I took the following AI in the OC meeting: "start a thread or book a meeting to discuss next steps in the messaging space per-WG and cross-WG".

Ed Summers

@flancian @edumerco @sam @Matt_Noyes this is great, thanks for helping push this forward. Definitely count me in for a meeting.

Reviewing the Loomio thread you started a couple years ago I think that @mako @ntnsndr @dazinism & @dynamic might be interested too?

Should we run a Matrix server?

What do you think?
Matrix is a federated chat protocol.
Running our server would result in people being able to have a @username:social.coop Matrix ID.
https://app.element.io is the main web client (there's also Android and iOS versions.)
https://anagora.org/matrix for my notes on this and additional pointers.

Loomio (www.loomio.com)

Sam Whited

@Matt_Noyes @flancian @edumerco @edsu @hollie I suspect synchronously would be better, but I'm happy to discuss here as well.

dynamic

@edsu @flancian @edumerco @sam @Matt_Noyes @mako @ntnsndr @dazinism

Quite possibly. Note: if you could use @[email protected] to tag me in the future, I'll see stuff sooner...

Eduardo Mercovich (él)

Hi and thank you all, yes I am interested.

As noted before, an important aspect to consider is defining if this is just for WG coordination or it is going to be a service to our community.

Also, of course we all have our preferences, but I would go for to consent, as consensus is the perfect solution, if only we had infinite time.

@dynamic @edsu @flancian @sam @Matt_Noyes @mako @ntnsndr @dazinism @[email protected]

Sam Whited

@edumerco @dynamic @edsu @flancian @Matt_Noyes @mako @ntnsndr @dazinism @[email protected] if we're doing this async, is this something we could use the alpha bonfire instance for? We were talking about using that for the CWG the other day, so the discussion on how we're going to discuss things async going forward might actually be a good test case, even before the final version is ready. Just a thought, and only if we decide to start discussing async, no pressure.

Ed Summers

@sam @edumerco @dynamic @flancian @Matt_Noyes @mako @ntnsndr @dazinism @[email protected] the last time I tried our bonfire instance it was painfully slow

Sam Whited

@edsu @edumerco @dynamic @flancian @Matt_Noyes @mako @ntnsndr @dazinism @[email protected] yah, me too. I dunno if that's a bonfire problem or just that it's an experiment that we're not dedicating expensive resources to though?

Eduardo Mercovich (él)

@sam @edsu @dynamic @flancian @Matt_Noyes @mako @ntnsndr @dazinism @[email protected]

I believe this slowness is the only thing that prevents bonfire to open to the fediverse. There is even a bounty for it...

Ed Summers

@sam @edumerco @dynamic @flancian @Matt_Noyes @mako @ntnsndr @dazinism @[email protected] I tried it somewhere else where it was super slow too, which is weird because I thought Elixir had an edge on Ruby performance wise. Maybe that was similarly under resourced though...

dynamic_hubzilla

@Sam Whited @Sam Whited @Eduardo Mercovich (él) @In #Flancia we'll meet @Matt Noyes @Benjamin Mako Hill @Nathan Schneider @dazinism

I tried out Bonfire's flagship "try it out" instance as well, and it was just as slow if not slower. I feel generally pessimistic about Bonfire, and definitely don't think it's an appropriate forum at this stage for an important discussion that needs to happen.

Sam Whited

@dynamic @Matt_Noyes @edumerco @flancian @dazinism @ntnsndr @mako good to know; yah, probably not worth doing the experiment if it's not even usable yet.

Eduardo Mercovich (él)

@sam @dynamic @Matt_Noyes @flancian @dazinism @ntnsndr @mako

Yes, but... Bonfire has everything ready to be a great tool, with the potential to help us with the big, complicated, loomio issue. They are also working on a governance plugin.
Can we help them with this slowness bug?

Eduardo Mercovich (él)

@flancian @edsu @sam @Matt_Noyes @mako @ntnsndr @dazinism
On another different line of thought/software, I had really great experiences with Zulip (https://zulip.com/).

What makes it great from my POV is the serious thread model. It helps to know what is happening, keep context, focus on what matters for you (including notificacions), mark as done, etc.

It is not federated, but it is Free Software and we can self-host it.
Anyone else tried it? Do we want to make a test?

Sam Whited

@edumerco @flancian @edsu @Matt_Noyes @mako @ntnsndr @dazinism I was thinking before that May First has chat and we have May First access but that it probably wouldn't be ideal for us because it is *just* an account and they don't provide a web client or anything (as far as I know?), but it occurred to me later that we could also just use the May First infrastructure and host our own web client (or just a page recommending actual apps for different operating systems).

Eduardo Mercovich (él)

@sam
@flancian @edsu @Matt_Noyes @mako @ntnsndr @dazinism

There is (or was, at least) a simple but effective web client really, I've used it a long time ago.
I will search for it.

In #Flancia we'll meet

@edumerco @sam @edsu @Matt_Noyes @mako @ntnsndr @dazinism thank you all for your interest and participation!

Ideally I think we could pursue the following using the fact that one of our VPSes is under-utilized currently:

- Install some or all of: a lightweight Matrix server (e.g. conduit), an XMPP server (something prosody adjacent?), a Zulip instance.
- Share test credentials with people in the working groups and gather feedback/see what catches on and productionize that?

In #Flancia we'll meet

@edumerco @sam @edsu @Matt_Noyes @mako @ntnsndr @dazinism on the topic of what the goal would be, I think the ideal outcome is we offer an extra service to the community *with the initial warning that it might have a worse SLO than the mastodon instance*, meaning they shouldn't rely on it for anything critical yet. Then we see how expensive it is to run and we vote as a community on running it or not?

In #Flancia we'll meet

@edumerco @sam @edsu @Matt_Noyes @mako @ntnsndr @dazinism of course it is the working groups that need this the most I believe, but I think if we run an instance at all we should try to make it useful to all the community, because why not?

Sam Whited

@flancian @edumerco @edsu @Matt_Noyes @mako @ntnsndr @dazinism I'd like to push back on "why not" as a reason to do anything. More specifically, I think we'll have different requirements depending on if this is for all users or just for a few working groups to use (I suspect if it's for all social.coop members as a service those requirements will be a superset of the requirements for if it's just us). We should decide what we want to do here and have a good reason for it up front IMO.