Big +1 on my side too.
Honestly, as someone else told it badly already, IRC is a nightmare to set and manage for anyone not coming from the 80/90s age of the internet.
I do personally use it since decades and so I’m used to it BUT It’s not because I know how to use it that I’ll hide the truth. IRC and any client for it is challenging for any new comers.
No, people don’t have to once again read and learn another tool just for our community.
We’re in 2021 and things have improved a lot in terms of messaging systems, rich exchanges platforms emerged (With many opensource) and so I consider (as many others I bet) that as a community looking for diversity and inclusion it’s time to bring the community of existing and new contributors better tools, the messaging system revamp being one of the most important one to be reworked.
I’m supporting (With another person from the internet) a small discord server of around 50 members and trying to answer many questions on reddit.
Why did we setup such alternative? Because most of those people were young students thriving to get straight answers and support from the community.
Why did they didn’t easily found answers? Because IRC channels are most of time dead towns (except for the kolla one) and that for people starting to learn Openstack it’s challenging to get access to IRC as it’s not as straightforward and feature rich as what alternatives messaging solutions can provide.
It’s a matter of UI/UX, time consumed and amount of knowledge required to acquire just for one slightly simple/quick question.
Same thing with the list by the way.
I deeply think that if we want to continue to embark more new comers we will need alternatives for current communication platforms such as the IRCs channels and the list.
Those are tools from the past. Sure they’re efficient, sure many of us know how to manage them but I really feel like adding another step to people trying to jump in isn’t a good way to welcome them.
I perfectly know that some of us found it interesting as it kind of gates from «moronic» questions and it’s kind of seen as way to mark a tribal validation of your effort to join us, but in the meantime I think we’re loosing opportunities to bring more peoples in.
It’s like in the real life, you’ll never want to use a tool or help someone that actually require you to follow a long and painful process before being able to help or use it.
Sorry for the long message but I really wanted to explain the issue with those tools as one of my concerns actually surfaced today.
PS: I don’t want us to join on Discord or any «SaaS solution » we can definitely host our own opensource alternative if we really want to gain autonomy on such topic.