Re: Debian presence on newer platforms
Hi Ansgar
On 2019/03/25 18:54, Ansgar wrote:
> a lot of communication in Debian happens over IRC. However IRC is not
> as nice to use as newer alternatives, creating a barrier for newer
> contributors.
>
> Do you think Debian should be more active to establish (official)
> presence on newer platforms?
>
> A disadvantage is splitting the community, but I'm not sure keeping IRC
> forever as the world moves on is a good option either...
>
> In particular I also wonder if Debian should look at Matrix[1]: it is a
> free and decentralized platform, and the UI (of Riot[2]) seems more
> friendly than IRC clients.
>
> (I haven't used Matrix much myself yet... Just played a bit as ${work}
> might use it and they have set up a test installation.)
As it happens, I've put a lot of thought in to this and considered
including it in my platform too, but my platform was already a bit
loaded (both in how long it is and the scope of the role I was laying
out), so I decided to cut it for a second term if that would ever work out.
Yeah yeah, long post coming...
(https://www.enricozini.org/blog/2019/debian/debian-vote-statistics/)
There's a massive amount of interesting things happening in the space.
Matrix is good, but Mattermost is certainly worth looking at as well.
https://mattermost.com/
It's a free software alternative to Slack, but it's not a mere copy,
Mattermost is a superset of Slack in terms of features. Mattermost
integrates with many different existing services. In particular, it also
integrates really well with GitLab, to the point where GitLab ships a
configuration of GitLab that contains an entire Mattermost installation.
You can also enable commands for channels and users that let them
contron GitLab right out of chat (or even add completely new commands
that control stuff pretty much anywhere):
https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/integrations/mattermost_slash_commands.html
I'm not sure how popular the idea will be to replace IRC with mattermost
completely, I consider it firmly in the needs-more-discussion category,
but I do think it's worth while considering for a lot of reasons, but
basically:
1. Spam. IRC networks aren't that great with dealing with large spam
attacks, Mattermost makes this easier to deal with.
2. IRC Gateway. You don't have to throw away your perfectly good IRC
client like irssi or weechat, they can connect to mattermost via its IRC
gateway.
3. Control. At the beginning of events like DebConf, we always have a
day or two where oftc kicks people off because too many people connect
from the same IP, for this and other reasons Mattermost might be better.
4. New users. I really want to get many new contributors in to debian,
and the average person finds Mattermost (and all its alternatives) *so*
much less intimidating than an IRC client. On top of that, Mattermost
have great phone apps so it's easier for the average person to stay
connected to chats when mobile.
But there's more, there's a lot of exciting things happening in the free
software communications world. There's the whole concept of the
fediverse that I think we should embrace within Debian. In a nutshell,
it allows you to connect different free social network services together
so that you can interact with other networks from yours, even if they're
different software.
Here are some of them many of you may already be familiar with.
1. Mastodon
Mastodon is a twitter-like platform with a tweetdeck-like interface.
More on Mastodon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastodon_(software)
Follow me on Mastodon! :) https://mastodon.xyz/@highvoltage
2. Pixelfed
Pixelfed is a project to recreate Instagram as a free software platform.
Pixelfed website: https://pixelfed.org/
Follow me on Pixelfed! :) https://pixelfed.social/highvoltage
Rhonda has performed a test installation of Pixelfed on Debian, it seems
that it needs minimal changes to run properly on Debian (maybe she can
elaborate if she's reading).
3. Peertube
Peertube is great, it's a decentralised video hosting service.
Website: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PeerTube
Peertube is a game changer. YouTube basically currently has a monopoly
on video hosting on the Internet due to all the eyeballs it's
attracting, but Peertube may be the answer to that, since it allows
users to self-host, but users can discover videos across instances.
I've been looking into various video hosting solutions for the DebConf
video team, because we want to offer users something nicer than just an
html listing of files, and out of the bunch of solutions I've looked at,
Peertube by far makes the most sense.
Not part of my DPL campaign at all, but if we get a Peertube instance
for Debian, I want to encourage our users to make videos about Debian
and share it there, similar to videos that I made for Debian Package of
the Day etc.
I would really love for Debian to have a Peertube instance to host all
the DebConf videos and a whole array of user contributed videos too,
ranging on how they use debian to howtos etc.
I spoke to DSA and they said storage-wise it's possible. I installed a
test instance last year too to test what it would mean to maintain it
(sorry it's not up anymore), and from a technical perspective, there
aren't many problems getting it up.
>From a social perspective, there's a lot more work. Having a video
platform where users can upload videos and post content, we'll need a
small team of moderators to take care of the site on a regular basis. We
could also initially restrict who could make accounts there, to make it
easier. But sorting out the moderation and putting together some good
community guidelines for that would be essential.
So, those are some great apps on the fediverse, BUT! I think we can also
embrace the fediverse in Debian. We have *so* much data everywhere, just
look at how much information is available on your DDPO page, what if we
could use the fediverse as a Debian super message bus to communicate
statuses across the networks? People are already complainging about how
asynchronous our bug tracker is (and we have more services with that
problem), but imagine if we had all these services that worked together
and aren't only highly integrated with each other (even though they can
still work fine alone), but also integrates well with all the other new
stuff everyone is working on? Perhaps an overly ambitious goal right
now, but what about 5 or 10 years from now? Maybe.
Having said all of that, I think mattermost and peertube could be a good
start, they solve multiple existing problems and the only downsides I
could think of yet is that they introduce some work for us, but it can
also be a great way for new contributors to get involved in the first
place to help administrate those services. From there we can move on to
the bigger and more exciting things. And having said all that, I'm not
prescribing anything here, just sharing my thoughts :)
> Similar things also apply to mailing lists; there are solutions that
> might be more accessible to some users (e.g. mailman3's web interface
> which for example Fedora uses). Though I can't say much about those
> as I haven't used them so far.
I didn't know about it but just checked it out, that's a much nicer way
to browse list archives for sure.
Thanks for the question!
-Jonathan
--
⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀ Jonathan Carter (highvoltage) <jcc>
⣾⠁⢠⠒⠀⣿⡁ Debian Developer - https://wiki.debian.org/highvoltage
⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋ https://debian.org | https://jonathancarter.org
⠈⠳⣄⠀⠀⠀⠀ Be Bold. Be brave. Debian has got your back.
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