I’m collecting generic feedback to determine how my project (COSMIIC - open source implantable devices, an open science hardware project) should host a community platform to connect users-to-users and users-to-support that the maintaining organization would be providing in supplement to base documentation.
I’m curious to hear your thoughts and experiences related to platforms like Discourse (this forum), Flarum (forum software), Discord, Reddit as both a user and as a maintainer/moderator. I opened this poll on LinkedIn and would love to hear your comments here or under the poll. Linkedin Poll
Summary of what I heard/learned here and in other open source projects:
rule 1: “do not build your castle in a country you do not control”, meaning the platfor/tool you choose should be either self-hosted or hosted by an organisation that you can trust and where the whole data can be ported to another instance of that platform.
rule 2: do not concentrate your community on one platform. If you want to change platform for one of your activities, your community should be able to find itself on a different one during the migration.
rule 3: do not hang out in a nazi bar.
rule 1: no slack, but mattermost or zulip could be used.
rule 2: github discussion only if you do not use github for the documentation, but github discussion may be out due to rule 1 (one can export issues and PR, but I do not know about the discussion part)
rule 3 would speak against redit I suppose
@Juliencolomb thank you for your thoughts. I agree that control over the fate of the data should be a priority, and I can see how there would be uncertain blind trust in running these types of things on services from companies like Discord or Reddit, and that dang Slack 90-day timeout.
@lizbarry yes. I’m already hosting custom sites on cosmiic.org and its sub-domains. Each web-based feature we attempt to introduce adds increasingly more “infrastructure” to maintain. That’s part of why I am looking into apps that would reduce that development/maintenance time. So I only would have to moderate, not build, maintain, and moderate a site!
[I jumped straight into creating and serving an instance of Discourse (the system running this forum) on one of my own subdomains before running into a Google Workspace mail transfer issue. Luckily, that stopped me and helped me remember I should be fielding input from those who have likely had to make the same decision.]
Thanks @Juliencolomb. Do you have a sense of how easy it is to get sponsored free-of-charge (i.e. gratis) plans for open source or non-profit organisations with Zulip, Mattermost, RocketChat and other open source Slack replacements? (assuming self-hosting is not an option)
@hpy Our academic group uses Atlassian for their Confluence and Jira services. They have an application form posted to get free services if you have an open source project. We were able to transfer our subscription from a standard paid plan at academic pricing to a free standard plan once we put our first open source materials out.
Confluence can be used to display public-facing wiki sites and Jira has various functionalities like Jira Service Management, which can be used to collect support tickets. Ultimately, we’ve decided not to use those services for hosting our documentation and decided to self-host most of our public-facing materials using open source website builders thus far. We still do maintain internal documentation in Confluence/Jira.
I have not interacted with these other services you’ve listed but will look into them for myself.
Hi! I can only chime in here on RocketChat - we ended up hosting an instance via Maadix but I did have conversations with them around licensing. Free was not offered/considered at all (and the discount was minimal).