I donât have a strong opinion either way about whether to enable chat, however, with regard to:
This will not centralize discussions, sorry.
The people that chat on Slack or Discord (two channels in which I participate) do so in those spaces because of the culture that exists in those spaces.
The community forum too has a specific culture around it thatâs different from other spaces on the project. I donât see enabling chat here to have much if any impact on the chat that happens in other places, it would just be another place where people can chat, but with the culture and demographic of the community forum.
I would like to remember again in this topic that a potential connection discourse-chat to matrix is in the works, and would allow to connect discourse-chat to any other existing chat out there (matrix, irc, telegram, slack and others)
Be aware that while bridging is âgoodâ, this is not a comprehensive solution because of differences between chat platforms. While there is usually minimum interoperability, in my experience, bridged users generally lack access to all spaces within a chat channel and lack access to all the features.
The longest thread come from Polish forum where yes, they basically acted as chat threads (but with split by topic). It worked well, though at some point activity in large part moved to Discord server.
Definitely. That can be safely ignored as potential benefit.
Okay, maybe I wrote the first point a bit categorically. But Iâm glad it provoked a discussion!
I understand that users of existing chat rooms are unlikely to want to change their comfortable platform immediately. But I still think it makes sense to at least try chat channels, even before itâs possible to connect them with matrix via a bridge.
If I understand correctly, the chat channels will be linked to the respective category and its moderators. I suggest asking local communities for their opinion if they want to try this feature. The worst thing that can happen is that the chats wonât work and there will be no activity in them. If that happens, well, you can always disable them.
I am in favour of turning them on, if the user experience is reasonable. I attempted to use them on meta, but they seem to be disabled there.
I view this similar to how communities have established Slack, Discord, Telegram and other channels, even though there were other existing real-time chat options for OSM. People were still interested in them, and I think some of the current use shows that people are already using Discourse for real-time chat, just poorly.
We just need to sort out moderation setup, and it would be good to see how they are in action at a different Discourse instance. Does anyone have any suggestions for the latter?
If you register on https://try.discourse.org, you can get an idea of the chats from the point of view of an ordinary user. I donât know how to look at chat channels from the moderatorsâ point of view.
Although we understand the desire from some people to have chats directly on Discourse, we also think that the problem to solve has a wider scope than these forums.
People want a modern, easy, welcoming and safe platform for OSM chatting, integrated with their existing accounts, where conversations can be centralized and donât require different platforms.
Thatâs why we think that enabling chat channels on these forums without a global strategy behind will do little to solve the identified problem, and we wonât be doing it for now.
We encourage everyone here to continue and kick-start a separate discussion over General talk on how to modernize and connect OSM chat conversations that can be proposed to the OSM Board to take a decision on.
I would also like to see such a platform for OSM, but I doubt that such a platform will ever be available.
Nevertheless, I would like to thank all the participants in this thread and the forum governance team for considering the idea of enabling chat channels.