So currently, we have two different closed-off developer chats on Zulip and Matrix.
This means, that new devs will be confused about which channel to join and experienced devs have to actively look around in both channels for questions to answer.
This seems like a really inefficient system, so we should at least decide on one official communication channel.
The other issue with this is the closed-off nature of these real-time chat applications. Shure, anyone can join, but answers to technical questions will inevitably get burried in unstructured long chatlogs, which no new develloper will read through. That will lead to a lot of questions being asked, that were already answered previously.
If we abandoned these channels in favor of one unified piefed community (like piefed-devellopment@piefed.social) or something, we could build a good knowledge base of answered questions, that are easy to search through and look around in and will also get indexed by search engines. This will make it easier and easier for new developers to join over time, as they will be able to look through an increasingly extensive knowledge base if they have any questions and also easily find the people, that are willing to help them.
Funnily enough, Rimou has already talked about the advantages of a forum-like communication channel for open source devellopers, so i think it's time for us to apply this to our own project.
I think I know the solution. Retrofit PieFed with live group chat channels alike Discord text channels(?) (done with ActivityPub of course). Make the Wiki pages federate. And then eat our own dogfood.
I think that'd be a good long term goal. Unfortunately it's a lot of work. I don't think group (live) chat is specified in AP. We probably want encryption and that's a hassle. And there's some hurdles in implementing Wiki federation as well. (And we do like 5 bazillion other things in PieFed so I'm not sure about the prioritization of something like this.)
What's wrong with a simple piefed community?
Having back and forth chat on a bunch of issues in Matrix or Zulip has been very useful. It's just a different format than the Reddit/forum-esque experience of here.