Choosing a synchronous chat platform

[JimMadge]

A poll to decide which platform to use for synchronous chat.
If there isn't a clear result from the first preference vote perhaps we can use the comments (maybe upvoting) to find the best answer.

Input particularly appreciated from @all-contributors/maintainers

[jdalrymple]

No preference - First time ive heard of Zulip but looks cool! Any of the above are fine, though leaning on more Open soruce things like Zulip or Matrix is preferred

[JimMadge]

Similar to me, would prefer open source but mostly I would want to pick the platform that allows most of the community to get involved.

[flpm]

+1 for open source. I have never used Zulip/Matrix, so I have no preference. I mostly use Slack and Discord and between them I prefer Slack.

[da5nsy]

I use Zulip quite a lot and am very keen on it. I particularly like the granularity of notification control. I was recently involved in writing a quick start guide to Zulip.
I also use all the other systems fairly regularly.
Matrix gets second place for me because it is also open-source, but I find the notifications are somewhat unreliable.

[JoshuaKGoldberg]

In theory, I would love an open source solution. Both for ideological reasons and for resilience against bad company actions.

In practice, I have never found one I actually liked the experience of. Matrix and Zulip both have serious UX annoyances (bugs, notifications weirdness, lack of features, etc.) that make me not want to use them. Discord, on the other hand, actually has a pretty smooth UX. Many other projects are also on Discord and already maintain public channels & help forums there. We'd get a lot of network benefits (and personal convenience for at least me) by being there.

Again, I don't like this situation, and would really prefer not to be tied into a soon-to-be-public company. But 🤷

[da5nsy]

Here to present a counter-argument for the network benefits of discord.

I personally have a strong stance of not using proprietary tech when there is a viable (incl. almost as good but not as good) open-source alternative. I think we need to be supporting the open-source options, and sometimes using them (and giving feedback) is a valid way of supporting a project. For Zulip specifically, I've found the devs to be incredibly responsive, and the project seems to be developing quickly.

Also, regards Discord specifically, due to the recent data breaches and plans around age-verification I personally do not use Discord any more, and so I would not join a chat hosted on this system. I am only a single participant, but I suspect I would not be alone in these positions.

[JimMadge]

Oh, there is no way I'm sending a copy of my passport to Discord 😆. There aren't many organisations I would trust with that, but certainly not one that has already lost identification documents.

(The real problem there is the legislation requiring individual companies to hold that kind of information, but the effect is I'm just not going to use services which require it).

[jdalrymple]

What are we hoping to achieve with the sync chat app?

[JimMadge]

I think that is a good question, and something we should keep in mind. It will take effort to set something up and maintain it, so what is the benefit?

I originally felt the need for it because I was having high-bandwidth conversations with @lwasser about our plans. It was the kind of chat that doesn't work well in issues, but it felt odd having it in a private place outside of the all contributors infrastructure.

That need doesn't feel as strong any more, but I still think it would help us stay coordinated and feel like a close team.

[jdalrymple]

So its primary for the maintainer team to communicate with each other in a way that has less obstacles that here? ie. through issues haha

[jdalrymple]

If that's the case, I'm down to try one of these other chat applications. Its low risk, worst case it doesn't work well and we move to something else.

[JimMadge]

Yes, if it isn't working for us, we can close it and/or leave a pinned message saying so.

[trueberryless]

There is a rather new open source alternative to Discord based on ATproto: https://colibri.social

I don't want to give even more options so that the decision is even harder, but I thought I might share it.

[JimMadge]

I don't think I've heard of AT before. Are there others using it? Any advantages over Matrix (or other alternatives)?

[louisescher]

Hi, creator of Colibri here. It's the protocol that Bluesky uses, among many others!

Our main downside is that we're still in Alpha, and that we have no concept of private chatrooms yet, as the protocol does not support private data as of writing. They're working on it, though. I've also been working on a Discord-style permission system and general overhaul of the platform to make the infrastructure more stable, but that's not complete. Once that's done, I'd recommend Colibri as well, until then, stuff might break. But feel free to try it out and give feedback.

I'd say our primary advantage right now is what makes ATproto such a strong platform, the openness. Since the account system works across the entire ATprotocol, people can use their accounts for multiple things. Our advantage over the chat platforms specifically is that we're close to Discord in terms of UI and are completely open source, with our apps being written in Solid.js and Rust, and the codebase is still fairly small so it's easy to contribute to. There's lots of ATproto apps out there, and since the data all works in similar ways, we'll look into cross-compatibility with other ATproto services in the future (like atmo.rsvp, bluesky for dedicated post feeds, etc.) in the future.

[trueberryless]

The question also is: How many of the maintainers do currently have a Bluesky account?
I know that Josh, Danny and I have one - but that's a minority. And I can't ask/expect all to create an account just for the this.

I guess most of use have a Discord account, but I can't verify this either and it is also not open source, as Josh points out.
I personally would be quite happy to see allcontributors be one of the first showcase projects on Colibri and I am really looking forward to having a synchronous chat platform as it makes exchanging ideas much easier.

[Berkmann18]

I don't have a Bluesky account (yet).