According to the github readme, there is a Discord community group. Why don't they run their own community? According to the list of features, Sama should be a good alternative to Discord (except voice chats).
Because it raises the bar for community participation. Running their own community sounds ideal, but that assumes someone interested in testing the software out and participating in their community would be willing to create a new account on their platform first. I probably wouldn’t create an account just to participate, whereas I already have a Discord account and joining their Discord community doesn’t require too much from me. Plus, nothing stops them from still working to build a community on their platform anyway.
It rubs me the wrong way because it means staying on a smaller treadmill.
Linux supports my 9-year-old PC just fine. But once you move outside "last two stable versions of Chrome or Firefox" some websites quit working. Since I only have 16GB of RAM, some hungry apps can't run at the same time.
We've all heard it before, I don't need to say it again. "Modern" means "Pay more to run faster on a shorter treadmill, or we'll shame you"
It’s probably because you understand that “modern technologies” often means “buzzword-laden blobs of unproven hype”. They’re the words typically chosen by software developers driven by trends who think new is always better and can’t concentrate on any project for long enough to see them through. The type of developer who pursues every shiny thing and sells their souls to VCs.
Meanwhile, serious developers with a proven track record who ship and care about stability and longevity understand that boring technology is best.
Toasters have been around for a long time. So has Javascript. I suppose that I can buy a modern toaster or an antique toaster. Still, they both seem unremarkably like toasters to me. Likewise, I can run an old Javascript program or a new one. It feels like being modern isn't really all that special. I wonder if no matter how old the tradition of writing software becomes, we'll always want to associate it with modernness. Will certain software writing ever become artisanal?
It doesn't seem comparable to Zulip at all. The idea behind Zulip is all around threads ("topics" in Zulip vernacular), channels just happen to be a way to group the threads.
SAMA seems more alike to Slack, where channels is the main grouping, and threads just happen to be a thing you can create in channels.
Slack threads are a failure imo. They were introduced in Discord too, with the same failure case. The problem is that you silo off communication and make it hard to notice that anything was said at all. The exact opposite of what communication software is for.
Mattermost does it the best imo: "threads" in mattermost are just reply chains that go in the main channel, and you can open them separately too.
I 100% disagree. I love threads in Slack. In fact, we actively encourage their use in our workplace. Not everyone in every channel needs to be involved in every discussion. If someone on my dev team says, "Hey, I'm having a problem with X", one person can respond in a thread and they can have a little discussion that doesn't ping everyone else all the time. However, other people have the option of contributing to the discussion if they wish. In addition, the thread can be found in a search at a later date if someone is having a similar problem.
Sure. And then you try Zulip and realize what could actually be.
Besides Matrix's whole matrix-y-ness (lol been using it 4 years, still have E2EE problems REGULARLY), they also completely, completely fumbled threads. Sadly, Zulip has no ecosystem, and the near universal gut reaction to it's UX is "eww". All around, just a god damn travesty.
And in the Discords I am on it's a disaster too. Every time a beginner uses one it cuts the chance of getting help by a lot. You basically have to get lucky that the first person who responds will solve it, otherwise you're out of luck.
For me they are the reason I use Slack. They allow us to have a meaningful conversation and not overlook anything important and at the same time allow interested people to dive into more detailed discussions. For comparison, I use Teams for another project and this is madness - people actively avoid discussion in order not to force the other team members to spend too much time scrolling the screen, and search is abysmal. (Note I'm using these for work, maybe if it was for other types of communication I might not care.)
> and at the same time allow interested people to dive into
Discussions often start out one way and then go off to something else. People can't know ahead of time if they should dive in or not. That's one of the problems.
Threads are good for some conversations and not others.
It does keep it neater but also doesn’t include or invite others into it as easily.
I’ve seen another presentation of chat where the latest few messages are shown threaded in-line inder the message. If it’s a message I’ve clicked into before, it remembers and shows me more of the thread in line.
I think slack could do this well but would be happier if mattermost or something had it first :)
Agreed, I run a 100+ member discord server for my WoW guild and so far both threads and forums are total dumpster fires that both go unused despite us trying to make them work. Slack's approach to threads is everything I want for Discord; I enjoy talking with my clients more on their Slack workspaces than I do talking with my guild on Discord just because the experience is so dismal on Discord.
We seem to put a large amount of effort into systems to replace XMPP, I wonder if we could instead put that effort into improving XMPP and its surrounding ecosystem.
If IRC were the only option, its inflexibility would warrant a new protocol, but XMPP is in such a good position with how malleable and deliberately extensible it is. Common gripes all have XEPs, hard stuff like E2EE and Jingle have a huge headstart over greenfield projects, we've got standard compatibility featuresets of XEPs to help with fragmentation, there's a well-founded independent governance structure for the project. It just needs investment and focus to push all this stuff over the edge and get implemented/adopted.
It's hard work. It's harder than starting fresh. But a better XMPP is more valuable than the 20th custom chat app re-implementing the same features as the other 19.
I'm not knocking this project in particular, this is a more general comment about the IM ecosystem, spurred by their blog post mentioning XMPP.
> … provide an alternative solution to the wide spread XMPP messaging protocol (and to be honest — the only wide spread ‘standard’ these days).
Did they miss Matrix for some reason? The spec is at https://spec.matrix.org/latest/