To newer, younger contributors IRC could feel ancient or cumbersome to learn.
Not only yong contributors…
Also, if they’re mulling departing from IRC, how about getting rid of mailing lists?
cumbersome to learn? are they talking about for admining a server because its chat and their are choices of clients?
Unlike IRC, which is a centralised protocol relying on individual servers, Matrix is federated. It lets users on different servers to communicate without friction. Plus, Matrix features encryption, message history, media support, and so, meeting modern expectations.
I mean get that but that does not make it easier. IRC is about as basic as you get usage wise. A decent client should store endpoints and credentials. Honestly seems like the major nuisance point its a plus as its not like social media in that you want contributors to be somewhat serious about a project and not just hanging out at ones as it meets their fancy.
IRC is about as basic as you get usage wise
And that is precisely the problem. The majority of people you get are those who like absolute basics and that for sure is not the majority. It makes it more exclusive.
you want contributors to be somewhat serious about a project and not just hanging out at ones as it meets their fancy
IMO, you want people to be passionate about your project. Treating a project a job isn’t going to attract more people, but less.
Frankly, IRC and mailinglists epitomise the toxic and exclusive nerd culture that linux is known for and still has trouble shaking. “No, I don’t want more users, eternal september”, “RTFM noob”, “no, I will not adapt, you adapt”, etc. . Not all change is good, but the same goes for “but it’s always been done this way”.
mailing lists and irc are for coders generally not users. the job thing is just laughable. there is no clock or requirement around time. i fine with this level of “toxicity”. oh irc and email. your soooo toxic with your developers.
what would you choose to replace mailing lists with? e-mail is accessible, easy to archive, and archives are also accessible and easily searched
genuinely curious
fediverse groups, of course that would require structuring the software in a way that resembles mailing lists instead of reddit
It depends on what the mailinglist is used for. PRs? a source forge (gitlab, forgejo, radicle, …). Discussions? A forum (lemmy, nodebb, discourse, even phpbb). Announcements? Microblogging platform (mastodon, misskey, …).
Everyone and their mother has a browser, developers have very few problems contributing to projects on source forges, interacting with issues, PRs/MRs, giving and receiving feedback, following discussions, and require little to no setup. Mailinglists require configuring the email client, getting to know the desired format of emails for each new mailinglist (top response vs bottom response, inline responses to comments vs quoting each thing they want to respond to, probably no HTML nor markdown, how media like screenshots or logs are shared, etc.), learning how to follow discussions and navigate mailinglists, etc. In short, mailinglists are a terrible mess, horrible to read and interact with, and plain unattractive (UX and UI) for newcomers.
