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Carl

Howdy Fediverse - I'm looking for some folks I can discuss running an online community using instead of or and what their experiences have been. Is anyone around willing to share their experiences so I can help improve the on community experience?

@edolnx I expect the company behind zulip would be happy to provide free hosting for you, as they do for a bunch of other open source projects (or you could self host, for which there is good documentation). I think it's best to try it that way, especially if you are not in any project that already uses the software. Also, it's great software... takes long to load, but very snappy once on normal usage, has amazing functionality (most visibly channels and topics), easily driven by keyboard, and has flexible permissions.

@tshepang I'm not currently scared with the prospect of hosting it, but it's more trying to understand the admin/moderation tooling around it. If you have any pointers for good example communities you're part of using it, I'd love to take a peek at them (even if just as a user)

@edolnx I not been admin on it, but it sounds solid from what I sense. Was also recently impressed that admins cannot view messages in channels where they are not members. This allows users who have permissions to create channels to have private spaces inside the same instance.

@edolnx @tshepang chat.zulip.org (the org used for developing the software) is an obvious option, and very active

@edolnx The @DB_VST uses it for internal comms, but it's very much more an organizational "work" instance than an open social community. Nonetheless, we're a community oriented volunteer group. Maybe our experiences can help?

(I'm not involved in hosting and maintaining the Zulip; I can answer as a regular user, but one of the admins could probably answer more pointed questions.)

@laogeodritt That's good to know! I've run several communities with slack and it has lots of holes. Discord is better, but it's inextricably tied to gaming so it's usually blocked at corporate firewalls which makes it hard for folks to collaborate at work. That's why I was looking at Zulip. The hosting part doesn't scare me (yet) but it was more the admin/moderation side that I'm much more interested in hearing about, so any contacts for that within VST would be great

@edolnx @laogeodritt Ask away, we'll answer what we can.

@DB_VST My understanding is that the VST community is a bit less "open" (and I don't mean that as a negative, just more tightly controlled and smaller than a "click to sign up"), but I'm curious to hear your thoughts on the moderation tools - both automated and manual. What you like and what you don't like about the platform would also be good to know. I'm still in early evaluation stages, so the amount I don't know dwarfs my ability to ask really intelligent questions 😳

@edolnx On moderation tools, there's what you want, mods (or admins) can delete messages, users can delete their own messages (and there is a timer you can set on how long a user can edit or delete a message), admins/mods can ban users, individual users can mute other users. From the automation side, there is an absolute mountain of settings (too many to list) but you can define which rolls have access to which things. As for "link to signup" you can do that and specify how long it works for.

@DB_VST @edolnx Also it's very easy to write bots that use the zulip API to do more specialized tasks/integrations like automodding or notifications (I saw this thread because it got auto posted in our zulip).

The thread model is good for technical communities because each question/idea can have a thread, unlike slack/discord where it gets lost in a busy channel. You can make the history public read-only without login.

I suggest looking at the Rust zulip to get an idea. rust-lang.zulipchat.com

ZulipPublic view of rust-lang | Zulip team chatBrowse the publicly accessible channels in rust-lang without logging in.

@edolnx are you thinking of self-hosting on a #RISCV machine? no better way to shake out a platform than to put your primary comms tool on that platform. (also: somewhat risky)

@w8emv Indeed that is what I was thinking. It's probably going to have to move later, but it can start on a BPI-F3

@edolnx

I remember debugging all sorts of issues that only showed up with a net server that got busy or that I tried to push to the edge of its limits. So even if the BPI-F3 isn't enough in the long run, trying to get enough traffic through it that you discover something that needs to be looked into is definitely worth it.

Thinking a Usenet server got the load average way up without the thing tipping over, the key was a crontab of '* * * * *' to run the news queue.

@edolnx I've never moderated an active Zulip community, but I've both participated in several active ones and sysadminned a Zulip server with a bunch of traffic (largely mirrored). I'm a big fan of it, and can try answering questions