What should happen to IPFS chat?

Ecosystem
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@mosh kicked off a great discussion using the Polis tool:

A lot of IPFS-related chatter happens in the Filecoin Slack (which is bridged, imperfectly, to Discord and Matrix). As part of the IPFS and libp2p governance and independence described in https://protocol.ai/blog/advancing-ipfs-and-libp2p-governance/ we should probably decouple this from the Filecoin Slack soon. (There is also a separate IPFS Events Slack, that has been used for IPFS Camp and Thing.)

Vote on Polis and submit your own statements https://pol.is/2v2dkpmjji

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The Communications WG will review the Polis results and move forward with something in January 2024. Here’s a summary of current input:

We seem to be united on these goals:

  • More conversations should be on the :sparkles: forum :sparkles:, public email lists, and other searchable venues instead of ephemeral chats
  • If we move to another IPFS Slack, it should not be a paid one
  • IPFS Events & IPFS Thing Slacks will be sunset and turn into channels in the primary IPFS chat

Controversies:

  • Slack vs. Discord for main platform
  • Bridging: Currently we have bridges across Matrix, Slack, and Discord. It opens up access for more people, but also invites spam and confusion.

If you have any thoughts on the topic, please weigh in on this thread or in the Polis by January 1: https://pol.is/2v2dkpmjji

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I’ll give my two cents: I think both long-form and async (e.g. forums) and real-time chats (e.g., irc, matrix, etc) are important. My view is that we should encourage long-form and async places. Places that are also searchable and have archives.

  • Long-form, async, searchable: this forum, or even GitHub discussions. I’m assuming GitHub does not require login to see discussions. If that’s the case, I’m up for it. If it would decrease infrastructure costs, that’d be great. I’m unsure what are the costs of this current forum.
  • Real-time chat: I would avoid Slack, Discord, or other locked-in platforms. Maybe Matrix, or even revert back to IRC in order to stimulate longer-form places. Whatever is decided, I think we should somehow keep a history of the chat that is searchable. The IndieWeb Chat is an IRC channel that is bridged to some other places and they keep a searchable history.
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As of last week, the bridging between Filecoin Slack and Discord/Matrix stopped working.

I think we need to make a decision here so that there’s clarity for the community.

My personal opinion is that we shouldn’t continue relying on the bridging and pick a single platform. As much as I’m wary of Discord and closed platforms generally, I think it’s better to have a single chat platform.

Discourse chat?

We may want to consider using Discourse as our chat platform, since a big part of the community is already on Discourse: Official Discourse Chat Plugin - plugin - Discourse Meta

I’ve enabled the plugin so that we can test this out, but I think this may be a good way to get the best of both worlds: retention and a single place for the community to communicate.