Hi Andy,
On Mon, 25 Mar 2024 at 01:32, Andy Smith via BitFolk Users <users@mailman.bitfolk.com> wrote:
So, if you do actually engage in online chat for any projects or
communities please would you fill in this short questionnaire to let
us know about it?
https://forms.gle/cYyP2QFZzpDWdJ9T6
I have filled in the form.
I'm also not promising to set something up on whichever platform
comes out top (this is not a vote!). It would be very interesting to
me to find out where people are, though.
My teenage kids see Email as "old people letters", which are only helpful for resetting your Fortnite or Pinterest password and not much more. Similarly, I now see IRC as "old people chat", while fully getting that I am a member of the "old people" group.
Personally speaking, I think "chat" is such a broad question. I think you mean "social chat," sharing the odd amusing link, talking about stuff that's good, bad, frustrating, etc. It's a "friendly group chat."
I used IRC between 1999 and now, but I only spend a little time on it because all the active communities are elsewhere. Partly because I don't have a super robust IRC client, I can use it from anywhere, including mobile. I have "The Lounge" (a free software web client for IRC) running at home, but over time, I've become less inclined to open it.
Work stuff is on Slack, and many open-source and old people reliving their youth in retro computing communities are on Discord. The hardcore Free Software people seem to all be on Matrix. All three of these platforms are crap for different reasons. I'm in exactly one group on Signal because that was dictated by someone else. I'm not too fond of that either. I'm in WhatsApp chats with many non-nerds (and family). Some people use Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat groups, but those people were mostly born in a different century to me.
Personally, these days, I spend more time talking to friends/associates/like-minded people (who aren't work colleagues or in topic-specific chats) on Telegram. There are a few nerdy podcast-related channels and some group chats I'm in there. I'm sure people find Telegram terribad, too.
Essentially, none of the options are amazing. For me, Telegram is the least worst, and Discord is the worst, with Matrix, Signal, and IRC lumped in the "meh" department. I have them all open all the time on every machine, with notifications off, and dip in as and when I have time or the inclination.
I was quite pleased to see Andy badgered into joining Telegram, tbh, as I now see his ramblings, which I missed from the Bitfolk IRC channel I never looked at. <3
/2p
I'm in a similar situation in that Telegram is the platform I
check and interact with most (all be it not that much for a
while). I suspect that is a combination of where people are and
that it is the closest in similarity to IRC use wise. I am in
multiple Discord channels, but find it too cumbersome in terms of
client resources and the mess of channels most servers have, which
leads to less engagement for me. I've used Slack for work and
found it the biggest barrier to communication I've ever come
across. I tended to copy information from there into text files so
as not to lose it, and any questions / requests I had tended to
disappear up up the chat window and not get a response. The
busiest channel was the cat photos one, and I suspect much of the
work communication happened offline in the office where the core
team were. I also run a Matrix client, which is fine, but most of
the channels I'm most interested in seem to be Telegram.
Stackoverflow and Reddit, which have been mentioned in the thread,
are platforms I tend to avoid. The times when I've found them
referenced in searches I've found Reddit a minefield of criticism
for the original question and no answer, and Stackoverflow all to
often full of questions with either no answer at all, or a mass of
suggestions that don't work and lead you to other similar
questions that supposedly have the answer, but in practice don't.
I guess that sort of sums up much of the internet ;-)
/2d
(OK, I don't actually remember that currency as such, but I have
lived through decimalisation.)
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