On Thu, May 20, 2021 at 1:03 PM Christopher Schultz < ch...@christopherschultz.net> wrote:
> Coty, > > On 5/19/21 15:28, Coty Sutherland wrote: > > Hi all, > > > > I was just notified about some mess going on with Freenode which has > > seemingly resulted in a mass exodus of users from the freenode servers. > > I read about this last night and I immediately thought "I wonder if Coty > will say anything about this." :) > lol, of course :P > It's an "interesting" situation, for some values of "interesting." > > We (well, Coty) maintains a presence on #freenode because it appears to > help some people. Probably a very small number of people (relatively > speaking). Removing that resource may cause some people to fail to get > help. OTOH, we don't maintain a presence on fb, AIM, or Parler and we > prefer the mailing list for most interactions for a whole host of reasons. > I wasn't exactly proposing that we remove the resource, just that in light of all the people migrating away from freenode and the likelihood that the Fedora community will do the same, I won't be available there going forward (I really only started hanging out on freenode because the Fedora community communicates there a lot). And since I was basically the only committer hanging around, I didn't think it was worth keeping a reference on the project page which makes it look as if the channel was an 'official' place to get help. I'm equally as OK leaving it, but since I was the only person paying it any attention I thought it was worth asking how others thought :) > I don't think there are any people who are using #freenode because they > don't trust the ASF infrastructure. I think they just want to use IRC. > (Which, for those who are unfamiliar, is like Slack but without all the > stupid cat photos.) #freenode was great because you didn't have to pay > The Man to run an IRC channel/server for you and you also didn't have to > run it yourself. It was a nice, shared infrastructure. All of that still > exists. It's just got a bad taste to it because something that was free > and grassroots is now owned by a corporation and Corporations Are Bad > m'kay. > > If we want to provide support via IRC, there is nothing wrong with > #freenode in spite of recent events, IMHO. > > I think the question should be "is a realtime support system appropriate > for our community?" I tend to think not, but I'm not the only one here. > I wouldn't call what is being provided in #tomcat on freenode "realtime support" haha There's maybe one question a month there on average (at least when I'm online during the week), and sometimes they even go unanswered depending on who is available at the time. > If we are going to "quit" #freenode, should we put our efforts into > pointing people to the mailing list(s) instead of pointing them to > another competing platform? I think we should funnel people to the > mailing lists. If the mailing list has too high a bar, then I guess we > can point them to Slack. (Does Slack require an account? Requiring > signup sucks. At least subscribing to a mailing list doesn't mean you > need another entry in your password safe.) > > Anyhow, I'd love to hear what others think. But I would suggest that you > consider your motivations before doing anything. Specifically: > > 1. Why abandon #freenode? > > 2. Why move to anything other than mailing-list? > I agree, we should drive everyone to mailing lists but not everyone likes them so having a few options is good for the community IMO. Also, we aren't really abandoning anything because we don't really maintain it, it's led by community folk as far as I know; I'm not a moderator. I was just suggesting that if it's not a resource we're actively maintaining that we maybe shouldn't point to it from the project page. > -chris > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscr...@tomcat.apache.org > For additional commands, e-mail: users-h...@tomcat.apache.org > >
