Do we have one yet? If not, let’s make one!
I would prefer IRC (I find it doesn’t look too off-topic when I’m at work heh), but I’m very down for either.
Let’s do this!
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Personally don’t think there is a need for one. geekhack has a IRC channel that kind of exists on its own (different group of active users), and a slack, but both were very dead. I feel one for this site would be the same.
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I’m active on the geekhack IRC, and I wouldn’t consider it dead at all. In fact, I think I interact more with the IRC channel than the actual website at this point.
You’re right about it being potentially redundant though.
@pab – Please no. The last thing we need right now is further fragmentation. Between geekhack, /r/mechanicalkeyboards, /r/mechmarket, deskthority, keychatter, keychatter slack, ctrlalt slack, /r/mechanicalkeyboards discord, several other keyboard discords, HWS Slack, etc I don’t see a point.
IMO it’s especially important to not further fragment right now (and quite possibly ever).
@brianjking IRC serves a very different purpose as it’s a live chat room versus asynchronous message board. I kind of like the live nature of IRC so I thought it would be cool to have one for specifically Keebtalk members. I understand the risk of further fragmentation though.
I think it would be fine to have down the road, but I wouldn’t create one right now personally.
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Sounds good! Let’s table this for now.
Strongly against Discord as it is non-free and centralized, but an IRC channel or Matrix channel might be good. If one isn’t going to be made, listing existing keyboard-related channels might be something worth doing in this thread.
Wait, why is Discord non-free? I’ve been able to setup servers and join without paying anything. It might not be ope source, but that’s different.
I do agree with @TelFiRE that it should be tabled for now though, at least until the userbase is built up more here.
A list of existing keyboard Discord and IRC channels would be nice though.
@stevesie, closed source is analogous to non-free. Non-free, in terms of software, is generally speaking to the freedom of the software, not its monetary price.
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Okay. I’ve never heard it called that way. It’s always been open-source, maybe free and open-source, but always the two together.
I list of common discords and IRC rooms would be pretty good but would require approval from each owner before being added to a master post.
One idea I proposed on GH a while back is to have a SSH Bulletin Board System - mirrored after vintage dial-up BBS’s.
The idea is you login, have a built in chat system, and can even play games with other people. If technically inclined even mirror the forums with this one so activity takes place at the same time.
The technical challenges are what software to use. If you go vintage you need to go source code deep because of security issues. One very popular community (Nexus) had already thrown in the towel after someone hacked/crashed their system running Major BBS.
However today you have languages like Rust and Java instead of Assembler and C which could make things more secure and scalable.
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Free software is both older than open source and guarantees more freedoms than open source does. Open source was a watered down version that came later. Although, in practice, people are often just calling the former by the latter. Anything under the GPL is free software, for example, but you might hear someone call it open source. I recommend reading the wikipedia article on free software to get a quick background on it.
I think that /r/mechanicalkeyboards Discord is pretty active - https://discordapp.com/invite/mechkeys?mode=login
Not sure if it’s official, but there’s a lot of people.
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not affiliated but def busy!
it also has a link to a lot of other discords for people to discover!
it’s official now. Sony gave the server to Nick. So Nickheller owns the server now. And I’m also a mod on there too.