Some TSMN-related projects and many of its members use group chats on Matrix, Discord, probably Telegram, and more.
If you are the admin of one of these groups (or you are in touch with the admins), would you be interested in receiving notifications about specific TSMN new posts? For instance, all new posts in the category “MyProject” and/or all posts tagged “OurBelovedTopic”, etc.
Oh yeah! I had offered to share topics/info in the Beyond Faircamp every once and a while, but the topics are coming thick and fast here! Might be an idea, if it wasn’t spamming too much especially, just maybe a digest or particular category
matrix in general works reasonably well as a chat protocol. another one i see being used (and considered trustworthy by those who can live with the worse ux) is xmpp/jabber. once it was backed by google. now it’s not even on the list.
i’ve developed matrix bots and set up matrix/telegram bridges; i’ve observed how most add-ons for bridging between matrix and another platform have proven unreliable and not necessarily well-maintained. (though that matrix/telegram bridge did work out in the end, configuring it was not well documented and turned out like a small adventure.)
i was of course hoping for a pleasant surprise by the developers of the plugin referenced in this thread – however it seems their priorities are simply elsewhere: i assume a slack/discourse combination is common among public-facing businesslike projects, e.g. a company chat + support forum combo.
i must discourage anyone from enabling the continued usage of discord and especially telegram, popular as they might be – except perhaps for helping people to migrate towards ethical and reasonably secure alternatives.
telegram in particular can be assumed to be a sensory organ of a certain warmongering authoritarian regime that happens to be quite “opinionated” on people’s personal lives as well as on cultural matters.
i’m thinking that providing a basic level of notifications to a chatroom on any platform may also be achievable by the more generic and potentially more reliable approach of exporting rss feeds – periodic digests seem to me a good balance as well.
in which case however the support burden for feeding the rss into the chat would fall largely on the maintainers of said chat - but with rss being the more non-specific technology, said support burden may amount to considerably less.
this forum could then offer a discussion hub associated with those channels, enabling more structured conversations – same as it started with “beyond faircamp”. i’d call that a win-win situation, where the forum-based community benefits and so does the chat-based community, while the platform capitalists are left out entirely.
i haven’t tried it. but at least it’s more recently updated than this other one:
something this forum could theoretically offer: running the matrix-rss-bridge on the server’s vps. or maybe on a sibling machine for better isolation.
chat hosts would then only need to create a bot account representing their community, provide the bridge admin with the keys to the bot, and invite the bot into their channel. then, the channel could receive forum digests (or almost-real-time notifications, depending on preferences.)
other community-facilitating bridges, such as between matrix and owncast chats, are also of interest.
Based on your feedback, we could try this plugin with Matrix, and based on our findings, and if there interest from Projects or other neighbor communities, we could consider other channels.
@keef as the creator of a Matrix room very aligned with TSMN, what do you think?
Why not try the official plugin maintained by the Discourse team?
Well, basically, scope. I already tried to outline some differences between the two approaches:
“discourse (push) matrix (and possibly others)”
“matrix (pull) rss from discourse (and possibly others)”
Idk how well I managed to delineate them but I did try to point out some of the basis for my suggestions and intuitions in my previous post.
Fact is, only you – and now also @defaultmediatransmitter – have the most accurate view of what would accomplish the most effect with the least technical effort.
So if your preference is to run integrations that are sourced from the Discourse ecosystem and plug directly into the forum – as opposed to other standalone containers that only talk to the forum software via Web protocols such as RSS – that’s completely valid
Sorry only just noticed this.. I don’t quite see the end result of this. I don’t want a lot of automated posts hitting the Beyond Faircamp channel, as that’s not what it’s for - feels like the volume here would just overload that space.
As someone running a Matrix room, how do you feel about the idea of weekly or biweekly updates (filtered by relevance to room topic) to give people things to discuss?
Not necessarily in Beyond Faircamp – more like in relation to the chatroom format in general.
I am honestly not sure - at the moment it feels like a solution looking for a problem - but then I only have the one Matrix room and I think we can pull stuff in there manually if we feel the need to chat about it - or most of the members are on here anyway, or can participate via federation right here as sknob seems to be doing.
It sounds like a nice idea but it’s not something I currently have a need for. So maybe not worth spending a lot of time on, unless you find someone who does have such a need?
(push)
(pull)