Though the decision has been made already, I would like to inform that Matrix has picked up its momentum recently.
On Matrix this should not be an issue if you set up as many official rooms as necessary. Basically Mozilla has followed this route recently, and it is sure Mozilla offers the real service too.
Also Matrix shares the nature with Storj in the sense that the rooms are decentralized and end-to-end encryption is available for each room. So it is possible to create rooms such as:
#sno-category:storj.io
#parent-cat:storj.io
#engineer-amas:storj.io
#category-announce:storj.io
and you can join them from any server on which you have an account (called homeserver). There is no point of failures here.
Supporting other platforms will be an overhead for support staff. All necessary support is already provided via Zendesk and forum. You can certainly make a suggestion here if you want other categories created in the forum.
#storj:matrix.org seems to be relatively quiet but not dead, so anyone interested in chatting about Storj / Tardigrade stuff over the decentralized and E2EE protocol can join the room anyway.
We have had an own instance of Rocket.Chat with exactly the same functionality. As turned out that any chat is a worst tool for purpose to support several tied products, like Storj and Tardigrade.
The forum allows you to make chat-like conversations, it’s working reactive, you even see when someone typing right now.
If you subscribed, you will get notifications right away if someone answer to your thread.
Think of threads like rooms - they working the same way, but allows to moderators and Regulars move some posts between threads to keep them organized and searchable. It’s quite difficult to do the same in any chat and thus rooms quickly become swamped with not related conversations and you forced to ask people to go to a different room with that question and so on.
I totally agree with you, and it looks like the experience has been a disaster for all of you guys…
Obviously Discourse works pretty well for Storj and Tardigrade. I do not think replacing it with another real time chat tool would do any good. I was not going to suggest that, instead I thought it might have been great if we had another channel for communication as a complement, as Mozilla has both forums and the real time chat tool, if you had enough manpower to maintain them.
The room on the Matrix network is open to everyone, and it should remain to keep working despite being unofficial.
Forum, ike this one is better for support. It is searchable. all posts in a thread follow the same topic.
However, chat allows people to discuss different things, maybe frequently changing topic in the same conversation (something that here would result in posts getting spit up into 10 different threads, losing the flow of conversation).
I like the unofficial Discord server. It would not be possible to have the types of conversations we have there on a forum, because the whole conversation would either be a megathread “off-topic” or posts would be split up into lots of threads, losing the flow of conversation.
Basically this is just a matter of your needs; if you want to ask something on which you need an organized discussion, Discourse is a rational choice. If you just want to chat some stuff that may or may not be answered, real time chat services like Discord or Matrix, which have members already, should work. They serve different needs and do not conflict at all.
Would you mind sharing the URL of the unofficial Discord server? Thanks!
It’s mostly a place for us to just hang out and discuss our interests. The off-topic channel is one of the more active ones. It’s a sign of a good community that we enjoy discussing the shared topic as well as other stuff.
