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Comment by raverbashing | Hacker News Reader

Or, maybe, you know, pick one and move already, then discuss later if people prefer the other one.

Indecisiveness and excess democracy are things that make "open-source" slower.

Edit: you're all responding like the actual choice they made didn't result in a bad situation for the members

Or, better still, pick one but create channels on both - the other one just to tell people where the primary channel is. Or even to carry discussion on both simultaneously, until you reach the decision.

Do that to prevent a hostile party from doing it before you.

That's what happened during the decision-making process, but then one got shut down. Now new users joining #newsboat will be directed to ##newsboat, which is completely out of control of the #newsboat ops. They won't be directed to libera.chat.

Agreed. It will be easier to see which one people prefers as well.

(I mean, it's an IRC channel, the servers might diverge in features and reliability but there's usually not much difference)

> (I mean, it's an IRC channel, the servers might diverge in features and reliability but there's usually not much difference)

You'd be surprised. This actually strengthens the point you're making elsewhere: people can, and will, debate such choices endlessly. It's because they care about the community, about making things better for themselves and for everyone. This is textbook bikeshedding - there's no ill intent, just scope insensitivity. Debating important issues and debating trivialities takes the same amount of effort, and expands to fill available time of participants.

I'm not sure what the best solution is, but the one I know works is to put a time limit on such issues, to prevent them from consuming more attention and resources than they deserve. That is, if consensus can't be reached in a short time, a preset choice must be made by default. If you reach that point and get strong pushback, you take the other option.

Thanks for the constructive comment and for explaining my point better!

You're right, snap decisions are the best... don't bother to get input or even really consider your options. Just flip a coin and yolo it, right?

FWIW, there is some merit to raverbashing's argument. I know first-hand that maintaining a community of enthusiastic techies is just like trying to herd cats. They can, and will, debate the pros and cons until heat death of the universe. I know because in communities I've been part of, we could and did debate options endlessly - until someone with enough time on their hands just unilaterally implemented one and then everyone begrudgingly accepted it.

Some degree of "do-ocracy" may be necessary - when you can't get the people to decide, sometimes the best option is just to announce a choice and see if people follow you. If they put up resistance, you can revert the choice and pick the other option. But it usually turns out that the ones most eager to continue debating are the ones who actually care the least, and will accept whatever decision was made.

You're picking an IRC server, not your favourite kid.

Bike shedding is real.

It's not bike shedding to make sure interested parties all get heard. My community didn't switch before this cluster fuck because we were waiting for someone who's important but only online for a weekend every few weeks or so. Just because you don't care, doesn't make it unimportant.

Because leaving X% of the channel that relies on Matrix bridges behind, rushing admins of bots etc, and making people feel like you didn't even give them a chance to say something about it are all great things for a community.

This has been the major reason why #haskell didn't try to move more forcefully.

We'd like to get some of the old logging bots moved over, etc.

We have some number of users who connect from tor, from matrix, or from webchat that simply can't move right now. These are things being looked at from the libera.chat side, but that work isn't done.

I very much value those users being able to continue to ask and get their questions answered.

That said, we used to have like 3-4 server ops lurking in the channel, and 15-16 channel ops that were active on the server. We just don't any more. This makes me rather concerned from a spam perspective.

On the other hand, there are < 80 people in the channel now, so perhaps spam is less of an issue now that we're a much smaller target.

Because staying on a network where nobody has control of their own channels is great for a community.

because you clearly knew that waiting for 2 weeks wouldn't be ok?

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