In the olden days, a FOSS (Free/Open Source Software) project typically had:
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Jan Wildeboer π·:krulorange:wrote last edited by [email protected]
(Thread) In the olden days, a FOSS (Free/Open Source Software) project typically had:
- A source code repository
- A web page with the documentation, FAQ and links to downloads
- At least one mailing list called announce, typically also one for users and one for contributors, all with public archives
- (maybe) An IRC channel to chat with other users and maybe also the developersMaybe itβs time to try that simple approach again? Everything open, everything accessible? 1/7
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Jan Wildeboer π·:krulorange:replied to Jan Wildeboer π·:krulorange: last edited by [email protected]
In those olden days, we also had some helpful rules. One was that only things that can be referenced in code or mail archives actually exist. So when there was a long discussion on IRC, someone wrote down the outcome (or coded the patch) and made it accessible to all. This was an important rule to avoid excluding those that didnβt have the time/willingness/connectivity to spend hours on IRC. 2/7
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Jan Wildeboer π·:krulorange:replied to Jan Wildeboer π·:krulorange: last edited by [email protected]
When I now see slack, discord, github etc everywhere as a *requirement* for participation, I think that we are exchanging a bit of comfort for the IMHO very high price of excluding a lot of potential contributors and giving a lot of data to proprietary companies without a real need for that. 3/7
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Jan Wildeboer π·:krulorange:replied to Jan Wildeboer π·:krulorange: last edited by [email protected]
Maybe this short thread makes you think a little bit about that. That would mean a lot to me! Run your projects in every way you want, I am not telling you to make changes. I merely hope that you start to think a bit about what's best to grow your community in an inclusive and open way, is all 4/6
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Hubert FiguiΓ¨rereplied to Jan Wildeboer π·:krulorange: last edited by
@jwildeboer the abandonment of mailing list is what bums me the most. Several big project replaced it with "discourse" whose usability is dubious. I ended up losing contact when they closed the mailing lists.
But then mailing list got killed by GMail, 20 years of killing email and counting
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Jan Wildeboer π·:krulorange:replied to Hubert FiguiΓ¨re last edited by [email protected]
@hub My gut feeling is that mailing lists will have a bit of a comeback. Maybe just for connoisseurs, like it becoming the Vinyl of communication
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nobletroutreplied to Jan Wildeboer π·:krulorange: last edited by
@jwildeboer do you think undernet and other IRC servers didnβt (donβt?) have a running cost? Or that the owners of those servers werenβt or had some special power to not monitor and collect all the data? You still needed an IRC client, half of which were shareware/nonfree. All the communication was unencrypted so any entity between you and the server could monitor and read all comms. Even trivially insert or delete messages if they wanted.
I donβt really see the distinction between entity 1 providing a free chat service and entity 2 doing it.
If your beef is more that people have gotten lazy about their decision making process, then Iβm all for a mindset change. It sucks having decisions made and then no reference to them.
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Jan Wildeboer π·:krulorange:replied to nobletrout last edited by [email protected]
@nobletrout I have no beef. I am just describing what I feel and what we might learn from how stuff was done (not so) long ago. Take from that what you want (or not
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Doggie :neofox_snug: :therian:replied to Jan Wildeboer π·:krulorange: last edited by
@jwildeboer mailing lists and IRC channels are like the opposite of accessible
to elaborate:
IRC is unusable on mobile internet connections, or on multiple devices at once, doesn't keep any history and has none of the features you would expect from a chat protocol in 2024 (yes bouncers exist but they are extremely convoluted to set up and often assume you have some arcane knowledge on how IRC works that doesn't seem to be actually documented anywhere)
Mailing lists clutter your inbox with tons of discussion you don't care about and are very difficult to read especially when a thread splits into multiple branches.
The best way I've seen of solving it is to display threads like Reddit or Misskey does, but I have never seen anyone implement a way to read mailing lists like that. Most forum software just ignores the problem by not supporting any way of "forking" a discussion, which results in terrible, impossible to follow threads where every other post quotes some previous post related to a different topic (see XDA-developers).
Also my email provider would ask me to pay up for the volume of received email if I joined a few mailing lists each receiving dozens of messages a day.
If a project requires me to join a mailing list to contribute I will simply not contribute to the project. Git forges exist for a reason, they provide really good UX for merge requests and issue tracking. -
ijreplied to Jan Wildeboer π·:krulorange: last edited by
@jwildeboer in the old-olden days there was even a newsgroup for that piece of software if the software was somewhat relevant for others.
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Jan Wildeboer π·:krulorange:replied to Doggie :neofox_snug: :therian: last edited by
@lunareclipse Mailing lists *with archives* is what I said β for reasons! Having a publicly available archive is really important, IMHO, so that I can check a project even *before* I subscribe to a mailing list. Most of the time I am happy to just bookmark the archive page and read stuff there.
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Jan Wildeboer π·:krulorange:replied to ij last edited by
@ij And we had bridges between nntp and mailman Then came phpBB and things changed dramatically ...
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@nobletrout @jwildeboer Hard agree. For me this is about project governance, and infrastructure governance along with sustainable fund raising models (includes corporate sponsors). We must raise funding to support FOSS solution providers that respect privacy and user freedoms. Unpopular opinion: It does a disservice to our communities if we all stand up forgejo instances without considering that if we all put that money towards something like CodeBerg, that we might get a solution we all need.
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Jan Wildeboer π·:krulorange:replied to Jan Wildeboer π·:krulorange: last edited by [email protected]
I am throwing this out here not to come over as a grumpy old man, yelling at the clouds. But because I guess many enthusiastic, young people simply never experienced the olden ways. Maybe they want to explore them a bit and see for themselves if there could be something viable in it for them. Especially wrt async communication. Is all! 5/6
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Jan Wildeboer π·:krulorange:replied to Carlos O'Donell last edited by
@codonell (FTR: I am a paying member of Codeberg, moved most of my projects there and am also running my own forgejo instance @nobletrout
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Carlos O'Donellreplied to Jan Wildeboer π·:krulorange: last edited by
@jwildeboer @nobletrout I figured you were, and I wrote "without considering" purposely. It is absolutely OK to do this for yourself, I don't object to that, but as @nobletrout says, and I agree with, we need a mindset change where we consider our options and their consequences. Consider if the top 3 downstream distribution put all of their sources on CodeBerg, and put all that funding in the same place? Imagine being able to do PRs against the same debian, gentoo, and fedora sources?
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Jan Wildeboer π·:krulorange:replied to Carlos O'Donell last edited by
@codonell I am not a big fan of centralisation. Forgejo is working hard to integrate ActivityPub so that ultimately you can file issues, pull requests etc to any instance with your preferred AP account. It's going to take a while to get there, but that's the future I am hoping for. Decentralised, distributed, open. @nobletrout
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Qreplied to Doggie :neofox_snug: :therian: last edited by
re: IRC with no history. Most of the IRC chans I'm in actually have public archives that are almost instant. I have my weechat loading the 1000 last messages from the chan (when I was connected, so that's obviously not perfect).
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Jan Wildeboer π·:krulorange:replied to Q last edited by [email protected]
@0leil I always saw IRC as synchronous, ephemeral communication. When I am there, I am there and when I'm not, I'm not. Meaning: I don't need or want to have an archive on chats.
The mailing list is the asynchronous communication channel for me. That's where I want the archive. That distinction was always really helpful to me. @lunareclipse
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Qreplied to Jan Wildeboer π·:krulorange: last edited by
@jwildeboer I've been contributing/following a few big projects that only use mailing list based contributions (Yocto, U-Boot bootloader, Linux kernel, libcamera, Buildroot). The last few years we've seen a lot of people voicing their discontent at that workflow and requesting we do everything with GitHub/GitLab "or else you will never get a contribution from me".
So I am not sure those young people are that interested in that old workflow.