I am an Engineering Physics graduate from IIT Guwahati, but merely not restricted to Physics itself. In the past few years, I involved in many Cybersecurity blogging and now on Open-source.
As Forem progresses, we will come up with effective ways to connect individuals in private and public contexts as appropriate, and chat contexts may come back — likely as more of a plug-in than a bake in.
I'm not sure how Forem Connect work in the background and it's dependencies. So think of this comment/opinion as a hypothetical idea.
Rather than removing it completely, make it available as an optional feature via admin panel with an asterisk. This way admins can decide upon to use or not use it based upon the way their community works and connects.
As mentioned above, i'm not sure whether this is possible or not, if it requires a considerble amount of debugging and refactoring => then disabling it for now and updating it to a newer version in later stages seems like the way ahead.
Rather than removing it completely, make it available as an optional feature via admin panel with an asterisk. This way admins can decide upon to use or not use it based upon the way their community works and connects.
I'm not sure how Forem Connect work in the background and it's dependencies.
Without wanting to go into too many details: one of the reasons we chose to remove Connect is that it has quite a bit of technical debt and keeping it around behind a feature flag does not help us in this regard.
Also, as Ben pointed out, if a chat feature does come back it will most likely be reframed in the context of the wider Forem ecosystem, not a single instance.
I am an Engineering Physics graduate from IIT Guwahati, but merely not restricted to Physics itself. In the past few years, I involved in many Cybersecurity blogging and now on Open-source.
Basically yes. Matrix got thrown around by @rhymes when this was first brought up, and I'd really like to entertain all sorts of ideas here.
Flimsy forem-by-forem inboxes which may or may not have E2E encryption at some point is not necessarily the ideal here. A single Forem can do a good job of managing permissions, i.e. we follow each other, you should be able to message me... Messaging already has so much sprawl, if this can be an optional decentralized connective element of the Forem ecosystem, that would be ideal.
I am an Engineering Physics graduate from IIT Guwahati, but merely not restricted to Physics itself. In the past few years, I involved in many Cybersecurity blogging and now on Open-source.
Mastodon does this exceptionally. I'm not sure how this can be implemented in a Ruby on Rails app, but the way two individually hosted Mastodon communicates can be a good fit for Forem.
It is more like; if you have created an account in one Mastodon instance, there is no need for you to create a new mastodon account. You can use your existing account to signup for another Mastodon server. So, what is the advantage of this?
Let's assume we both are following each other in dev.to and also used our dev.to account to create a Forem account (both of us) => It implicitly means we are also following each other in Forem.dev
I am an Engineering Physics graduate from IIT Guwahati, but merely not restricted to Physics itself. In the past few years, I involved in many Cybersecurity blogging and now on Open-source.
I see, I'm not aware of those minute facts; but anyways Mastodon is the only social media service I can come up with, which might come near to what Forem is aspiring to introduce via Forem connect.
For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse
I'm not sure how Forem Connect work in the background and it's dependencies. So think of this comment/opinion as a hypothetical idea.
Rather than removing it completely, make it available as an optional feature via admin panel with an asterisk. This way admins can decide upon to use or not use it based upon the way their community works and connects.
As mentioned above, i'm not sure whether this is possible or not, if it requires a considerble amount of debugging and refactoring => then disabling it for now and updating it to a newer version in later stages seems like the way ahead.
I think it's a good idea! 😄
Without wanting to go into too many details: one of the reasons we chose to remove Connect is that it has quite a bit of technical debt and keeping it around behind a feature flag does not help us in this regard.
Also, as Ben pointed out, if a chat feature does come back it will most likely be reframed in the context of the wider Forem ecosystem, not a single instance.
You mean like a federated architecture?
Basically yes. Matrix got thrown around by @rhymes when this was first brought up, and I'd really like to entertain all sorts of ideas here.
Flimsy forem-by-forem inboxes which may or may not have E2E encryption at some point is not necessarily the ideal here. A single Forem can do a good job of managing permissions, i.e. we follow each other, you should be able to message me... Messaging already has so much sprawl, if this can be an optional decentralized connective element of the Forem ecosystem, that would be ideal.
Mastodon does this exceptionally. I'm not sure how this can be implemented in a Ruby on Rails app, but the way two individually hosted Mastodon communicates can be a good fit for Forem.
It is more like; if you have created an account in one Mastodon instance, there is no need for you to create a new mastodon account. You can use your existing account to signup for another Mastodon server. So, what is the advantage of this?
Let's assume we both are following each other in dev.to and also used our dev.to account to create a Forem account (both of us) => It implicitly means we are also following each other in Forem.dev
Mastodon is a RoR app and open-source, so that could definitely serve as inspiration. 🙂
github.com/mastodon/mastodon
That said, Mastodon is about federating ActivityPub content which is not necessarily a good fit for realt-time chat.
I see, I'm not aware of those minute facts; but anyways Mastodon is the only social media service I can come up with, which might come near to what Forem is aspiring to introduce via Forem connect.