Now is a good time to discuss the progress on our short-term goals. I’d particularly like to highlight the (perhaps most important) goal of moving the community’s official communication channel to Matrix from Telegram. More specifically -
- We do our best to interact with the Community only via Matrix accounts instead of Telegram accounts
- New interactions with the Community will be started using Matrix instead of Telegram and if necessary, Matrix <> Telegram bridges will be setup to facilitate Community members to continue living in Telegram e.g. new City chapter discussion groups or new Student club discussions are started as Matrix rooms
- The Foundation will highlight Matrix rooms before the Telegram group e.g. on the Website, via Social Media, during intro presentation at meetups, etc
This was something that the foundation team took up very seriously in the initial stages and the community also responded back in a positive way, many active community members started engaging only through matrix. The foundation team explicitly used telegram to post any messages.
Most of the folks (including us at the foundation) that were engaging via matrix have stopped doing so for various reasons.
For me, it was because of the multiple ( 30+) FOSS United groups (city chapter, volunteer etc.) that I am part of. It’s not feasible to set up bridges for all of these (I took some help from a few volunteers to bridge one of these groups and it took more than an hour after which we gave up trying) so I need to be active on telegram to monitor these chats, respond to queries etc. By the end of the first month, I got fed up of using matrix to send messages on the FOSS United public channel just for the sake of it, while i still have to continue using telegram.
I understand this is a very rare problem that perhaps only I (and maybe Vishal) must be facing. But I’d love to know from others why they have switched back to telegram.
As highlighted above, we have also stopped putting up the link to the FOSS United group on our official channels (the website being the most prominent), at least as the primary CTA. It’s still mentioned in the get in touch section above the footer but I doubt anyone notices that.
As a result, while we continue to make (unsuccessful) efforts of bringing people to the matrix chat, the telegram group is dying.
This would not have been concerning if there was even a small uptick in the number of people joining the community on matrix.
These are just observations, I’m not against using Matrix ( I actually find it less bloated with better UX) but I wonder if that’s the best thing for the overall growth of the community.
To quote @knadh from this retrospective blog post on IndiaFOSS 2.0, here’s why we used telegram so many years back in the first place -
Why Telegram, a non-FOSS app? To try and include as many people as possible, where the messaging technology wouldn’t be the reason to not participate.
To re-iterate, I do want to see FOSS United move over to Matrix eventually, but perhaps through a less hardcore approach. Someone might argue that people would always prefer telegram until we don’t get rid of it so it really is a chicken-egg problem.