That one's a good example, though I'd still argue that such cases are rare. I'm pretty sure that, at least as a consumer (if not as a volunteer) you could communicate with such a local group through email. Last time I've been asked to join a facebook group, I've said I didn't have an account and everyone switched to a mailing list administered via google in no time. (Though I was not the only one.) Pretty sure a bunch of other alternatives would have been possible if google didn't work nicely. Over the last half-year of online academic events, I've seen at least half a dozen different online services used (Zoom, Zulip, Gather.town, google hangouts, Cisco Webex and probably a bunch I don't remember). Most of us users don't particularly like to, but can (without serious tears) learn a new tool when it comes up and turns out to be more suited.
As it comes to reach, don't forget that email has probably the greatest reach of any service around.
It really depends on the details. I was having a conversation about this this afternoon. If you're trying to grow a community of (even) an open source project and your purist take is email and IRC or the highway that's probably going to limit your participation. Not 100%. Some will be committed enough to deal with not using Slack or whatever. But many potential participants will be F This.
Do you mean that email and IRC are both poorly suited now? If so, what do you use instead of email for an open source project these days?
If your answer is Slack, someone like me is not going to get involved, because I find Slack disastrously clunky and I can't archive and search it the way that happens automatically with email, nor can I get sensible notifications from it about specific things I'm interested in when someone brings them up.
I am subscribed to a bunch of Slack channels (e.g. for Rust & Go), and it's just so much of a pain I found I ended up not bothering to open it most days, so I just drop in occasionally to have a look. That's fine as long as the community doesn't care about me of course, but presumably open source project growth is affected by that sort of thing.
You're describing the fragmentation problem--which is what we were discussing this afternoon--exactly. Some people won't use proprietary products. Some can't be bothered with IRC. Some of those will use certain proprietary products but not others because it means they have to use a client for one particular purpose.
A lot of people find email lists "old school."
So you end up with fragmented communication channels. Everyone is "happy" but you end up with a number of different sub-communities not talking to each other. It's worse than it's ever been IMO.
That's a real problem, but actually I wasn't describing it.
What I'm describing is how I found Slack difficult to work usefully with to a significant degree, compared with other platforms I've used.
Therefore, when evaluating its effect on community growth, it's not as simple as "use Slack nowadays to grow an open source community", because it acts as a significant repulsive barrier towards some of us (who are relevant to that community), even if it's attractive towards others.
It's not so much fragmentation as functionality; and those might be solved if there was better federation between systems to allow a broader range of tools.
The reason this is not just fragmentation is illustrated by my result with the Rust & Go communities: After trying out the Slack channels, and finding myself only dropping in once a month or so for a peek due to the tool being clunky, I lost the motivation to go looking for other fragmented sub-communities until I'd eventually find a "good" one. As a result I haven't gotten involved in any, despite the initial interest. I'm too busy with other things, and other communities. So I'll just passively consume the product now for a while, until reasons to put in the effort come up again. And I'm someone who is actively interested in the projects as a PLI person. Just an anecdote, but I think this repulsion effect is not great for open source community building.
But if they're not interested in using it for community communications, the fact that they already have an email address doesn't much matter if they won't use it for that purpose. They have a phone number too but they probably don't want to use that either.
There's no great solution. Ultimately you mostly have to meet people where they are or are willing to be. And that probably means that different groups are on siloed channels.
> Last time I've been asked to join a facebook group, I've said I didn't have an account and everyone switched to a mailing list administered via google in no time.
That's amazing. I've seen similar things the other way around. Someone didn't use Facebook. People didn't switch; they got left out and forgotten.
Another one was Google Groups (a type of mailing list). Someone didn't want to use a Google account. They couldn't figure out how to subscribe. Was the group willing to switch to another provider? No of course not. In the end an admin manually subscribed the person with their non-Google address, but if that hadn't been possible, the group would have let them go rather than switch service.
I think it depends on how much the group wants to accommodate everyone who wants to be in it, and what the mix of people is. Also whether it depends on additional tools such as Facebook Events.
If it's a fun social group that you're interested in joining, where the people don't particularly care who is in it, they're probably not going to change what they do. That's fairly obvious when the group aren't your friends (yet). Less obviously, I've seen it happens among friends too, where someone not on Facebook gradually gets left out and forgotten from things like party invitations.
> Over the last half-year of online academic events, I've seen at least half a dozen different online services used (Zoom, Zulip, Gather.town, google hangouts, Cisco Webex and probably a bunch I don't remember). Most of us users don't particularly like to, but can (without serious tears) learn a new tool when it comes up and turns out to be more suited.
I've seen the same thing this summer. (Some of those tools have awful data protection issues and permissions to do things they shouldn't on your computer, yet I've installed and used them anyway. When it's a job interview you don't really have a choice.)
The above list shows us Facebook doesn't have a monopoly. But I don't count them as great examples of freely leaving behind walled gardens either. It's more like, there are more walled gardens. You don't get a choice which tool to use. You must use whatever tool the group has chosen before you join it, and they are very unlikely to change tool for a new joiner.
> As it comes to reach, don't forget that email has probably the greatest reach of any service around.
Yes and no. Everyone uses email, but many only use it inside Gmail, which is a bit of a mess if you're subscribed to a bunch of mailing lists, and trying to keep track of events you've been invited to.
> That's amazing. I've seen similar things the other way around. Someone didn't use Facebook. People didn't switch; they got left out and forgotten.
I probably should have said it was a tech-savvy academic community, and a somewhat small one (ca. 50 people).
> Another one was Google Groups (a type of mailing list). Someone didn't want to use a Google account. They couldn't figure out how to subscribe. Was the group willing to switch to another provider? No of course not. In the end an admin manually subscribed the person with their non-Google address, but if that hadn't been possible, the group would have let them go rather than switch service.
Google groups was what we ended up with, after facebook caused resistance. The thing with google groups is, it's not really a walled garden -- it's just a mailing list; you have all your data archived in your email unless you choose to delete it yourself, and if it fails for whatever reason, you can just manually send an email with a huge Bcc instead. Google in generally is pretty good at "export all your data"; while partly due to antitrust pressure, I think that this is mainly a way to keep the techie audience semi-loyal. I am more worried about github/lab, ironically, due to the "superstructure" they add on top of the repositories (issue trackers mostly). In theory there are tools that can export all of it "back" into the repository, but in practice people are loath to use them.
> Yes and no. Everyone uses email, but many only use it inside Gmail, which is a bit of a mess if you're subscribed to a bunch of mailing lists, and trying to keep track of events you've been invited to.
Anything is a mess if you need to keep track of lots of events. Has Facebook figured out how to make calendars non-confusing?
> The thing with google groups is, it's not really a walled garden -- it's just a mailing lis
Yes and no. It's not much of a mailing list for the people without Google accounts who couldn't figure out how to subscribe after Google made the documentation for doing that hard to find (they used to have a decent page about it that was removed). That's quite different from other mailing lists.
Thus the anecdote about someone who asked how to subscribe, which was solved by a group admin manually subscribing them. I'm certain we lost a number of other people who didn't want to bother an admin enough to ask for help, and just gave up.
What we found over time is, eventually, a lot of the people reading the group thought it was a forum, and either posted via the Google Groups web interface (never using email), or didn't post (and therefore interact) because clicking the Post button took them to the Google login/signup page, and that put some of them off.
> Anything is a mess if you need to keep track of lots of events. Has Facebook figured out how to make calendars non-confusing?
I find Meetup ok for this, because I can see in chronological order what I found interesting today and in the next week or so. It tells me what's the next event I signed up to. And I can see a good selection in chronological order that I might like to take an interest in, because I signed up to a bunch of groups.
Facebook events also seems to be ok if you are only ever invited to very few events on it, as I am. I still miss them because I only login about once every 2 months these days :-)
> Some of those tools have awful data protection issues and permissions to do things they shouldn't on your computer, yet I've installed and used them anyway.
It's not like you can say anything different about the big corporate providers... Sure they might protect your data better (against external threats) but the data they do have they are surely abusing as much as they can.
As it comes to reach, don't forget that email has probably the greatest reach of any service around.