There are several existing Solid community communications channels including:
What would you prefer the main communication channel of the Solid community to be?
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This forum. I’ve been bookmarking threads and posts for references with the built-in function and like how it works. I was lurking in the Glitter chat to begin with, but it just felt ill-suited to go in there with a question while everyone else was discussing something else. It doesn’t load all the time for me either (Safari 12.0.1 on macOS 10.14).
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I usually tend to prefer Reddit, but I have to admit that Discourse is quite good.
Ultimately, we should all migrate to something that’s built on Solid.
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Reddit has the advantage that other communities are available in the same “venue.” (Gitter is a nice supplement for more informal, ephemeral chats.)
Maybe turn the OP into a poll?
I think there is room for several, first I think we need to think in terms of type of communication.
I find there is a need for workflow-integrated technical discussion. For now, Github is clearly the best platform for that, but I’d love to move that to a Solid-integrated Gitlab install some time in the future. It needs issue tracking, it has to integrate with test environments, searching issues, project boards and all that kind of stuff.
Then, we also need synchronous chats, as it is important to have tight dialogs to settle problems quickly. For now, gitter is what we have, and it is OK, but not brilliant. We have chats apps on Solid, so it would be great if we could turn that into something that works for us, and also integrate that with the technical platform so it is easier to stay on top of what’s happening there.
And then, we need asynchronous discussion, for when you have longer problems that require longer answers, need to have deeper debates and so on. This forum is great for that. I just haven’t posted a lot here, because most of what I need to do is deeply technical, and so the first communication channel is where I need to spend most of my time.
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What would you prefer the main communication channel of the Solid community to be?
- Gitter
- Discourse
0 voters
Multiple channels have always been challenging especially since the demise of Usenet and the NNTP protocol, in regards to adoption and use.
One solution to the problem is exploiting the fact that Linked Data can be generated is a variety of ways (by hand or via tools) across these channels – thereby creating a progressively curated knowledge graph that manifests as a Semantic Web.
The Semantic Web in question can start life by simply saving RDF documents to a public, private (using a variety of WebACLs).
Here are some examples using our URIBurner service (which generates 5-Star Linked Data from a myriad of sources, including Discourse Forums):
- URIBurner ProxyURI for a Solid Discussion Thread about RDFization of iCalendar and vCard documents
- RDF-Turtle rendition
- JSON-LD rendition
- SPARQL DESCRIBE Query Results Doc that returns RDF-Turtle
The same can ultimately be done for Reddit.
BTW – this already works for Github as per this example document.
Related
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I think Discourse forum is a good hub, but not at the exclusion of other forms. I think around code, GitHub is ideal, and a chat forum with different channels has a place too, and for that gitter is adequate.
The issue with all of them is they are not decentralised, GitHub and gitter are owned by a corporation. Discourse is at least movable and can be self hosted.
Ideally, Solid projects will replace them all, so even if that will take time, I’d like that to be a stated aim and for this community and Inrupt to try and support anyone building these as open source projects.
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In my understanding, they all have their positions.
Gitter is for instant messages, quick and flexible. But not easy to preserve valuable information.
Discourse in contrast is topic oriented. The ideas and discussion get accumulated and evolved. Very suitable for documenting and searching. Suggest to keep it for professionals. (As Stack Exchange)
Reddit is a little similar as Discourse, but is more public-facing (Everybody has Reddit account). People can have non-tech topics over there.
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@happybeing makes a very important point that I want to acknowledge. Ultimately our key communication channels (i.e. chat, forum) should be and will all be delivered through solid-based applications. It’s going to take time to realize that, and so until we do it’s important that we use the right tooling that will help us all get there together as quickly and productively as possible.
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I agree with the folks who talking about the value of mulitple types of chats.
Gitter is great for quick off the cuff talks, questions, culture growing, etc. So I would hate for that to go away.
Personally, I think a wiki style of tool would best for documentation and such. Github “sites” and wikis are really good for this as well.
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Nothing should be exclusive. The benefit of a Semantic Web of Linked Data (wherever it originates) is that all of the data is accessible and mesh-able (rather than mash-able) courtesy of entity identification (via HTTP URIs) and entity description (via RDF sentences where HTTP URIs identify the subject, predicate, or object).
Basically, curate your Knowledge Graph via a Solid Pod by leveraging the increasing number of tools that let you do that productively (i.e., not injecting programming into the flow, on a mandatory basis).
Share your Pod (or parts of it) with a list, group, or the world by way of WebACLs.
This is what this whole thing is about i.e., yesterday’s challenges are today’s opportunities 
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I already gave my answer. Having never used any of the choices, guess I’ll not be voting.
Would suggest another option, except…
EDIT
How was I to know this was Discourse?
I think Discourse (this forum) is the best for me.
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May also be worth considering spectrum.chat as a prospect… it combines aspects of both forum and real-time chat.
Or for that matter Slack
I believe the general consensus is that Slack isn’t well suited to open source communities. One of the tangental benefits to spectrum seems to be that all communication gets saved publicly so that content is available via search engine, etc.
I only logged in in to this forum because it accepted my github account; simple and not YARL yet another registration login