Creation of an official Discord server for the Node.js project

[ovflowd]

Discord is a massive hub for collaboration, communication, and projects to reach their audiences.

It's becoming trendy for massive open-source projects and tech companies to have Discord Servers (ie, Cloudflare, Sentry, GitHub Education, etc.)

The upcoming Ambassador Program gives us even more reason for allowing users to interact with Node.js ambassadors and take a closer part of the community.

The goals of such a Discord server are simple:

• Yet another space for sharing announcements (mirror of RSS feeds and other sort of announcements)
• A space for Node.js enthusiasts to talk and discuss together
  • GitHub Discussions never worked out, and usually, we see Node.js technical discussions happening in places such as Twitter/X, Stackoverflow, and others, which happen not to be the most ideal form of asynchronous communication
• Although we have a Slack instance (community governed), rarely anyone joins or communicates there (the same with the IRC server)
  • With the Discord server, we could officially shut down both our IRC nodes, which have been moderated/managed by a single person (@ljharb), and the same applies to the Slack instance.
  • It also allows the OpenJS Foundation Slack to focus on OpenJS-related discussions and communication for existing Collaborators (more internal conversation rather than community-facing)
• The appeal for users to use Discord is way higher, due to:
  • One account for all your Discord Servers
  • Way better chatting, communication, and sharing features
  • Numerous integrations that could leverage our experience and collaboration with our Community
  • Way better Moderation tools
• With the Discord server, we could easily have channels that vary from:
  • Feature Feedbacks
  • Support Threads (which could allow Node.js developers to help each other and quickly find existing/prior questions)
  • Run Community Surveys/Polls with ease and way better granularity and reach (since many people don't use X/Twitter anymore)
  • Host streams from Node.js Collaborators / Ambassadors
• The instance could be moderated by the Moderation Team + Volunteers and managed by the TSC + trusted volunteers

Running a Discord server could be better for our community and our ability to reach the outer layers of our community.

[tniessen]

I think it might be beneficial to direct users to ask their questions on Discord instead (Not a replacement, but a "hey, we also have Discord, you can ask questions there, any they might gain more traction"). This could help common issues gain more visibility and traction. Would this be acceptable?

An upside of using GitHub is that org members can ping collaborators or teams when it seems appropriate, and we can also get folks from libuv and V8 involved rather easily. Some of the most knowledgeable contributors almost exclusively interact through GitHub, so directing users away from GitHub might be directing users away from those.

[RedYetiDev]

FWIW I was specifically referring to GitHub Discussions

[tniessen]

My response also applies to GitHub Discussions :)

[ovflowd]

Some of the most knowledgeable contributors almost exclusively interact through GitHub, so directing users away from GitHub might be directing users away from those.

But I assume that Discussions was used for general chat. I assume help requests can still be directed to node/help and feature requests/bugs to node/node

So I assume, it would still make sense to disable Discussions, maybe? IDK :shrug: I'm fine either ways, but I'm fond of reducing the number of parallel platforms we have for people to write something. And if GitHub Discussions are mostly used for general discussions, Discord is an ideal place... I know there's a tradeoff of "but it's all on GitHub, no extra account needed", and I'd say yeah. I think in the end it boils down to, "do we really want to have GitHub Discussions?" has anything important happened there for the last X period of time?

[mhdawson]

From the discussion so far, my understanding was that the Discord effort was around providing support for those that already use Discord as their communication channel. I don't think we should anything that would require Node.js collaborators to join Discord in order to be involved in day-to-day work of the project.

I guess I'm just agreeing with what @tniessen said in part. For any discussion where we want project collaborators to be involved, we should not push those discussions to Discord.

[ovflowd]

From the discussion so far, my understanding was that the Discord effort was around providing support for those that already use Discord as their communication channel. I don't think we should anything that would require Node.js collaborators to join Discord in order to be involved in day-to-day work of the project.

I guess I'm just agreeing with what @tniessen said in part. For any discussion where we want project collaborators to be involved, we should not push those discussions to Discord.

That is a correct assessment. My point was unrelated (somewhat) and more an open question: Do we need GitHub discussions? Are we using them? Do they serve for some specific purpose?

And no, we won't require collaborators to join Discord although they are more than welcome and invited to join :)