On Sat, 15 May 2021 at 16:58, Senthil Kumaran <senthil@python.org> wrote:
I see lots of vague complaining and no concrete argument.
Really? I don't see that way. So far, I see that few others find settling upon chat solution will be useful for core-dev too.
I see a general interest in *having* some sort of community chat, but no real plan on how to get a critical mass of people on a chat system. Specifically, we tried Zulip and it failed, in the sense that basically no-one uses it.
So let's start by working out *why* it failed. I don't see any point in having a vote, which comes up with the conclusion that (say) people like Discord, if we then set that up and there's no-one on there. If we were to ask the question, why did people stop logging into Zulip as part of their daily sign-in routine (or why did they never even start doing that), what would the answers be? Mine would be simply "because no-one was there". More specifically, even if people were there, there were no conversations going on.
Yes, it's a circular argument, unless people use a system no-one will use it. I get that. But how do we break that cycle?
Explicitly making it more of a social community (while still allowing that we're all technical so casual technical questions still count as social ;-)) might make a difference. As might a deliberate effort to keep people engaged. But just choosing a new tool and hoping people like it enough for the community to "just happen" seems destined to fail.
Paul