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Offical/Unofficial communities #1438

Open mweinelt opened 1 month ago

mweinelt commented 1 month ago

Introduce your stance As part of the moderation team I'm concerned about the listing of community spaces.

Describe the issue

Page links image https://nixos.org/community/

Additional context n/a

nat-418 commented 1 month ago

@pca006132 I named five comparable projects to Nix above, and found none of them link to Reddit like Nix does. Should we link to Lemmy? To XMPP? To MySpace? Why should we bother pointing people to a platform that everyone already knows has fora for virtually every conceivable topic? Do we owe very single place people chat about Nix a link? I think the official site should link to official resources. I don't understand why anyone could object to simply removing the unofficial links, unless they wanted official promotion of their preferred unofficial resource.

nat-418 commented 1 month ago

The benefit of linking to those platforms, is to help newcomers who may not want to immediately start using matrix.

@MagicRB We also provide a link to the Discourse, which is extremely user-friendly. I don't think there is any need to send users to a private, for-profit company and it's unofficial forum rather than our open, official, community-run forum.

I can tell you first hand NixOS was intimidating enough

Then let's make getting started easier by reducing the number of possible options for "community", and say "the happy path is the official fora. You can have real-time chat with Matrix or async with Discourse." Easy!

pca006132 commented 1 month ago

@nat-418 I am just responding to "The /r/nixos subreddit should likely be removed, as it is currently a major contributor to social issues in the community". I am not arguing for/against linking to unofficial resources. I just don't think removing the link is useful in fixing social issues.

MagicRB commented 1 month ago

@nat-418 Again, people do not want to use unfamiliar things, if what you were saying were true then the Discord wouldn't have so many members.

nat-418 commented 1 month ago

@MagicRB I don't think Nix is "for" people who don't want to use unfamiliar things. The Filesystem Hierarchy Standard is familiar, and Nix breaks it. Mutability everywhere is familiar, and Nix breaks it. Using one functional programming language for packaging software and configuring Linux is unfamiliar, and Nix insists on it. Nix isn't for the faint of heart. That's OK.

And also, Discourse is used by many communities, for example Neovim. It's not hard or confusing or unfamiliar. I don't think on either side of the "familiar" argument that keeping these links is required.

nat-418 commented 1 month ago

I am not arguing for/against linking to unofficial resources. I just don't think removing the link is useful in fixing social issues.

@pca006132 if we think a place is causing problems (assuming @mweinelt is right in this case) then it makes a lot of sense not to send more users to that place. Removing the link removes official recommendation.

AshleyYakeley commented 1 month ago

I named five comparable projects to Nix above, and found none of them link to Reddit like Nix does.

Haskell links to a whole bunch of external resources, including Reddit.

AshleyYakeley commented 1 month ago

I would like someone to make an argument for why the official website should promote, advertise, and seemingly endorse non-official resources.

The official website should link to the subreddit because it's a very effective way of getting help with Nix-related issues, as well as discussing Nix more broadly. It's a benefit to the community.

DieracDelta commented 1 month ago

I would like someone to make an argument for why the official website should promote, advertise, and seemingly endorse non-official resources.

I think the primary argument is that such platforms as reddit and discord do a huge amount of good for the Nix community. They're large communities full of folks able and happy to help. I've anecdotally found this to be the case in both the NixOS subreddit and discord. (Especially the discord! In particular, Nobbz is incredibly patient and kind. Without folks like him I at least wouldn't have gotten the hang of NixOS. ) Of course there will be edge cases (as happens with large communities) but the good done should not be dismissed.

As a second argument: the Nix community already has a visibility problem when it comes to fixing technical problems you might encounter when using Nix. For example, documentation is fragmented and difficult to find. Obfuscating some of the few mediums where people actually can get help worsens this issue. I personally think that a disclaimer is sufficient, and that removal would seriously hurt new user adoption.

AshleyYakeley commented 1 month ago

@mweinelt Your proposal of the three sections makes sense. It clarifies where there is,

* official moderation (Matrix, Discourse, GitHub, ?Zulip?)

* official communication (Mastodon, Twitter)

* unofficial resources (StackOverflow, Discord, Reddit, IRC, etc)

Maybe a PR for this? I think this part is uncontroversial.

garbas commented 1 month ago

At Marketing team, we strive to share all the good ideas that come from all corners of the wider Nix community and help people find their little place in intersection between their interests and Nix.

Instead of listing less resources, I would hope we would be discussing how to add more of them. But I do agree with @mweinelt that we should make it clearer what is official and what is unofficial. And that is what we should do first.

And regarding the /u/nixos reddit, as said, I hope to add more of such resources and not less.

As last, I'd like to thank everybody who chimed in and help keep the discussion reasonably civil, despite strong disagreements. Also, I'm going to close this issue since I don't think any further is going to bring anything fruitful.