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Re: Debian is testing Discourse



* On 2020 13 Apr 15:27 -0500, Sven Hartge wrote:
> What I am saying here is that by having multiple channels of
> communication you naturally get different groups of people in them which
> tend to drift apart sooner or later, because each group isn't
> represented in the other media. And then you get the "forum casuals"
> against the "mailinglist greybeards" against the "IRC noobs" in the end.

So, we need one more silo to contain them all?  Insert obligatory XKCD
here as I'm sure is one that applies.

> I can see why the GNOME people choose to close all other communication
> channels and focus on one and only one: to avoid splintering the
> community. 
> 
> That by doing so they may have lost some members who absolutely didn't
> want to use the new way of communicating and if they anticipated and
> went with it anyways I can't say from the outside.

They certainly did lose users.  It seems the GTK subreddit is active as
a result and probably some Web forums, unrelated mailing lists elsewhere
and maybe even some Usenet group.

If Free Software, Linux, and the entire software ecosystem we enjoy
should have taught us anything it is that it is impossible to contain
everything in a single silo.  Considering the breadth of topics on this
list over the years and the topics of all the other Debian lists, not
all of this can possibly thrown into a single Discourse silo with only
tagging to provide any separation, can it?  The scope of the Gnome
project is much smaller but still large enough that I don't find their
Discourse implementation to be all that friendly (in terms of Discourse
and their chosen layout, not the people involved) and I've been around
plenty of Web forums over the past couple of decades.

Every approach, Usenet, mailing lists, Web forums, Reddits, et. al. has
a certain amount of onboarding/learning curve.  If you don't have
separate topic-based implementations of the preceding and think that
everything can be done with tags, the segregation will still exist as
those interested in a certain topic will only search for certain tags
and thus an improperly tagged post may still be ignored.  This is how I
see Gnome's Discourse working, for some definition of working.

- Nate

-- 

"The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all
possible worlds.  The pessimist fears this is true."

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