We’ve been reflecting on how we can better engage with our community and make it easier for our team to stay responsive to your needs. Currently, our community is spread across multiple platforms, including GitHub, Discord, Discourse, and others. This has made it challenging to keep up with discussions and provide timely feedback.
To address this, we’re proposing to move our community discussions from Discourse to GitHub Discussions. Here’s why:
Quicker Developer Engagement: Since many of our team members are already active on GitHub, consolidating our platforms will make it easier for us to quickly engage, respond, and provide support.
Better Integration with Our Workflow: GitHub Discussions integrates directly with our repositories. This allows us to easily convert discussions into issues and transfer them to the appropriate repo, maintaining a record of the conversation and making it easier to resolve matters efficiently.
Streamlined Communication: By consolidating platforms, we can reduce fragmentation, making it easier to keep track of discussions in fewer places and enabling more productive interactions.
We’ve noticed that engagement on Discourse has been relatively flat, with most traffic coming from anonymous users (users not logged in). This doesn’t align with the growth we’ve seen in other areas of the community.
Our Plan:
Community Feedback Period: Over the next few weeks, we invite all of you to share your thoughts and feedback on this proposal. We want to ensure we’re making the best decision for the community.
Consideration Period: After gathering feedback, we will carefully review and consider all input before announcing our decision.
Thank you, and we look forward to hearing from everyone!
In general this seems fine, other than the ‘jarring’ nature of relocating.
But ironically the biggest issue see would be fragmentation, with discussions split into different repositories. (discussions for ‘firmware’, quite separate to discussions for the Android app for example).
Admittedly the communities around each one probably quite different, so having them separated makes sense. But for casual users, that are not overall focused on one area seems to mean would have to follow discussions in many different repositories.
Dont see a way (but may be missing it) a way to view discussions from many repositories in one unified interface AND keep track of read/unread, and what are new threads (discourse does that). Maybe just inexperience with their discussions.
Also where would more general discussions go. Like ‘getting started’ discussions, its often not directly related to firmware (although core to everything!), it may not specifically be about any particular client etc. If anything it might be more about a hardware recommendations for example.
Great questions. The idea would be to create a repository specific for discussions which is where these conversations would take place. Within GitHub Discussions we can create different categories for Discussions, similar to the categories we have here on Discourse. So all conversations will be in one place, but can be categorized based on topic.
What about feature requests? they seem to live as github discussions now (its a fine line if a feature request is an issue or a discussion)
… will the remain as discussions on the individual repositories, or moved to this central discussions areas? Many feature requests are kinda repo specific, but also not, many would actually need work on multiple repos to implement.
Seems devs are back to having to monitor issues within individual repos, and this separate discussions repo.
If a thread in the discussion area was to be moved to be an issue within a specific repo, would it just disappear from discussions? That seems like could be confusing.
I just joined up here, having ordered a couple Heltec units to start playing with.
I am familiar with Discourse from other communities, and find it quite useful for threaded discussions over time. While not familiar yet with GitHub Discussions, I do know that I have little use for the more diarrhea-style flow of Discord channels. That is, being able to find, read, and respond to a specific thread is extremely useful. I guess I’d be voting according to the feature set in that regard.
For what it’s worth, I’m also more interested in a decentralized internet, so piling everything up among the same few giant vendors strikes me as the wrong direction. Not everything needs to be blobbed into the likes of Microsoft/GitHub, Google, or god forbid, Facebook.
As someone who had (and still has) an issue with the RAK RTC, I posted across 3 platforms as I was told this would expose the issue best.
Consolidation is good IMHO.
GitHub seems very serious and nothing for newbies. I guess it would mean less posting of anything other than deep technical problems. This forum has for me been broader and welcoming for beginners. Would mean less sharing of build info.
Issues sometimes get converted to a discussion if there’s not enough info or we need to discuss further to actually figure out what’s going on. That would likely be the same. Sometimes the number of issues we get in the firmware repo can really stack up and we just need to get lower-priority issues with scarce info out of there but don’t want to close them.
The great thing about using GitHub Discussions as our forum, versus using discourse, is we can easily convert it to an issue and transfer it to the appropriate repo. So if you post about a problem you’re having and we recognize there’s a potential issue, without even leaving GitHub, we can get an issue open in the right place so that we can track and work that.
No, the discussions stays where it’s at. The when you convert it to an issue, it essentially creates an issue with a link to the original discussion.
While GitHub Discussions isn’t exactly like Discourse, it is more forum style and comparable to Discourse than Discord. We think it’ll be a fairly easy transition. There’s of course difference and there will be a learning curve but in terms of better engagement with the community, it’s a better option. But we want input from the community first before we do anything.
GitHub Discussions is very forum style, it’s not necessarily the same as the issues side of things. We’ll be able to have different categories for discussions much like we would here. The idea is to make it very conversational just like Discourse is, but with the added benefits of the devs being able to easily monitor it as we’re already in Github all day.
To be honest I missed the fact that this refers to a front end called “Discussions” and not GitHub itself. This was because I never heard of it. I think a link to a sample site using discussions would help people see if they want to comment.
The only problem I have for sure is that this is Microsoft and not sure that FOSS (Free and Open Source Software see e.g. https://youtu.be/ucXYWG0vqqk ) projects are in tune with that (no disrespect to Microsoft - I would say this if the site belonged to any commercial venture).
I also have no problem with paying for membership of a forum. Free in FOSS does not mean not paid for. I think some sort of fee which could be a small symbolic charitable donation at first (to any one of several good causes) for membership is important on principle. Then there can be no surprises if at some point a fee needs to be charged that goes to the site maintainers when the structure allows for such an administrative layer and the survival depends on some income. Free lunches are in my view nice but long-term bad for the soul and a systemic threat to FOSS as exhaustion and financial struggles throttle it.
The important thing is that those who do the work get to chose their tools and have support! It would be tragic if poor tools and lack of funds lead to exhaustion and folks quitting their valuable and heroic roles.
So if you need efficient GitHub linking to manage the workload, so be it.
I would however make a plea for an exit plan in case the FOSS principles are not kept. So a functioning data backup and proven ability to transfer to another forum if needed might be good. The data of the forum should be available according to FOSS principles for forking if need be. Being locked in to any provider would be sad. If the site cannot provide this then it is suspect. (Even if no site anywhere provides this… we can dream.)
You can get a pretty good idea what it would probably look like at
Its lightly used atm, so may look different once ‘scaled up’, because at the moment that discussion area is focused on the Firmware specifically.
Crichton is talking about (if I understand correctly) a more encompassing version of that, to cover discussions for anything meshtastic related, so covering other things like hardware and the client apps.
Ignore the content, that doesn’t matter. Just look at the layout of the Discussions page. It’ll be organized for the types of discussions that happen here on Discourse, we’ll create the same categories and in fact can create additional categories as well.
Github discussions is awful, terribly user unfriendly and is made for ultra geeks (too complicated). Nothing better than discourse for user friendliness, in my opinion.
This is my favorite platform I have found you all on.
I do not like discord because I know they are all about censorship and monitoring.
I don’t know about this one or github but I’m comfortable with this one, but could stand to do some research on it
I don’t know about whats best from technical standpoint & what you guys need as far as addressing issues goes (like does github have some sort of ticketing or trouble tracking system?
I 100% agree!!! This is my primary concern especially considering this topic & the uses this project can support, such as apposing centralization of power.