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cncf / foundation

☁️♮🏛 This repo contains several documents related to the operation of the CNCF. File non-technical issues related to CNCF here.
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[Interest Check] Matrix / OSS Slack alternatives support #667

Closed conor-naranjo closed 10 months ago

conor-naranjo commented 10 months ago

Centralizing CNCF communication on a proprietary app like Slack could potentially serve as a barrier to entry for contributors/people interested in CNCF projects. It also could potentially harm long-term information discoverability of discussions that occur around projects.

Matrix is an open protocol supporting all forms of real-time communication allowing for BYO-client. At a minimum, providing bridge-support [0] to the CNCF Slack will allow contributors who would like to use open tools to do so.

Longer-term, there is also good support for video conferencing and other real-time communication channels within the Matrix ecosystem, such as support for Jitsi and Element Call [1] to provide alternatives to Zoom.

[0] https://matrix.org/ecosystem/bridges/slack/
[1] https://github.com/vector-im/element-call

caniszczyk commented 10 months ago

We have 100K+ folks in the CNCF Slack and 200K+ in the Kubernetes slack.

It hasn't been a barrier of entry in my opinion. I love Matrix/Element but I am not convinced it can scale to meet our needs.

We generally push projects to keep all relevant documentation in GitHub / GitHub Discussions etc

caniszczyk commented 10 months ago

Also FYI CNCF projects aren't forced to use Slack, we have projects that use Discord or nothing.

felixfontein commented 3 months ago

I only very grudgingly joined the CNCF Slack when I was offered to become a co-maintainer of SOPS last year. I didn't join it before since I really dislike walled gardens such as Slack. To me, using Slack (or Discord) is a reason to not contribute to an open source project.

Having a Matrix bridge would be really useful IMO, this would allow contributors and interested parties to chose whether they want to use Slack or Matrix to communicate with others on a project. For me this would have meant joining discussions there much earlier, and also now it would make it easier for me to participate in discussions. (Moving to Matrix is not really an option since the other maintainers seem to prefer Slack.)