this post was submitted on 08 Apr 2026
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We should rethink how the communitcation channels for piefed devs work (piefed.social)
submitted 2 days ago by DeckPacker@piefed.social to c/piefed_meta@piefed.social
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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.

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[–] wjs018@crust.piefed.social 10 points 2 days ago (2 children)

A development focused community isn't a bad idea, really. rimu has mentioned in the past that we need to dogfood our own platform more. We have some specific ones already:

But, having a catch-all everything else might be useful. The closest thing we have to this currently is the codeberg repo. There is lots of info to be found in codeberg issues and PR's and I find myself linking those quite often in matrix discussions. However, it isn't something that casual users usually know how to navigate or search.

The different chat platform options are there mainly to help meet people where they are. Lots of the fediverse uses matrix, so many people only really reach out to us on there. We made a zulip instance to help address some of the shortcomings of the matrix chatroom since Zulip allows for topic-based organization in a kind of hybrid between a chatroom and a forum. However, the number of people using zulip is far smaller than matrix.

[–] Skavau@piefed.social 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

All I can say here is: Come on Fluxer. Do something.

[–] DeckPacker@piefed.social 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I think, that the vast majority of pieced developers is actively using piefed (or some piefed-compatible software) though, because otherwise, how would you even think of contributing to a project like that? Is not breaking some peoples habits really worth all the negative aspects of realtime chat platforms like Zulip or Matrix? I think there would be some huge upsides, if we explicitly told people on the codeberg page to post their questions to our forum instead of asking it on matrix/zulip.

[–] wjs018@crust.piefed.social 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Like skavau mentioned elsewhere, the realtime chatrooms do serve a useful purpose. It is more freeflowing and responsive. So, it's nice to do things like realtime debugging or issue resolution (a lot of other piefed admins are there to provide expertise). Also, we have gone there in the past to brainstorm different feature ideas or ways to solve an issue, just to kind of get a temperature check from some power users there.

[–] rimu@piefed.social 1 points 2 days ago

At the moment the chat features of PieFed are quite neglected and minimal, because we have Zulip and Matrix. If we were PieFed-exclusive then there is a strong incentive to improve that part of PieFed.

What is the MVP chat experience that PieFed needs to provide before we could start to dogfood it? Group chats?

[–] rimu@piefed.social 4 points 2 days ago

If you have a stake in this, please vote in the poll at https://piefed.social/c/piefed_meta/p/1965370/which-platform-s-should-we-use-for-discussing-piefed-development

PieFed contributors only, please. Not just developers, anyone who wants to see what developers are up to can vote too.

[–] hendrik@palaver.p3x.de 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

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.)

[–] DeckPacker@piefed.social 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

What's wrong with a simple piefed community?

[–] Skavau@piefed.social 3 points 2 days ago

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.

[–] poVoq@slrpnk.net 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Maybe a Loomio instance linked to the chat would be best?

[–] rimu@piefed.social 1 points 2 days ago

I love Loomio but I'd love PieFed even more if it had some of Loomio's features...

[–] Sibbo@sopuli.xyz -1 points 2 days ago (3 children)

I think the modern way of handling support for open source software is discourse.

[–] DeckPacker@piefed.social 6 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Yeah, I've seen some projects use that, but I see no reason to, considering it's not FOSS and piefed is really well suited for this exact purpose.

[–] julian@activitypub.space 4 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

> @sibbo@sopuli.xyz said: > > I think the modern way of handling support for open source software is discourse.

I'm also going to go out on a limb and say that this seems to be the case because Jeff Atwood put his name behind Discourse. He's a big name (he's also an outspoken blogger who rubs some people the wrong way, but I digress...) Lots of open-source projects just happen to find Discourse first instead of other good forums like NodeBB and Flarum.

To each their own.

[–] julian@activitypub.space 3 points 2 days ago

Personally, if you're going to pick a forum, I would recommend NodeBB

(caveat; I work on NodeBB)

It federates well with Piefed out of the box (Discourse federation is lagging well behind), has private forums and real-time chat. Robust plugin system, themes, PWA, open API for whatever functionality you want to build :)

However, if we're splitting hairs, I agree with @deckpacker@piefed.social in that you might as well just use Piefed directly. I am a big fan of dog fooding.

But if @rimu@piefed.social prefers the forum approach, I am here to help.