Creating an IRC Team/Workgroup

Argh, my bad, I meant Mozilla team. Meaning the blog post about MozNet as a whole shutting down.

Rust team’s post was well handled. Although nonetheless a more concrete path forward, which is what in my opinion this thread is trying to construct, would’ve been useful.

Is there a way to use Discord from IRC clients? If so, that’s great. If not, I think IRC protocol compatibility (it does not need to support all features, but basics are needed) is a hard requirement for the next chat platform.

Alternative clients are against Discord's ToS.

It isn't, just that. The issue is providing users with an IRC channel that is still moderated, etc. This, as far as I know, is not the case of the ##rust on FreeNode. Moreover, the ## namespace on FN is for unofficial channels, and I know plenty of people that treat that with immediate distrust ("Oh, where's the official one, that's what I want!") So, in it's current state, not great.

The OFTC channels (#rust, #rust-offtopic, #rust-beginners) solve the namespace issue, and could solve the moderation issue as well, paving a clear path forward, in my opinion, for OFTC to become the new standard.

I tend to disagree here, to not have a de-jure official channel on IRC, but solely a de-facto one, is to push IRC as a second-class citizen space as far as the Rust community goes. We would like, and in a sense I think we deserve, to have an official channel just like there is an official Discord, etc.

I disagree with the framing that venues that are not "official" are second class citizens. The vast majority of all community action is outside the project, that includes almost all conferences, all meetups, the second community Discord, the Freenode IRC. That's good.

The Discord is "official" in the sense that the project is using it, as much as we're using our Zulip. The community meeting there is a byproduct of being an open project and people using it. Officialness also implies that you can reach a sizable amount of the project there and have discussions about it there, which is just not true.

I'm not a huge fan of stamping things "official" just for the sake of it. "Official" comes with lifecycle management (like the pain of maybe making it unofficial again and going through all the discussion again) and the problem of proving the services worth.

I'm saying all this as a person that has kept Rust community on IRC for long and got very burnt by it. I have a very practical resistance here.

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I don’t think alternative clients are needed. Are bots against Discord ToS? Can’t we have a bot both on Discord and on IRC for bridging?

Here's a problem: we can't have 10 venues that we use, because we can't make sure that we can all take input from there.

Phew. I don't know what to say. This is essentially "the harrassed have moved off, all good now". Quoting safer is also odd.

To be clear: In a time where there's a huge debate about maintainer burnout, harrassment and culture of the relationship between maintainers and users, arguing against the wish of a project to keep their members safe from harm is not a strategy to win. Bring strategies that keep people safe from harm. This is not negotiable.

And IRC has been a place where these things have happened and we expect the IRC community to own that instead trying to wiggle around it.

This is not a good faith argument. Our website is a primary communication channel and does not need 24/7 support. It breaks down if you ask the simple question: if you'd need to pick between an IRC channel or a website, what would a project pick?

Yes, the argument can apply and there's prioritization of efforts happening.

We can't defer responsibility for the channel (in the sense that the buck has to stop somewhere). We can also only defer it if we see tangible project gains in having it as an official venue (and, as outlined above, most people justs do fine without being that). It is super-straining for a project to keep its venues in check and in order and brings a surprising amount of overhead with it!

Given that we had huge issues to find reliable mods for irc.mozilla.org and the general issue of growing the mod team, I'll take your statement about mods with a grain of salt.

That would essentialy be boundary play. If Discord decided to interpret this as a third-party client and ban, we'd have no say.

That being said, we have good relationships with Discord and might get some things to fly, but I agree that this is a major flaw of the Discord platform.

We used to have an IRC -> Discord bridge at some point, btw. but it was an annoying maintenance burden.

This is false, and you know it: we discussed this two days ago. The freenode channel is moderated by some pretty well-known community members, including mod team members, and I hope to build up moderation there to be much better.

There's a difference between committing to the channel as a place where we can guarantee a level of conduct being upheld, and just having moderation support on the channel. The channel has more or less as much moderation support as #rust does, but that's not enough for us to commit to it.

If the moderation grows to the level at which we're comfortable with it we might officialize it again. In its current state, we cannot do this.

(Turning ##rust into an official Freenode #rust channel is something that folks may be open to; as I understand it it's not necessarily an official endorsement in the same way. At the moment we decided against it because we weren't sure if the Freenode channel was pleasant at all, but it is, so that's fine.)

#rust-offtopic

You've brought up #rust-offtopic a bunch of times. That's not been an official venue for quite a while. I don't see how it's relevant here at all.

I'll also note that despite being quite unofficial that channel has been pretty active and has grown its community.

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