Please only vote if you have contributed to PieFed in some capacity (e.g. coding, translation, reporting bugs, discussing bugs) or might in the near future!

Currently, we have two different developer chats on Zulip and Matrix. This means, that new devs will be confused about which channel to join and experienced devs have to actively look around in both channels for questions to answer. This seems like a really inefficient system, so we should at least decide on one official communication channel.

More discussion at https://piefed.social/c/piefed_meta/p/1964543/we-should-rethink-how-the-communitcation-channels-for-piefed-devs-work

Personally I find Matrix to be a pain in the ass and prefer Zulip. But it hasn't managed to attract as many users as Matrix has despite pushing it quite hard for months. Also PieFed development has started to bleed over into PieFed naturally, such as !piefed_css@piefed.social and !piefed_plugins@piefed.social. So we're in an awkward place at the moment.

Have you considered using PieFed? 🤔

If it's between Matrix and Zulip, it's Zulip, hands down. I run into way too many problems with Matrix, and public rooms usually aren't encrypted regardless.

If only Zulip supported federation... ideally on top of matrix or apub....

Alright, here are my thoughts. I voted PieFed + Zulip + Matrix, but really I think my answer can be a bit broader than that. Here are the three things I think we need and I don't think PieFed covers them fully yet:

1. Somewhat persistent store of knowledge (can be PieFed)

This would be a place where asynchronous discussions can be had or questions can be asked and answered about how to do things regarding development. See something like this exchange I had with DeckPacker as an example. It illustrates everything that this mode of communication needs and PieFed can provide:

• It was a very technical question, so it would be relevant in a focused dev community
• It wasn't time-sensitive, so the asynchronous nature of posts/comments works fine
• Future devs could have a similar question, so having it be somewhat accessible in the future works well

This currently kind of exists within codeberg issues/PRs as well as within our documentation, but someplace with a lower barrier of entry for the dev-curious to ask technical questions might be nice.

2. Realtime support and troubleshooting (mostly Matrix currently)

The needs that this channel of communication needs to meet are realtime troubleshooting and support of other piefed admins that are experimenting or having issues. I personally don't think there is going to be any real way to not have this be matrix. That is where the vast majority of the threadiverse admins and app developers already are. Also, lots of this stuff doesn't need to persist long-term, nor should it.

3. Internal, non-public discussions (currently mainly Zulip)

This channel is one where the access control is much stricter and only intended individuals can view. Currently, most of the piefed.social admins/staff and the core maintainers are active on Zulip. With Zulip making it relatively easy to private message and create private channels/topics, it has worked well for this purpose. I guess that private communities would work for this in PieFed, but it would mean that everybody that is invited needs to make a piefed.social account since private communities don't federate. In practice, that's not that different than people needing to make a zulip account I guess.

@rimu@piefed.social - I am kind of answering your MVP chat question from the other thread here:

If we wanted to dogfood as much of this as possible, then here are the features I think we would need to add into PieFed:

• Private group chats : This would be a way for admins/staff/mods to have a truly private chat internally. This would essentially enable something like a mod chat, admin chat, or whatever-else-you-want chat. I think an MVP implementation of this doesn't need to federate and only allow local users and it could still be useful. Federation would be a lot trickier due to the much less secure privacy and software incompatibilities with other Apub software.
• Public group chats : This would be a group chat that is open to any user. Think of something like sticking a chatroom link in the community sidebar that users can use to join. I honestly don't know how to make federation work here since the link would presumably be for the chatroom's home instance. Maybe something like the url-rewriting that we currently do for post links.
• Wiki Improvements: This would be a bit more of a nice to have than something for an MVP, but some love for the wiki system could help with knowledge management. I think some of the main things here are actually permissions issues. If we could do something like empower users to have wiki privileges just within a community (without making them an outright mod), that could help ease the burden on moderators and distribute wiki maintenance load.

I reckon I could make substantial progress on those in a weekend. Something basically usable.

The scary thing about contemplating going all-in on PieFed is that we'll be missing some functionality that we need - but that is also kinda the whole point of dogfooding - to highlight what's missing and drive improvements. That discomfort is to be sought and embraced.

I guess it wouldn't need to be a sudden change - whatever the result of the poll is could be used as an eventual goal to aim for rather than something we immediately implement today.

Yeah, I think we would need to do things gradually. I would be happy to mod a piefed community for development if we want to go ahead and make it, and then go from there. We can transition stuff around when we think the features are there. Open source like this is a race against burnout more than it is against time, so we don't need to rush.

Race against burnout, heh. For sure.

I think part of the reason we've been on 1.6.x for so long so I've chilled out a bit, trying to find a more sustainable pace rather than banging out new features constantly (and then associated fighting fires).

Zulip is the best

The last missing piece to make it perfect

@rimu i won't vote because i'm not contributor but I spent many time building communities around such project. i agree that matrix can be lame but the federated aspect is the killer feature. It remove the friction of having to create yet another account. That's why zulip, mattermost and other fails to gain traction. Also the fact that so many activitypub projects are already on matrix make it the place to be for people involved in multiple projects. I would keep matrix and bet on its improvement

I personally like and recommend Matrix. A significant amount of Fediverse developers are on matrix, including the Fediverse developer network.

Piefed could run their own of they wish.

Encrypted comma for private chats. Threads can be used for tracking specific issues.

There are multiple bots that can be run. RSS not is built in. Us folks doing Owncast streaming have made bots to announce when someone goes live.

Matrix is seeing significant growth in EU.

It's become quite easy to install and get set up.

There's already a good piefed presence in matrix.

Multiple clients in the works already. Commet seems like one folks really enjoy.

@rimu while I think Zulip is interesting there is a large barrier of a ton of people not using it already, at least matrix has an active userbase of fediverse developers

What does sociopathy anoint mean?

lol sorry about that. It means my phone keyboard doesn't know what I'm attempting to type and I didn't pay enough attention to it. I've editted the post. "A significant amount of Fediverse developers are on matrix".

At first I intended to only watch but then I had a thought:

• fediverse is an excercise in re-decentralization of the internet. That means we've been living in a centralized one for so long, that sometimes our thought patterns might need to be challenged

  • if "piefed only" gets chosen and piefed is down - centralized approach is a problem
  • if a refactor requires to break some things for a bit of time - centralized approach is a problem

  putting all eggs in one basket create single point of failure

Now, I do agree that I feel like there is little knowledge about threadiverse on the threadiverse itself. But does it mean everything has to move to one platform?

I feel Unix philosophy has been in general good intuition. In the scope of that post:

• Write programs that do one thing and do it well.
• Write programs to work together.

(...)

Nero burning ROM was the best burning software. Then it started getting more and more features and it deteriorated

Some time ago there was an article and discussion on fediverse about pixelfed not presenting all posts, only those that contain images. If that isn't a threat to fediverse, etc
One of popular reactions to that has been " if it did, how would it be different from mastodon then?"

So maybe what is really missing is some Zulip+/Matrix integration instead of centralization?

If centralization is a concern, then you don't need to avoid Piefed, just use a different instance.

So, all the official dev discussion ends up at piefed.team or something. This would go better if Piefed/Lemmy/NodeBB supported private federated groups, but that isn't the case yet :)

Edit: It does still have centralization vulnerability in that if there is a critical vulnerability discovered in the codebase, then it will affect both.

Zulip and Piefed.

Not sure if I'm allowed to vote. I tried to add options for bad word customisation during the code jam, but failed.

an option that seems to be surprisingly absent is discussion where the source lives, on codeberg. imo it's very useful to have persistent discussions close to the source.

while i still consider matrix to be the best option for chat on this list, primarily due to federation, it's mostly useful for ephemeral conversations. finding old messages in matrix is often a pain, knowledge isn't searchable (search engines won't see this at all), and even new joiners typically won't have "all" history. structure with threads is also still very limited due to there still being a fair number of clients without thread support.

having discussions in codeberg issues also makes it a lot easier simpler to find context when you e.g. look at a commit, find the associated PR, then see the linked issue with the discussion.

edit to add more info:

what i've also seen in various projects in the past is when more complex issues have been discussed in chat, that a summary and key elements of the discussion or even a copy of the conversation will be persisted to e.g. issues, to allow for easier discussion (real time communication can work a lot faster and more efficient when there is some back and forth) while also ensuring that the information isn't lost over time.

i voted for piefed + matrix, but in reality i'd prefer codeberg + matrix. with federation, codeberg + zulip would likely also be a good alternative.

I'm going to call an end to this poll at this point because 35 responses seems like plenty.

Here are the results:

It is surprising and gratifying how many people would be fine to just go all-in on PieFed. Bold.

I think it's fair to say that Zulip is not very popular as every scenario with Zulip in it did poorly. At the same time every scenario with Matrix in it did Ok.

These results suggest we should move the discussions formally held on Zulip over to a PieFed community and keep Matrix as-is.

We can take it as a given that codeberg will always be with us.

It is very much a forge, though, not a true discussion space. Issues only have a single thread, @mentions only work with contributors, banning is limited or non-existant(?) and so on.

We gave it a good try. I love it but we need to meet people where they are.

do mentions really only work for contributors or is it more of an issue of people not being autocompleted when typing @? i noticed earlier today that autocomplete doesn't even work for people who previously contributed, like @wjs018@piefed.social. maybe it only autocompletes for people who already commented in the issue/PR?

in terms of banning, it looks like this has been implemented 2 years ago already: https://codeberg.org/forgejo/forgejo/pulls/802

i have not found a chat I like but I like piefed so....

I think the autocomplete only works for certain users - the owner and anybody already involved in the issue/PR, but I haven't thoroughly tried to test this at all.

There were attacks on codeberg when someone would title a PR in their project with triggering and tag as many users as possible. They had to limit down who can be pinged from an issue

What is Zulip and Matrix?

@rimu Signal group? #DeltaChat group?

To put it very simply, they're both chat platforms.

https://piefed.social/c/piefed_dev

!piefed_dev@piefed.social

Movim, perhaps

Altough it's already decided, i support your choice, that's a good decision.

Here is my point of view :)

I choose piefed community even tought i prefer zulip for its chat organization. It works as a git page where we can resolve topic, create topic based on discussion. It is well made and and their app do a very good job.

However, as you pointed out, it didn't attract new users for many reasons as being in another chat, create new account (while having so many accounts elsewhere)...

I think we can make piefed closer to zulip. Piefed already have the most important feature of zulip :

• moving post to the correct category.

Maybe we are missing two things ?

• subcategories ? for that we have flair. We can turn some flair into tabs. A dropmenu where you can chose the flair ?
• moving comments on a new post or categorize comment by topic ? (Maybe it is only revalant on live discussion)

Yes I'm sure this will inspire many improvements.

Something that occurred to me is - currently we have a bell to get notifications about new posts in a community but perhaps we need a bell for flair in a community. For people who are interested in Translation but not all other developer discussion.

Oh nice idea, it will fit nicely my fediverse community ! We can play a lot with flairs :3

We can use them to hide content, to categorize content, we could add a related hashtag, make a search with include, exclude...

mastodon's hashtag and piefed's flair are alike.
On mastodon, you can create a timeline where you can mix username, hashtags, so maybe the next feed feature would include some hashtag ? :)

The bell notification is a very good idea, i would like to expand it to hashtag. 😋

@rimu@piefed.social

Maybe the list is overhelming but the bell notification for flair is already great idea.

Since several months, I stopped suggesting new ideas on codenberg since there is already lot things to do. It will also add more API and the dev team is small. But yeah we can play with flairs. :)

This sounds sensible to me.

I've been kind of hoping for pretty much precisely this, already.
At least I am using Zulip only for chatting about PieFed, and that means I am not really using it as much as a chat as a kind of a web forum. In the way I use Zulip, it is basically a clone of PieFed.

The only feature PieFed is missing is refreshing the screen when new comments appear. But that's a feature that doesn't have to stay missing forever!

software incompatibilities with other Apub software.

You can just make it federate encrypted data. At least for first only PieFed would be able decrypt the private messages, but eventually at least mBin would join for sure. Safe private messaging would be a very useful feature in any case!

Having to create an account in a specific instance is too much asked, IMO. But having to create an account on some instance supporting a specific feature does feel reasonable, at least to me.

Yes. UI incorporation may be the thing here if anything. And to make sure Piefed doesn't bug out for someone if a flair being followed is removed by a community lol

There's a new comment filter

It's still quite active and a better place to follow development discussions compared to Matrix.

If anything, I would rather close the Matrix to encourage people to join the Zulip.

Zulip can be used as a tab in the browser, the cost to join is quite low.

Also, from a purely philosophical perspective, keeping Matrix instead of Zulip just because there are more people on Matrix over Zulip seems antithetical to Piefed itself: following that logic, we should just use Lemmy as there are more people there and it's the established platform.

On the other hand, most of the people involved on Piefed probably think that Piefed is a better software than Lemmy, and that Lemmy users should switch to it. By that logic, using Zulip rather than Matrix makes sense.

Last point: if we wanted to meet people where most of them are, we should open a subreddit and a Discord. Codeberg isn't federated, that doesn't seem to be an issue to use it for Fediverse project.

I hope this comment doesn't come up as too critical, it's just that I was traveling for a few days and it's a bit surprising to see such an important change decided over 48 hours.

I think it’s fair to say that Zulip is not very popular as every scenario with Zulip in it did poorly. At the same time every scenario with Matrix in it did Ok.

Isn't Piefed + Zulip 20% when Piefed + Matrix is 22%?

But even that is visible only if I press ^R, right?

finding old messages in matrix is often a pain, knowledge isn’t searchable (search engines won’t see this at all), and even new joiners typically won’t have “all” history. structure with threads is also still very limited due to there still being a fair number of clients without thread support.

All of these issues are solved on Zulip

I'm not sure what you mean with pressing ^R, the Piefed filter is just "Active"

It's open to interpretation, a bit.

There is clearly strong support for using PieFed. Matrix is only ahead of Zulip by 1 vote or so, which isn't a strong mandate either way.

No matter what filter I have, nothing refreshes unless I manually refresh the page in my browser, right?

On my side the page refreshes if I change the filter

remind me when it's federated

Codeberg isn't federated still we use it for the code.

A more featured solution > an incomplete federated solution

Also, aren't you guys using Discord for LW administration?

So will Zulip stay open?