[Agda] On IRC, Slack, Gitter, Discord, and Zulip (re: Hanging out with the Lean crowd)

[a.j.rouvoet]

Although I agree with the intent, I suspect that trying to convince the 
entirety of the community to consolidate on a single platform is bound 
to fail.
For example, the #agda freenode channel is not going anywhere soon. 
Another example that I only became aware of: the functional-programming 
slack (functionalprogramming.slack.com) has an #agda channel with 400 
members, and is also on zulip 
(https://funprog.zulipchat.com/login/#narrow/stream/215389-Agda).

That being said, you can certainly ensure that the Agda website etc. 
picks one solid medium that can be used for all casual communications 
besides the mailing list and the issue tracker. Do not just spawn a new 
one; make sure you move the conversation and kill off the ones managed 
by the Agda team that are then deprecated (slack, gitter, ...).

Personally, I'd like to vouch for Discord---but am not against Zulip 
perse, since I have no experience with it.
Communities like https://discord.com/invite/reasonml are extremely easy 
access and heavily used by programmers.
Slack is slow and tedious nowadays.

(Sorry Jesper, I intended to reply to the list)

On 8/21/20 1:23 PM, Jesper Cockx wrote:
> Dear Agdakkers,
>
> In his recent mail, Jacques raised an important point that got lost in 
> the rest of the conversation:
>
> > - the community ought to pick a single communication system (Slack, 
> Discord, Zulip, gitter, whatever, but just one!)
>
> I wholeheartedly agree with this! Github does a reasonable job of 
> keeping track of issues and feature requests, and this mailing list 
> works well for broadcasting messages to the broader community, so 
> these two we should definitely keep. But it would be nice to 
> consolidate all other discussions and questions on a single platform.
>
> Here are some of the current options with my opinion on them:
>
> - IRC: An open system but based on archaic technology. I'm having a 
> hard time browsing the history of a channel when I'm not always connected.
> - Slack: Seems to be the de facto standard for many people and we used 
> it successfully during the latest Agda meeting. However, it is 
> commercial software and keeping a full history is not free.
> - Gitter: Is well integrated with Github but feels otherwise quite 
> barebones compared to Slack.
> - Discord: Many features are more aimed at gamers than programmers. 
> Some people used it for screensharing during the Agda meeting. It is 
> commercial software and we'd have to pay for certain features
> - Zulip: Has a nice threaded interface to conversations that can take 
> a while to get used to. It is 100% open source software and is 
> explicitly aimed at open source communities 
> (https://zulipchat.com/for/open-source/ 
> <https://zulipchat.com/for/open-source/>). The HoTT community also 
> seems to be using it quite effectively.
> - MatterMost, RocketChat, Matrix.org, ...: These are other open source 
> alternatives to Slack, but they seem to be less popular than Zulip in 
> the type theory / formalized math circles.
>
> My personal preference would be to centralize all communication (other 
> than Github and the mailing list) on Zulip. But since this is an 
> important decision, I would very much like to hear other opinions as 
> well before we decide on anything.
>
> Cheers,
> Jesper
>
> _______________________________________________
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> Agda at lists.chalmers.se
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