Place to chat about Web Components standardization

[annevk]

Heya,

Some of us decided to create a place on Matrix where we can "hang out" and chat about Web Components standardization: https://matrix.to/#/#web-components:matrix.org. (If you'd like more context around Matrix see https://whatwg.org/chat for some links, it's essentially a more modern version of IRC.)

It's not particularly active right now, but it could be with your help. 😊 And we can use it during meetings for coordination.

Hope to see you there!

[Westbrook]

Interesting! We’ve been organizing the Web Components Community Group via this Slack for the last year or so and it’s been going pretty well. It’ll be cool to see even more discussion around web components at large!!

EDIT: we later moved to Discord... where we've been having quite a time for the last year or two! 😉

[knowler]

I’ve noticed a number of folks (including implementers) who might have valuable contributions to the community group unable to participate due to uneasiness around using Discord. I’m wondering if it would be worth evaluating using the above mentioned Matrix room or even GitHub Discussions instead for discussions that might benefit from broader engagement. Discord might still be valuable from a support or web components “evangelism” perspective, but it seems like when it comes to community group activities we should be reducing as many barriers as possible to allow those interested to participate.

[EisenbergEffect]

Well, Matrix has its own issues. A number of groups have started there and then abandoned that for Discord. So, it probably just depends on who you ask which one is better/worse.

[justinfagnani]

I'm one of the people who went looking for a home for WCCG discussions and set up the WCCG Discord, and it was a honestly very frustrating experience. Every option had serious issues¹.

At the time, there was a flood of web and open source projects moving to Discord. One of our goals was to be convenient to the largest number of community members, and because so many of them already used Discord for dev projects, it was very valuable to be a click away from joining and an icon in their server list.

But I think there are two things to consider with this specific issue:

1. The implementors and standards participants and not exactly the same audience and the WCCG audience. WCCG can be on Discord while the W3C group uses Matrix.
2. I've seen some hints of projects moving some things off of Discord due to threading and public search indexing. GitHub Discussions is better on those axes, but I've personally notice the volume of discussions to be lower, and the time to reply be longer, there for whatever reasons. Some people really love the immediacy of chat and the low barrier of not having to create a topic for every new thought.

Footnotes

1. A lot of the UX problems with Matrix had to do with rooms, thread, and discovery. Those could have been improved on in the last couple of years, so it'd be great to look at it again. ↩