discuss/past

discuss (archive) exists to collect previous notes and decisions from the main discuss page.

Brainstorming

random channel for informal

The naming of #indieweb-chat was largely an accident/convenience (not an agreed decision, majority was actually against!) back from the days of when we had #indiewebcamp and #indiechat, and switched everything to be #indieweb-* prefixed.

It was important for the context/culture of the time for indiechat to not be logged or provide any lengthy history.

Informal (sometimes offtopic) chatter is helpful for friendlier community building.

When we connected up Discord, the only option was to disable all history in the channel, which is unfriendly to newcomers, and a papercut (at best) inconvenience even to existing community members using Discord.

Use-case for "random":

We need a channel that:

allows people to have an environment where they can chat (important for community building),
has at least some history so the context of discussions are preserved, and;
is not confusing to newcomers.

#indieweb-random is proposed for this, as a new channel, without having to figure out "what to do with #indieweb-chat" since many folks are already familiar with the Slack default #random channel.

This solves the declared problem sooner without having to figure out what to do with legacy usage.

Additional details:

indieweb-random is NOT available via the chat.indieweb.org web UI
indieweb-random is NOT logged in our web-based chat archives
indieweb-random is bridged to Slack and Discord, so history will be visible in both
it is ok to quote from random even though it is not publicly archived (different from existing "-chat", and any offtopic/OTR proposal)

Opinions?

+1 Tantek Çelik: (proposer)
+1 capjamesg
+1 Aaron Parecki
+1 pcarrier.com
+0 gRegor Morrill not opposed, but I do think this effectively means we would need to close indieweb-chat in the near future (which could also be ok!), because if we want to have unified discussions anyone across Slack, Discord, and IRC can access, only this new channel (with its history preserved in Discord/Slack), allows that.
+1/0/-1 Add yourself here… (see this for more details) and optionally a comment if you wish

Resolution

The #indieweb-random channel was added on 2024-05-24.