fell away from using it for a couple of months while I was travelling. I just tried it again, and it vaguely looks like I'm not logged in? I don't see any way to log in, though.

Interestingly, tapping on the search input shows lots of life.

cc <@U03DNL2SRNF>

Screenshot 2024-06-24 at 7.41.15 PM.png

Not a good sign. (Their social accounts have also gone silent).

But, it's also possible that something broke on our end (like an integration's token expired or something) and nobody noticed.

Some Slack usage data, with relevance to the two previous threads (but perhaps worth discussing separately). Only data for the past year is available. I've rounded all the numbers.

We have between `260-370` people active on the slack in any given month, `80-120` of whom post.

We have between `150-230` people active in any given week, with `25-70` of them posting.

We have between `20-120` people active on any given day, with `0-30` posting.

An update on moving away from Slack.

I've talked with a bunch of folks here and elsewhere, explored Zulip and Discourse hands-on, an looked around for other alternatives.

This has given me a renewed appreciation for Slack. The way we use it, it sits in a unique spot in the space, something between a forum and a chat.

* The medium/format of Slack, plus our cultural norms, encourage people to make substantial posts which then foster lively discussion. It feels like a forum.
* Everyone see new posts instantaneously; heck, you even see typing indicators and online/away status. It feels like a chat.
* When looking at the top-level of a channel, you see the full content of each message, with a count of replies. It feels like… a blog index?

There's WYSIWYG text editing, unobtrusive persistence of drafts, polished clients for every platform. The information hierarchy is clear: channel -&gt; post -&gt; reply. Slack is, by and large, rather nice.

Slack is also an enterprise-bootlicking product suffering from continual <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification|enshittification>. They're holding our history hostage. There are effectively zero moderation tools. User signup is flaky. The client is like an extravagant slice of cake — rich and thick to a fault. It's a service that runs over the internet, but it's not part of the web. It's not meaningfully extensible — there are "bots" and data exports, but they're basic and begrudging. It's siloed. It's proprietary. It's not the least bit malleable. Slack is antithetical to the ethos of this community. We champion the agency of individual people and wild experimentation. Slack, by design, opposes those.

With every alternative product I've explored, a few of these issues are addressed, but comparatively more of the nice qualities of Slack are absent.

I use Discord all day every day. It's like Slack but slower ("Installing updates 1 of 5"), buggier, bloated with features and ads ("Get Nitro"). It also makes novel but awkward design choices. For instance, to start a thread of replies to a message, you must name the thread. That's a friction point. It allows some flexibility, in that you can start more than one thread for a single top-level post. But I'd argue that it is strictly worse than having a single linear thread (like Slack) or a single tree of replies (like a mailing list / forum). And besides, it's just as bad as Slack, or worse, in every way that presently pains us, except the boots being licked are gamer boots.

The organization behind Zulip is lovely. They're principled, self-sustaining without VC, focused on building a great product for their users. But, that product leans heavily into ephemeral chat, and suffers from a famously clunky user interface. Beyond just playing with the product, I spent some time in their Github (yay open source) looking at issues and discussions, and I don't see signs that they'll be able to fix the UI — it's hard for them to make even small styling changes, let alone restructure the information design.

Discourse is… fine. It's a little bit more chaotic, a little bit more clunky, a little bit more web-y, a little bit more bloated. It has way too much structure, with a visual hierarchy that doesn't map to the conceptual hierarchy. Like our Slack, it aims to be a hybrid of a forum and a chat, but it does that by offering both separately rather than synthesizing them into a compelling hybrid. If the community had started on Discourse, I think we'd be less unhappy with it than we are now with Slack, but I still think we'd be unhappy.

But the most charming alternative, and hands-down my favourite path forward… will take a bit of explaining.

It's the <https://forum.merveilles.town/|Merveilles forum>. It's brutally simple. Spartan! But it's tasteful. It's immaculate. Crucially, a member of the Merveilles community built and maintains the forum software, taking a decidedly <https://cblgh.org/cerca/|principled> approach. This forum is a reflection of the community it homes, because it was built by and for that community. (See where I'm going with this?)

All the off-the-shelf options — Zulip, Discourse, Mattermost, Discord, IRC, phpBB, Mastodon — they'd let us _get away_ from Slack. We could pick one that had some nice features. It'd be a pain in the butt to move, and a blast of fresh air to settle in. But even if we self-hosted, we'd still be held hostage — by _product design decisions_. Every one of these products and services makes a set of tradeoffs to satisfy as many customers as possible. None of them expect their customers to be like us — champions of individual agency and wild experimentation.

I believe the only way to move _up_ from Slack is to build our own thing. To take the Merveilles forum approach — be brutally simple, but tasteful. Figure out what core design decisions reflect our values; build some situated software just for ourselves. Design a final form that we'd like it to have, build the minimum viable version, and grow it from there slowly. Treat it like a collaborative project, accepting contributions from our members, but led by one or a few core people who are committed to putting in the work. Favour technical openness — open source, public data, protocols — so that anyone can hack on top.

Building our own thing would be a stupid amount of work. Someone (maybe not always the same person) would need to continually invest time and energy. It'd more likely fizzle out and die than become a viable escape from Slack.

But if it does succeed, I think it'd be better for us than any of the other Slack alternatives.

So I propose we explore this option. Build it ourselves. If we manage to build something compelling, we move away from Slack onto that. If we don't, we stay on Slack, and wait for the situation to change further (either something better comes along, or Slack gets even worse and we _have to_ jump ship.)

Have you considered Flarum?

Brutally simple, mobile friendly.

I like this plan. And tbh I like slack. Yall feel like my colleagues :face_holding_back_tears: 

The annoyances seem huge experiencing them almost daily.  But the effort of building from ground up to fix them would be hugely disproportionate...

There'd have to be more than us to help, like 10x more than us, with 2x bigger issues than us, to bring the proportions into balance

Yes. I'm envisioning a _radically_ different approach. Something that'd be infeasible for a product like Slack.

For instance: all data is public; there's no authorization, just authentication; it feels like a chat, but doesn't need anywhere near realtime perf.

Like, it wouldn't be absurd (for our scale) if the backend were literally a repo on github. Or a Dropbox folder. Or a single server in my basement.

The thing we'd build would be situated software. I think that allows a dramatic complexity reduction.

(Note: I'm not actually proposing any of these ideas. They're just illustrative of the difference between what we could build for our needs, in contrast to what's needed for commercial software)

The idea of there being a landing page that shows discussions immediately without authentication and the auth to post is really cool. And maybe we could download and prepopulate the slack history. Getting RTF and posts showing nicely seems tedius for the long tail of cases. But a lot of the optionality slack has isn’t needed so it is plausible. I’m sure other communities would love an open source opinionated thing like this too (jus sayin)

<@UE6EFEPTQ> I feel like the difficulty of creating a forum is slightly exaggerated. Most web frameworks use online chat as one of the example web applications. Alternatively look for hacker news clones on GitHub to see more examples. I wouldn't worry about technical aspects a bit.

Building something new is a challenging path to take, but I am curious to see what happens next. :slightly_smiling_face: 

It may help to try to assemble a list of necessary features… I do worry this may be more challenging than it seems at first, but I suppose it all depends on features needed. I am probably too dependent on all the difficult things you often see in recent chat clients and forums… :sweat_smile: 

Yes! I've been hashing this out with a few folks. <@UBN9AFS0N> came up with a good list. I've got my own list. I think at some point soon, we can spin up a discussion specifically about what this thing ought to be.

(At which point, I'd especially love to hear what features are on your wishlist)

One overarching design goal is to split this up into small, simple, independent parts that anyone could reimplement. I had a good experience with <https://github.com/ivanreese/2222|this game project > recently. Having seen what Mariano and Kartik did with slack history dumps, and how people write TUIs for basically any service with a decent API, I feel like a pragmatic, ruthlessly minimalist approach to system architecture might allow for a sort of ... um... "marketplace" ... of implementations for each of the pieces. (Sorry, threw up in my mouth a little.)

Like, we wouldn't want the project's success to hinge on people coming out of the woodwork to fill the gaps. But rather, if someone wants to put their FoC money where their mouth is, they could rebuild part of the system in their own way and show how and why their FoC vision kicks ass.

This sort of opportunity for people to build stuff and demo it has been missing here. People build stuff, but it's all different kinds of stuff serving different purposes. That makes it hard for bystanders to understand and appreciate, or integrate with. Then there are things like TodoMVC, but they're soulless and vapid. (Sorry.. I really dislike TodoMVC for some reason. Need to unpack that. Anyone know a good group for commiserating about software?)

If we built a community hub as, like, a handful of nicely isolated pieces, each requiring a few hundred lines of JS to do a bare-bones MVP... I think people might play in that space.

I'm very skeptical of a community-built tool being successful. It's a really hard thing to do, and it is possible, but will take loads of (unpaid) work and continual maintenance - even if it ends up fizzling out

(no more ideas/tools and all that)

<@UC2A2ARPT> I didn't see your thoughts on a Mastodon-like instance for the community. The default Mastodon setup is optimized for individuals microblogging publicly, so it would need a few tweaks:
• If we want to simulate Slack-like intimacy, we could keep our instance defederated (instance-only) or unindexed by Google.
• To support long-form, we would have to customize the max char limit. Or support in-line articles.
The good thing is: There is already a Mastodon-fork called <https://github.com/hometown-fork/hometown|Hometown> which has <https://github.com/hometown-fork/hometown/wiki|made these tweaks among others>.

Because we'd save the effort of building client apps for various platforms (<https://elk.zone/|elk.zone> is my fav and is quite beautiful), we could spend our energy on important things like making the content more browsable and searchable. In Mastodon, it is possible to subscribe to hashtags (i.e. topics) but we might need more than that in terms of discoverability of old content.

Microblogging emphasizes individuals more than it does topics. When I post something in <#C050QK4917D|> , I am assured that everyone interested in that topic will see that eventually - which encourages me to post. This kind of interface for topics would be a minor tweak of the user-interface for Elk etc that is much more feasible to undertake.

Yes <@U06SS0DHZD1> to contradict myself, one of the few times I enjoyed coding for a living was when I'd discovered Django and two of us built an entire social network with groups and forums and tagging and uploads and profiles in a matter of weeks. I was literally smiling the whole time. Don't know if Django has succumbed to the usual bloatification by now though?

But then again, advice from <@U03R0B9U1GD> should always be heeded of course. So. I'm undecided.

Needless to say nowadays I'd resurrect my own Node/React jobby, <https://github.com/DuncanCragg/ForestReact|https://github.com/DuncanCragg/ForestReact>

I would want someone/something to summarize each thread/conversation. I don’t volunteer. I know that <http://Kagi.com|Kagi.com> provides a feature called “Universal Summarizer” which uses an LLM to produce summaries of information that it found. I wonder if Kagi would offer advice on how to ensure summarizability?

I use Kagi almost daily and the basic summary is great, just avoid the dialogue bit which is badly broken! I don't know how it would do on one of our threads, mind!

I saw Kagi Summarizer summarize a pile of Odin code. It did a good job. Makes me wonder what else LLMs can do...

Re marketplace of implementations: do I understand correctly that the community would live the in some publicly accessible database which any frontend would be able to query (and write - if authenticated) ?

As someone who is heavily exploring situated software, I really like this idea. Yes, it may turn out to be a lot of work, maybe to the point of not being up to our expectations, but at the very least it's going to be an interesting learning experience. I also like more specifically the idea of a minimal central core, meaning a repository. Among other advantages, it allows everyone to experiment with tools locally and without the risk of destroying the shared repository.

I’m interested, but also wonder what exactly we would propose to add to such a system? There are many things I would remove from the Slack experience, but I don’t currently have a clear picture of what I would add to make a better chat/forum/wiki. Looking forward to the feature matrix, <@UBN9AFS0N>!

New here, but I'm in :hand:

Potentially some adjacent prior art in the "marketplace of implementations" is the <https://main--realworld-docs.netlify.app/docs/intro|RealWorld Demo App> used for comparing implementations of basic CRUD applications. Specifically it's designed to allow comparisons for frontend only, backend only, and full stack approaches which is a constraint I think would be useful here as well?

For some reason I started working on a FoC slack alternative 4 months ago and then forgot about it :sweat_smile: I'm a bit swamped with work right now, but I could probably clean it up and have it running in a week or two

I'd need help importing the existing slack history, and probably won't have enough time for CSS polish, but it might make a good starting point? I could also transfer the repo over to <@UC2A2ARPT> once its up

Ah, one more thing: The code I wrote seems pretty dang cheap/efficient (even for 2k+) users, so I'd be willing to eat the continued cost of hosting if that helps (consider it a donation)

<@U0584S0ULF8> Hey, that's a fun coincidence. I'd be happy to take a look at it.

Google Groups, or any sort of similar thing, always seemed to me to be best for this sort of thing. Never really understood why everyone wanted to move to ephemeral chat.

Personally, I dislike the ephemerality, and have mixed feelings about the kinds of conversation encouraged by chat. But I love the feeling that someone is _there_ on the other end. I don't get that nearly as much from most long form, async media. I think there's something special about presence indicators. I'm curious what the tasteful, subtle version of those could be.

Remind me — does Google Groups show a green dot for online users?

USENET doesn’t do presence indicators. There’s no current session because it’s a properly decentralized system. Also, no login/auth/&amp;c. It’s very hard to monetize, which is probably why it isn’t used much these days. A mix of USENET and IRC might be interesting if you want to go full “brand new, it’s retro”…

For a small community like ours, Usenet could indeed be a viable option. What killed the news groups that I participated in long ago was spam and abuse, which in the absence of effective moderation lead to research labs blocking the NNTP protocol. If we run our own server (and thus have full moderation capacity), this shouldn't be an issue.

(Science Fiction prototyping / very biased wishlist) I’d love a system that replays conversations within topically based threads that dynamically accepts audio feedback like what Anchor for podcasts did back in the day and re-links or continues to add on the conversation with newer comments. The purpose of the audio potentially dictates the format. IE is this
thread intended to teach/summarize topics/ideas, is this an exploratory thread, is this an action oriented thread with todo’s expected to come out of it, is it a thread of comments meant to encapsulate a specific idea from every angle? Sorry for the broken thought stream my attention is always under constant assault from outside. 

I find Slack and all chat apps distracting. I don’t want constant intrusion. I don’t even want other people to know I am “present”. I prefer interaction optimized for pull rather than push. BBS and forums evolved to do this really well. They let you catch up to everything you missed since the last visit. They can email digests (auto-<@UBN9AFS0N>). I only interact here via his digests.

Can a USENET group be the minimal central core? The sync protocol already exists. Everyone gets a local copy of the repo if they want. Anyone can build advanced features on the repo, eg create a website that shows summaries, implements search or other views.

I'd need to learn a _lot_ more about usenet before I could even begin to weigh pros and cons. I would enjoy learning about it — I like studying the history of our field. But, in this particular case, there are so many potential "just use X standard" suggestions to wade through that I don't have time to go study all of them to sufficient depth to weigh the tradeoffs. What I can do, though, is design something from scratch that approximates the shape I think would best suit this community, and then share it here, and then (A) do my best to be thick skinned as everyone tears into it, and (B) solicit opinions on what existing thing the design most resembles, so that we could decide whether to rework it into conformance, or continue down the path of just building something to scratch our own itches.

I’m finding that existing code and ideas are laced with crazy biases from the 1950s which are no longer valid. A fresh 2024 take on old problem(s) might just result in better and faster results...

<https://futureofcoding.slack.com/archives/CEXED56UR/p1723400211266819>

I created an acccount and clicked the thing in the email but it won’t let me log in.

ანტ.m4a

971_frSHDWCCVg.png

whoa, love the 2222 project. made an ant remix. starts around `T`  and is somehow almost imperceptible on some audio speakers

how did you decide to leave Slack as the main community gathering place? What is the lacking things in Slack? I couldn't find it in the post you wrote

This has been a thing since 2020 or earlier. There’s some discussion in <https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/046|this episode> of the podcast. Basically, it’s an online platform, but it’s not part of the web. We’re not a community to them, we’re just data sharecroppers. We exist here at their mercy, and they’re slowly making things worse for us.

I thought this might just be a challenge to the community. It’s a good one, actually.

My research project will now adopt this as one of its first use cases.

This doesn’t mean there will be anything public very soon… :-)

Screenshare - 2024-08-11 11:09:41 AM.webm

I made a thing!

<https://github.com/surprisetalk/ding>

<https://futureofcod.ing/signup>

(I've only got 100 emails per day right now, so email me at hello@taylor.town if the verification email doesn't send and I'll add you directly.)

(<@UCUSW7WVD> <@UC2A2ARPT> I added you as collaborators on github)

reminds me a little of <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advogato>

I created an account and clicked the thing in the email, but when I try to post, I get an error.

I see your user in the db... Ah! Try using your email address in the username field. I'm going to update it so that either works haha

I logged in, but I got an error when I tried to post something.