Tim,
Thank you very much for creating a meetup.com group for us! The UX for finding future meetups and adding meetup dates to a calender is quite good. Finding WLUG should also be fairly easy now when searching for "linux" within a 50 mile radius of Boston:
I've noticed that some search strings will show LUGs with overlapping interests but not WLUG. I think adding more words like "FOSS", "Android", "Libre", "Open Source", "Ubuntu", "Fedora", "OpenSUSE", "Arch Linux", "Unix", etc, to the related topics and/or What We're About section should improve this.
I've tried setting up a community over Slack but I think the steps need to join was what made it too intrusive for new people -- take joining the Rust language Slack server for example:
- Send an invite link to your email
- Register with a name and password
- Be greeted with prompts about whether to send notifications
- Open the #general channel
And this has to be repeated for joining every community that has their own Slack server, or at least this has been my experience so far. I think Slack has cemented itself as more of a means for teams to collaborate on a project, not so much for casual users who want to jump right into a new chat.
Matrix only needs to register a username and password (email is optional) on the server you're on, and once that's done you can join any number of channels on that server. This is much closer to the UX of IRC, and it's still superior in some ways because there's no fiddling with choosing a specific authentication method like SASL and/or authenticating with nickserv
I think in general Matrix has more mindshare amongst Linux users as a modern alternative to IRC, which I think is worth considering when comparing frequency of posts on Reddit:
-Josh
On Sat, 2020-01-11 at 22:59 -0500, Tim Keller via WLUG wrote:
This morning I went out and created a meetup group for WLUG:
https://www.meetup.com/Worcester-Linux-Users-Group and paid for six months. Feel free to go and join up if you'd like.
The matrix stuff is cool, I cut my teeth on IRC so I'm always partial to the old school but I also understand that eventually we'll want a slack channel as well maybe.
Tim.
We also have an IRC channel:
http://www.wlug.org/participate.html
Internet Relay Chat
Join the realtime chat on our IRC channel.
Connect your IRC client to irc.freenode.net
Join the #wlug-ma channel or join directly from this link: irc://irc.freenode.net/#wlug-ma.
See more information about Freenode and join the chat from your web browser
but maybe IRC is too old school--no one chats on it anymore.
On Fri, Jan 10, 2020 at 04:03:14PM -0500, Joshua Stone via WLUG wrote:
> Hey all,
>
> Last night's meeting was excellent, and I'd like say thanks again to
> Tim for giving me a ride home!
>
> Last night's discussion gave me ideas of ways we could improve general
> activity, increase attendence, and improve outreach efforts. Hosting a
> meetup.com group would be certainly improve discoverability, and
> getting in touch with WPI's computer science group would be great too.
>
> I think what a lot communities are doing nowadays is having a text chat
> format for users who want to communicate more easily over the internet,
> especially with mobile devices. As an example, there are Discord
> servers for Fedora, Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, etc, and they have room sizes
> generally in the hundreds or even well over a thousand. Even before
> Discord they'd use IRC for providing support, posting updates, etc.
>
> Having a text chat of our own would certainly help improve
> participation -- I think Matrix would be a good option here because it
> has many nice features and has a fairly polished user experience:
>
> - Numerous clients available on desktop, mobile, and web (
> https://matrix.org/clients/
> - Persistent chat history
> - Link previews
> - Various bots to choose from for adding functionality (
> https://matrix.org/docs/projects/bots/
> - User moderation
> - Server federation
> - Self-hosting available, both client and server are completely FOSS
> - File sharing
> - Voice/video calls
>
>
> I have a screenshot if anyone wants to see what a Matrix chat room
> would look like:
>
> https://i.imgur.com/aVILcWB.png
>
> Or you can join the room I made:
>
> https://matrix.to/#/!EiTljkvagZDFKfQfFu:matrix.org?via=matrix.org
>
> Alteratively, if you have a Matrix client already:
>
> #wlug:matrix.org
>
>
>
> Any thoughts?
>
>
> -Josh
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