Open Stack

On Wed, May 26, 2021 at 1:35 PM Zane Bitter <zbitter at redhat.com> wrote:
>
> On 20/05/21 3:39 pm, Jeremy Stanley wrote:
> > On 2021-05-20 21:28:26 +0200 (+0200), Dmitry Tantsur wrote:
> > [...]
> >> This is, indeed, not quite on-topic, but I'm advocating for
> >> Matrix, mostly because that's where Mozilla went and because it
> >> seems to check all the boxes.
> > [...]
> >
> > It seems, from what little I've read, that Matrix servers can
> > integrate with IRC server networks and bridge channels fairly
> > seamlessly. If there were a Matrix bridge providing access to the
> > same channels as people were participating in via IRC (wherever that
> > happened to be), would that address your concerns?
>
> Here's the problem: IRC authentication is a disaster.
>
> Matrix authentication is decent by all accounts.
>
> If you bridge a system with decent authentication to a system where
> authentication is a disaster, you get a disaster (see also:
> Schopenhauer's Law of Entropy).
>
>
> IRC works fine for me and you because we made it fine by doing stuff
> that has the effect of excluding casual users and new contributors.
>
> Although I think OFTC was always a better choice than Freenode ever was,
> the reality is that by moving there we will continue to exclude new
> people in this way, plus we'll lose a few of the old people along the
> way (and maybe even manage to completely fragment the community, judging
> by some of the comments in this subthread).
>
> IMHO by refusing to consider Matrix we are missing an opportunity to
> make the community more open while only paying the cost of moving once.
> Instead it appears we are going to pay the (community) cost without
> getting any of the benefits.
>
> cheers,
> Zane.
>

I want to take one moment to kind of circle back to this. Nobody on
the call where the TC, and numerous community leaders discussed this
whole situation earlier today, ever ruled this out. The consensus and
focus at this time was the short term continuity of being able to
communicate and maintain community culture/tooling while freenode...
frankly... grows into a larger, more impressive tire fire as each day
passes.

Many of the community leaders I've spoken with agree, we need to do
better or we need to do more. But we also still need to get work done
while we figure out the new things and ensure we have some level of
community continuity. That was the consensus and driver to make the
decision which was made this morning as the grim reality set with
regards to the state and path Freenode is on. Reality is that on some
level, we will always be bridged across multiple networks, channels,
tools, and ultimately protocols. There is no one solution to make
everyone happy, so the immediate focus is on short term continuity as
we evolve. So the next step is ultimately choosing the *next* places
to evolve and communicate and somehow providing the cross reference,
since we all face the grim reality that multiple networks always have
and will continue to be a thing regardless of rooms on matrix,
discord, or Frank the plushy Shark's fancy new webchat app.