Signal is too much--I have thousands of unread messages, most of which were sent by 2 people. Signal is for real-time conversations (like IRC), not discussions to be read at leisure (like email lists or forums). Fedora uses Discourse (not Discord). Maybe that's worth investigating? I've been mostly able to live with its email integration. "https://www.discourse.org/about Open source at heart Discourse has been open source since 2013, with our full codebase on GitHub. Your community data is never locked into a proprietary system; you can self-host, migrate away if your needs change, or customize the platform in ways closed software won't allow. Hundreds of developers have contributed security patches, accessibility improvements, and new features over the years. It's how we believe community software should be built." On Tue, Feb 10, 2026 at 05:20:16PM -0500, John Stoffel via WLUG wrote:
"eroc1990" == eroc1990 <eroc1990@protonmail.com> writes:
Did you read the article i posted? Part of the issue is CSAM being pushed into matrix servers and the management was hard to make work. But maybe that's gotten better and if we ran our own server it wouldn't be a problem?
Something to talk about for sure on thursday. I'm not up on these tools at all, but I do want to make sure that email chats and signal chats are shared widely as possible.
And one of the choices I failed to list is:
- instant messages (signal) - email threads.
Those are two aspects. When I got home sunday and found 130+ messages in signal to catch up on, it was pretty funny. But did I really need to read them all? Maybe. Did I enjoy it? Enventually once I read them.
But I like the mailing list and how I don't need to be watching it constantly, nor do I get dinged with notifications. Whcih is both good and bad. LOL!
John
I feel like the obvious winner in this case would be Matrix. Synapse can be a bit of a bear to set up, but you get E2EE in both 1:1 and Rooms, things can be organized into Spaces and you're able to freely join and leave any room or space that's irrelevant to you. Administration isn't all that bad when you're running a Private server, but it comes with costs in terms of the resources needed to store and serve the various components of Matrix. Would be curious if anyone has any proclivities toward another service with similar offerings.
On Tuesday, February 10th, 2026 at 3:49 PM, John Stoffel via WLUG <wlug@lists.wlug.org> wrote:
Hi all, A bunch of us are also chatting on signal (look in the email archives for a link to join!) and I feel like we're leaving the email forum users behind.
And we need to keep the WLUG community working together and sharing together, no matter what their systems or resources are.
I found this interesting article on replacing discord with something new.
https://taggart-tech.com/discord-alternatives/
And I thought we as a group show evaluate some of these options as well. In order of requirements I think:
- needs to be open - WLUG needs to control the data - needs to have clients across a swath of systems. - web based - CLI / plain text based - Apple/Android clients. - searchable - able to organize a bit into channels. - announcements - regular chat - questions or howtos
Right now I enjoy the signal chat and how free form it is, but since I can only read it on my phone because getting a CLI client working is a pain... and I don't want to install the signal app on my work laptop.
So what do people think?