Offical/Unofficial communities

[mweinelt]

Introduce your stance
As part of the moderation team I'm concerned about the listing of community spaces.

Describe the issue

• Mastodon, Twitter and Stackoverflow appears as if they were moderated by the NixOS moderation team, which is not the case
• The /r/nixos subreddit should likely be removed, as it is currently a major contributor to social issues in the community
• The visual difference between official and unofficial spaces could be made clearer, e.g. by using a different coloring
  • The part where unofficial platforms are NOT moderated by the NixOS moderation team should receive more emphasis

Page links

https://nixos.org/community/

Additional context
n/a

• I already created a Pull Request

[adamcstephens]

Thanks @mweinelt, I agree we could do better to differentiate unofficial spaces on the website. Another suggestion could be to also change the unofficial buttons into links, thus demoting their visibility some.

In defense of keeping the links on the page, I think it's important for the community to link to unofficial spaces. People have different needs and reasons to choose different networks, and I'd like to keep the barriers to help low by meeting people where they are. We all know the learning curve is already high, and Discord allows them to skip the "new chat network" of Matrix to focus on what they're trying to accomplish with Nix*.

I think we should be able to clearly identify other popular unofficial spaces and their difference from the official spaces, without completely delisting Discord as #1439 attempts.

---

in #1439 @samueldr said:

I have only had second-hand reports for the other location. The other location may be worse depending on how accurate and pervasive the behaviour from the second-hand reports are, and one's opinion.

I'd be happy to discuss what goes on in the unofficial Discord, and how we can continue to be a more inviting place. I also would encourage anyone to join and see what the community is like themselves before making conclusions. I suspect any second-hand reports you have are already dated, but appreciate feedback on recent activity. I've only recently been promoted to an Admin there, but even in the past few weeks we've made improvements to improve things and will continue to do so.

Please feel free to send me any evidence of concerning activity in private if that helps. My door is always open.

[jshcmpbll]

I appreciate the concerns raised about r/NixOS. As an active member of that community, I've valued the open dialogue and diverse perspectives that contribute to its richness. Labeling the forum as unofficial sufficiently clarifies its status and maintains transparency.

While I understand the motivations behind wanting to ensure moderation aligns with community standards, it's crucial to recognize the importance of fostering a space where differing viewpoints can be respectfully exchanged. This approach prevents the formation of echo chambers and promotes a more inclusive environment.

Ensuring that our discussions remain constructive and respectful of all members is essential, and I just hope our moderation team will continue to guide us in upholding these principles effectively while also allowing users to discuss topics they don't personally agree with.

[rgoulter]

Mastodon, Twitter and Stackoverflow appears as if they were moderated by the NixOS moderation team, which is not the case

Yes, it's strange that social media tags appear under "official spaces".

The part where unofficial platforms are NOT moderated by the NixOS moderation team should receive more emphasis

I think the headers "Official Spaces" vs "Unofficial Spaces" already distinguishes this sufficiently.

The /r/nixos subreddit should likely be removed, as it is currently a major contributor to social issues in the community

This is a bad idea. Removing this exacerbates tensions in the community, for little-to-no benefit.

[piegamesde]

Just open the subreddit and have a look at it. People banned over here causing discord and spewing hatred.

Do we want this to be a representation of our community? Can we safely direct our community members to go there?

[mrshmllow]

I have a lot of cool friends from the nixos discord. It is moderated to some extent thanks to a core group of active admins / mods. However, it feels like every week or so there is some kind of small scandal that goes down there. There are also a few privileged accounts that rarely interact with the community there at all / lay dormant (including atleast one who has been suspended in official spaces).

[deviantsemicolon]

Just open the subreddit and have a look at it. People banned over here causing discord and spewing hatred.

Do we want this to be a representation of our community? Can we safely direct our community members to go there?

I think this is a good argument for separating official and unofficial communities. I would also recommend a warning under the unofficial communities section stating that the NixOS team does not moderate such spaces, and that the actions of them do not represent the NixOS team or community at large.

[psionic-k]

The /r/nixos subreddit should likely be removed

We've forgotten the responsibility of representing an open community on the internet if we look at a significant gathering of technical support bandwidth and community only to conclude that it should be excluded, especially because of the mere existence of certain users, who will naturally arrive there after being excluded from other spaces.

Reddit has, for better or worse, always used its own system of self-governance, upvotes and downvotes. The question is not who is allowed to speak, but whether what they have to say will be upvoted or buried by other users. Will waves gather momentum or fizzle out? It's not perfect, but it's a different principle of operation that emphasizes open authority of the users, and protecting that uniqueness is an important element of community diversity. Users who choose that platform do so because of the nature of that mechanism, and they should not be discriminated against.

Nobody expects the world to share a room, but we do expect to not go build a brick wall in front of our neighbor's driveway. The respect for the independence of different spaces and the freedom to move between them is a fundamental strength of online community. Oil and water will separate. That is natural and healthy.

[thilobillerbeck]

Please keep in mind that this discussion is about how to achieve the mentioned points in the issue not if we should remove Reddit. Please use discourse for that.

[viperML]

On the topic of unofficial communities, I believe we are missing the Nix User groups there (https://nix.ug) and the IRC channels (which I don't have any connection with)

[RGBCube]

Is the definition of offical "moderated by the NixOS GitHub organization mod team" or "officially promoted by the NixOS foundation"? If it isn't the latter, I can see keeping StackOverflow, Twitter and Mastodon on there.

The /r/nixos subreddit should likely be removed, as it is currently a major contributor to social issues in the community

How so? It looks more like the moderation team is doing all this to themselves, as the subreddit only reacts to those. I was expecting stuff to get quieter after 20 days after the deadline but thanks to the moderation team it has not. Maybe the team should be replaced instead? Everyone knows you can't get a functioning community without compromises.

[mrshmllow]

How so? It looks more like the moderation team is doing all this to themselves, as the subreddit only reacts to those. I was expecting stuff to get quieter after 20 days after the deadline but thanks to the moderation team it has not. Maybe the team should be replaced instead? Everyone knows you can't get a functioning community without compromises.

I'm so confused what your trying to say.

[RGBCube]

How so? It looks more like the moderation team is doing all this to themselves, as the subreddit only reacts to those. I was expecting stuff to get quieter after 20 days after the deadline but thanks to the moderation team it has not. Maybe the team should be replaced instead? Everyone knows you can't get a functioning community without compromises.

I'm so confused what your trying to say.

I think the moderation team are the ones causing the "social issues" and that they should be replaced.

[nat-418]

I'd like to propose a potential compromise:

1. Remove all unofficial platform buttons
2. Invite unofficial platforms to adopt the same moderation policies / collaborate with the official moderation team.
3. Add unofficial platforms as links that agree to point # 2

Would this work for the Discord, @adamcstephens ? I think the Discord could be a model example of how to handle the reality that there are more platforms people want to use than the official moderation team could support. By publicly saying "we aren't one mod team but we work together and share basic commitments" we can signal that the community is united while also open and flexible. Any thoughts @piegamesde or @mweinelt ?

Clarification: by "collaborate with the official moderation team" I mean the mods of whatever unofficial platform should be in the official moderation Matrix room (or whatever other channel) and discuss / coordinate moderation decisions. So if X person is suspended from Discourse for Y time, then X person is also suspended for Y time on Discord (or whatever other unofficial platform).

[MagicRB]

While i personally see the point of removing unmoderated spaces and assuming that the reddit is as problematic as has been said (i dont know so i will refrain from making any judgements there), i can also see why ditching reddit is sane, but i also think that for transparency all should be kept. But i dont really wanna touch on this as i dont have any valid factual opinion to share.

But i would like chip in with something else. I think that removing unofficial spaces and then adding them back on the condition that they adopt the same moderation policies and CoC essentially makes them official. As in the end it shouldnt matter who moderates those spaces but that they are moderated equally. (I know we're all human and two teams following the same guidelines will never agree on what action to take 100% of the time, but still i think the team shouldnt be the deciding factor but the policies)

So then my suggestion is a 3 way split:

• offficial - same team
• unofficial - same policies
• unmoderated - differing policies

[mweinelt]

with my moderation hat on

Various people have been able to state their opposing opinion on the matter and have not become the victim of “abuse of authority”, as claimed. This issue was opened precisely with the idea to have a discussion on the matter.

But under no circumstance are we accepting sockpuppeting, a deceptive practice that circumvents the need to have an appropriate amount of restraint, in sensitive discussions like these.

[jaen]

I think the de-emphasizing links to unofficial spaces by, for example, making them text-only and not pills makes sense (kind of surprised about Mastodon and Twitter being considered official, if not managed by the NixOs organisation).

I don't think requiring unofficial spaces to implement the exact same moderation policies as official spaces makes sense - they then become de-facto official spaces.

But it also makes sense that a space could become an associated spaces, by adopting the same policies as official spaces, should they want to, which is essentially @MagicRB's suggestion.

I don't think unofficial spaces (in the sense of differing moderation policies) necessarily need to be removed, because "those also exists if you don't want those above" is not really a glowing endorsement IMO. I certainly wouldn't expect it to link to someonething s inane as, say, a "Fascist Nix User Group", but r/NixOS is not that even if (suspiciously eyes sridcaca) it has some problems.

That said, everything apart from de-emphasizing unofficial spaces and making it clear they might not follow the same standards as official spaces feels like a policy decision and maybe should be deferred to whatever comes out of the constitutional assembly.

[SomeoneSerge]

Assuming the subreddit would rather prefer an independent moderation policy, why don't we just kindly ask them to add a disclaimer in the title: "An unofficial NixOS subreddit" or "not associated with the NixOS foundation/NixOS governance/etc". The NixOS community web page could be updated to say "here's other communities discussing NixOS: [reddit]". I don't see any reason they should oppose that...

[squalus]

I don't mind that there are links to unofficial communities like Reddit. I don't place any value on a forum being "official" or being controlled by the NixOS moderation team.

The goal here in linking to different forums should be to help users connect and find assistance in the places where they are most comfortable. Their opinions about the NixOS moderation team shouldn't be a consideration. This is about helping users, not helping moderators.

Reddit is a major social media platform and there are about 25k subscribers to the NixOS community. It's reasonable to think that plenty of users would like to discuss the project over there.

[nat-418]

Assuming the subreddit would rather prefer an independent moderation policy, why don't we just kindly ask them to add a disclaimer in the title: "An unofficial NixOS subreddit" or "not associated with the NixOS foundation/NixOS governance/etc". The NixOS community web page could be updated to say "here's other communities discussing NixOS: [reddit]". I don't see any reason they should oppose that...

I think it would be good for them to clarify that they are not official. I just think we shouldn't link to unofficial fora unless they agree to broadly work together with the official mods. I don't really care about the naming conventions @MagicRB, I want us to be intentional and link (I presume mainly for the benefit of newcomers) to places that we officially endorse.

[teburd]

I find reddit, discord, etc really active and helpful. My experience on matrix was a mixed bag, k900 is awesome and helpful. When I asked about why jlink was dropped from nixpkgs and how I could help get it updated and back in there was a whole thing with a few people that seemed to think it was important I know closed source is bad, it shouldn't be in nixpkgs, etc etc and that rubbed me the wrong way. Haven't yet experienced that sort of issue on discord or reddit.

[Jaculabilis]

Mastodon, Twitter and Stackoverflow appears as if they were moderated by the NixOS moderation team, which is not the case

Definitely. Those three should probably move in with the other unofficial spaces.

The visual difference between official and unofficial spaces could be made clearer, e.g. by using a different coloring.

I think once those three links are moved under the Unofficial heading, the headers themselves will be enough differentiation. It wouldn't do any harm to use a more muted color like putting them in gray, though. That should probably be the Marketing team's call.

The /r/nixos subreddit should likely be removed, as it is currently a major contributor to social issues in the community

I don't think this is an accurate or informed assessment.

1. /r/nixos is 99% technical discussion, if you check it regularly. The proportion of drama hellthreads to the rest of the discussion is about the same as the Discourse or Zulip. Consequently, it shouldn't be considered a "major contributor to social issues" any more than any other forum.
2. The posts in /r/nixos that are about the drama are mostly posted by srid. Don't blame the whole subreddit when there's one person in particular who is easily identifiable and has a clear track record and motive.
3. Half of srid's posts are downvoted because the subreddit thinks they're too drama-monger-y. If you read the comments on drama posts, a number of users are annoyed that it gets posted and want to go back to technical discussion.
4. Where the subreddit does upvote a drama post or comment in support, it is expressing a category of opinions that have also been voiced in GitHub discussions, Discourse, or Zulip. It does not make sense to blame the subreddit specifically for the existence of one "faction" in the current community unrest.
5. If I may editorialize, the social issues in the community are caused by the fact that there are multiple "factions" whose views are irreconciliable. It does not make sense to blame one "faction" for this, because neither "faction" is creating the problem on their own; it's the fact that both "factions" exist and cannot get along that causes the problem. Either "faction" giving up and leaving (or forcibly ejecting the other) would "solve" the problem: not because they were really the cause of the issues, but because the issues were caused by having two opposed sides.

Finally, I would caution attempting to purge unofficial communities from these lists, because there is currently a large subset of Nix users who feel that their views are not being heard fairly in official spaces or that the moderation is biased against them. In such a circumstance, trying to remove spaces where that opinion is expressed will feed into that and undermine the perceived legitimacy of the moderation team, at a time when such a resource is all the more valuable for its scarcity. (The fact that this was even proposed means some of the damage is already done, unfortunately.)

[crertel]

Basically the same feedback as @Jaculabilis .

(I'm curious if there's any thought given to linking out to the forks or not. I personally think it's not right/needed, but I could see "If you liked this, try other neat flavors" as a justification.)

Mastodon, Twitter and Stackoverflow appears as if they were moderated by the NixOS moderation team, which is not the case

Agreed. This is 100% an issue with the current design. Moving those three links down into the "Unofficial" section would make sense to me. Seems an easy and straightforward fix, especially since all those are more "view content tagged as Nix in this space" as opposed to "this is our official Twitter, Mastodon, etc."

The /r/nixos subreddit should likely be removed, as it is currently a major contributor to social issues in the community

There's a lot of good technical discussion there, in spite of a couple of trolls. It also has around 24K users if Reddit is to be believed, so it's not exactly a fringe thing.

If we were to remove spaces based solely on some things and actors we disagreed with, we'd probably need to shut down the Github, DIscourse, Matrix, and especially Zulip.

The visual difference between official and unofficial spaces could be made clearer, e.g. by using a different coloring

Is page design a marketing team domain? I think the current design is nice and coherent, though maybe a de-saturated palette could also be used.

I just think we shouldn't link to unofficial fora unless they agree to broadly work together with the official mods.

Hard disagree. We should link to them if users are likely to find value there; moderation concerns are secondary (also, if they're working together with the official mods, that implies somewhat a degree of "officialness" does it not?).

[nat-418]

If we were to remove spaces based solely on some things and actors we disagreed with, we'd probably need to shut down the Github, DIscourse, Matrix, and especially Zulip.

Please don't troll GitHub issues. This is where contributors come to actually get work done. It's not funny, it's not cute, it's not sincere. Not only is this a total misrepresentation of what has been said previously, it's a blatant flaming of the official Nix / Nixpkgs / NixOS community. I know that folks on "dissident" Matrix rooms, Reddit, etc. have linked to this issue and riled up their audience, but please think twice before coming over here and making noise like this.

[nyabinary]

How so? It looks more like the moderation team is doing all this to themselves, as the subreddit only reacts to those. I was expecting stuff to get quieter after 20 days after the deadline but thanks to the moderation team it has not. Maybe the team should be replaced instead? Everyone knows you can't get a functioning community without compromises.

I'm so confused what your trying to say.

I think the moderation team are the ones causing the "social issues" and that they should be replaced.

What's the purpose of this inflammatory comment?

[jshcmpbll]

If we were to remove spaces based solely on some things and actors we disagreed with, we'd probably need to shut down the Github, DIscourse, Matrix, and especially Zulip.

Please don't troll GitHub issues. This is where contributors come to actually get work done. It's not funny, it's not cute, it's not sincere. Not only is this a total misrepresentation of what has been said previously, it's a blatant flaming of the official Nix / Nixpkgs / NixOS community. I know that folks on "dissident" Matrix rooms, Reddit, etc. have linked to this issue and riled up their audience, but please think twice before coming over here and making noise like this.

No offense but your opinion does not speak for the community as a whole and your response is ironic. Just because other members don't sit and chat in the same rooms as you doesn't make their opinions any less valid than yours and you need to work on respecting other members of this community better @nat-418

[mweinelt]

How about the following separation:

• Official community platforms (moderated)
• Official social media channels (change the hash tags to our profiles)
• Unofficial community platforms (not moderated by the NixOS moderation team, migrate StackOverflow here)

[nat-418]

Mastodon and Twitter are technically official

Are they? The links look like hashtags to me?

Yes, they are all hashtags / search keywords. The Twitter one doesn't really work unless one is logged in already. I think these buttons should simply be removed. I don't see the need to advertise them.

In general, there are lots of places where people can talk about Nix. I think we should only advertise the places on this page that are official or agree to follow the official standards on a best-effort basis.

[delroth]

• Unofficial community platforms (not moderated by the NixOS moderation team, migrate StackOverflow here)

I think this misses a key distinction: Stack Overflow does not tolerate harassment towards (esp. marginalized) contributors, while both the NixOS subreddit and the unofficial Discord have proven to not only implicitly tolerate it (by not moderating it - plenty of examples if you look at the last month), but for the subreddit I'd go as far as saying "encouraging it".

[mrshmllow]

the unofficial Discord have proven to not only implicitly tolerate it (by not moderating it - plenty of examples if you look at the last month)

Today instead of punishing or even warning the bad actors they removed the offtopic channel instead. There's a guy who kinda just unprompted randomly sends hateful messages pretty much on the daily. I've seen homophobia, transphobia, ableism, etc etc. All unpunished. Last week someone started making fun of pronouns and made it a long point to call me "an object" repeatedly.

It's a bit offtopic but this week I was muted for 7 days ostensibly for blocking srid and poscat, while a mod spread rumors about me "harassing" and stalking users

:(

[nat-418]

@jshcmpbll, I think you need to consider what @mrshmllow said. Is that what we want to endorse?

No offense but your opinion does not speak for the community as a whole and your response is ironic.

I don't claim to speak for anyone but myself. My response is 100% sincere.

Just because other members don't sit and chat in the same rooms as you doesn't make their opinions any less valid than yours and you need to work on respecting other members of this community better @nat-418

My objection is not to difference of opinion or preferred forum, but to toxic cultures that host targeted harassement, impersonation, brigading, and related abuse. See this recent example. I don't think the project homepage should advertise any forum whose users actively seek to harm contributors or the project generally. This should not be controversial.

[ners]

See this recent example.

Your recent example has actually been removed, if you bother to look at what it actually looks like.

That seems to suggest that the forum is not as unmoderated as has been claimed; it's just not moderated by you.

[nat-418]

That seems to suggest that the forum is not as unmoderated as has been claimed; it's just not moderated by you.

I have no idea if that forum is moderated or by whom. The link you provided seems to indicate the offending image was removed by some kind of automatic filter. That doesn't really address the core concerns stated above. I don't moderate any Nix community fora, I'm just a project contributor.

[mrshmllow]

@\jshcmpbll, I think you need to consider what @mrshmllow said. Is that what we want to endorse?

I don't particularly think removing the links is a good idea... I just wanna see the moderation get better there

[RaitoBezarius]

See this recent example.

Your recent example has actually been removed, if you bother to look at what it actually looks like.

That seems to suggest that the forum is not as unmoderated as has been claimed; it's just not moderated by you.

This is an automatic action taken by Reddit filters for newly created accounts, it seems disingenuous to claim this is a moderation by someone. I suppose that the account was too fresh, received too many reports, and then Reddit must have automatically penalized visibility. It is not moderated. It is just shadow-banned.

Let's be precise, please.

Today instead of punishing or even warning the bad actors they removed the offtopic channel instead. There's a guy who kinda just unprompted randomly sends hateful messages pretty much on the daily. I've seen homophobia, transphobia, ableism, etc etc. All unpunished. Last week multiple people started making fun of pronouns and made it a long point to call me "an object" repeatedly.

It's a bit offtopic but this week I was muted for 7 days ostensibly for blocking srid and poscat, while a mod spread rumors about me "harassing" and stalking users

:(

If those accusations are true, this is highly problematic. I sent multiple receipts on that account on Zulip:

• https://nixpkgs.zulipchat.com/#narrow/stream/435724-governance/topic/Proposal.3A.20Trademark.20.2F.20Brand.20consistency/near/439368589
• https://nixpkgs.zulipchat.com/#narrow/stream/435724-governance/topic/Proposal.3A.20Trademark.20.2F.20Brand.20consistency/near/439367678

upon @tomberek proposal to try to take care of them in https://nixpkgs.zulipchat.com/#narrow/stream/435724-governance/topic/Proposal.3A.20Trademark.20.2F.20Brand.20consistency/near/439364419

To the best of my knowledge, they were not addressed.

I recognize the need for folks to have an unofficial platform with their preferred way of communication, e.g. Discord or whatever, but this situation is actively detrimental to the safety of our community in general.

This seems to be a relevant topic for the assembly to weigh on.

[squalus]

This is an automatic action taken by Reddit filters for newly created accounts, it seems disingenuous to claim this is a moderation by someone. I suppose that the account was too fresh, received too many reports, and then Reddit must have automatically penalized visibility. It is not moderated. It is just shadow-banned.

If Reddit automatically hid the post, I wonder how it was even found.

[mweinelt]

Please, can we talk less about the moderation aspect of things, and more about how to correct the perception issue on the homepage?

[Jaculabilis]

Please, can we talk less about the moderation aspect of things, and more about how to correct the perception issue on the homepage?

It seems like everyone generally agrees with your OP's first and third points, concerning the styling of the web page, and disagrees over your second point, concerning whether the subreddit should be linked at all given its different moderation standards. It should not be surprising that everyone is therefore discussing the one unsettled point in your OP, rather than the two points that are settled.

If you want to avoid the moderation aspect of things, you should strike that point from your OP and explicitly declare the question of adding or removing things to be out-of-scope for this issue. But if you really do want to discuss the inclusion or exclusion of the subreddit, then surely its moderation policies are highly relevant to that decision.

[nyabinary]

the unofficial Discord have proven to not only implicitly tolerate it (by not moderating it - plenty of examples if you look at the last month)

Today instead of punishing or even warning the bad actors they removed the offtopic channel instead. There's a guy who kinda just unprompted randomly sends hateful messages pretty much on the daily. I've seen homophobia, transphobia, ableism, etc etc. All unpunished. Last week someone started making fun of pronouns and made it a long point to call me "an object" repeatedly.

It's a bit offtopic but this week I was muted for 7 days ostensibly for blocking srid and poscat, while a mod spread rumors about me "harassing" and stalking users

:(

Could you send some evidence (to be clear, I agree with you) I just want the evidenced to be archived and presented.

[nyabinary]

Please, can we talk less about the moderation aspect of things, and more about how to correct the perception issue on the homepage?

Inherently, how these communities moderate themselves is important to the perception issue (to me anyway), we shouldn't and can't promote toxic communities.

[tomberek]

Please, can we talk less about the moderation aspect of things, and more about how to correct the perception issue on the homepage?

@mweinelt Your proposal of the three sections makes sense. It clarifies where there is,

• official moderation (Matrix, Discourse, GitHub, ?Zulip?)
• official communication (Mastodon, Twitter)
• unofficial resources (StackOverflow, Discord, Reddit, IRC, etc)

Regarding the moderation conversation: I'll ask everyone to extend the same courtesy as in https://discourse.nixos.org/t/policy-on-discussion-of-the-moderation-process/42073 to consider discussion of moderation, in this case for the moderation relationship with unofficial spaces, to fall under the same policy and to use the Meta/Moderation section of the NixOS Discourse rather than this issue, Matrix, etc.

[nat-418]

I would like someone to make an argument for why the official website should promote, advertise, and seemingly endorse non-official resources. I don't see a similar promotion of non-official fora on the Debian, Gentoo, Arch, Ubuntu or Guix sites. I don't know why we need to promote non-official fora. It seems the standard practice across Linux distributions is to promote official fora, mailing lists, etc. It seems to me the issues of moderation and variable quality of non-official content make it a losing proposition for Nix to expend its good name for these external, unaffiliated operations. If someone wants to use a big and popular proprietary social media platform like Reddit or Discord, they can easily find people talking about Nix there. Nix does not need to officially link to such discussions and thereby lend them an air of credibility, even if the link comes with a disclaimer. If such external, non-official fora do not want to follow the standards for moderation of the Nix official community, then it seems we would do a disservice to the Nix community by proposing they visit such fora which may or may not treat them respectfully. There doesn't seem to be any upside for Nix in linking to non-official fora.

[pca006132]

To be honest, I doubt if people care that much about whether or not the subreddit is moderated by the official moderation team. People unfamiliar with the project structure probably don't know there is an official moderation team anyway. Like it or not, it will be perceived as part of the community. You can't fix social problems by simply removing links to the subreddit, or ignoring concerns as reflected by some of the upvoted drama posts. This can only cause more division in the community.

[MagicRB]

The benefit of linking to those platforms, is to help newcomers who may not want to immediately start using matrix. As someone who started on the Discord I can tell you first hand NixOS was intimidating enough. So linking to unofficial platforms helps people. And truth be told, let's not ignore the fact that "good news" are noy news worthy. The only thing that makes it over from the subreddit and discord to people that don't actively participate is the negative stuff as that's the only stuff which generates enough outrage to get shared elsewhere.

[nat-418]

@pca006132 I named five comparable projects to Nix above, and found none of them link to Reddit like Nix does. Should we link to Lemmy? To XMPP? To MySpace? Why should we bother pointing people to a platform that everyone already knows has fora for virtually every conceivable topic? Do we owe very single place people chat about Nix a link? I think the official site should link to official resources. I don't understand why anyone could object to simply removing the unofficial links, unless they wanted official promotion of their preferred unofficial resource.

[nat-418]

The benefit of linking to those platforms, is to help newcomers who may not want to immediately start using matrix.

@MagicRB We also provide a link to the Discourse, which is extremely user-friendly. I don't think there is any need to send users to a private, for-profit company and it's unofficial forum rather than our open, official, community-run forum.

I can tell you first hand NixOS was intimidating enough

Then let's make getting started easier by reducing the number of possible options for "community", and say "the happy path is the official fora. You can have real-time chat with Matrix or async with Discourse." Easy!

[pca006132]

@nat-418 I am just responding to "The /r/nixos subreddit should likely be removed, as it is currently a major contributor to social issues in the community". I am not arguing for/against linking to unofficial resources. I just don't think removing the link is useful in fixing social issues.

[MagicRB]

@nat-418 Again, people do not want to use unfamiliar things, if what you were saying were true then the Discord wouldn't have so many members.

[nat-418]

@MagicRB I don't think Nix is "for" people who don't want to use unfamiliar things. The Filesystem Hierarchy Standard is familiar, and Nix breaks it. Mutability everywhere is familiar, and Nix breaks it. Using one functional programming language for packaging software and configuring Linux is unfamiliar, and Nix insists on it. Nix isn't for the faint of heart. That's OK.

And also, Discourse is used by many communities, for example Neovim. It's not hard or confusing or unfamiliar. I don't think on either side of the "familiar" argument that keeping these links is required.

[nat-418]

I am not arguing for/against linking to unofficial resources. I just don't think removing the link is useful in fixing social issues.

@pca006132 if we think a place is causing problems (assuming @mweinelt is right in this case) then it makes a lot of sense not to send more users to that place. Removing the link removes official recommendation.

[AshleyYakeley]

I named five comparable projects to Nix above, and found none of them link to Reddit like Nix does.

Haskell links to a whole bunch of external resources, including Reddit.

[AshleyYakeley]

I would like someone to make an argument for why the official website should promote, advertise, and seemingly endorse non-official resources.

The official website should link to the subreddit because it's a very effective way of getting help with Nix-related issues, as well as discussing Nix more broadly. It's a benefit to the community.

[DieracDelta]

I would like someone to make an argument for why the official website should promote, advertise, and seemingly endorse non-official resources.

I think the primary argument is that such platforms as reddit and discord do a huge amount of good for the Nix community. They're large communities full of folks able and happy to help. I've anecdotally found this to be the case in both the NixOS subreddit and discord. (Especially the discord! In particular, Nobbz is incredibly patient and kind. Without folks like him I at least wouldn't have gotten the hang of NixOS. ) Of course there will be edge cases (as happens with large communities) but the good done should not be dismissed.

As a second argument: the Nix community already has a visibility problem when it comes to fixing technical problems you might encounter when using Nix. For example, documentation is fragmented and difficult to find. Obfuscating some of the few mediums where people actually can get help worsens this issue. I personally think that a disclaimer is sufficient, and that removal would seriously hurt new user adoption.

[AshleyYakeley]

@mweinelt Your proposal of the three sections makes sense. It clarifies where there is,

* official moderation (Matrix, Discourse, GitHub, ?Zulip?)

* official communication (Mastodon, Twitter)

* unofficial resources (StackOverflow, Discord, Reddit, IRC, etc)

Maybe a PR for this? I think this part is uncontroversial.

[garbas]

At Marketing team, we strive to share all the good ideas that come from all corners of the wider Nix community and help people find their little place in intersection between their interests and Nix.

Instead of listing less resources, I would hope we would be discussing how to add more of them.
But I do agree with @mweinelt that we should make it clearer what is official and what is unofficial. And that is what we should do first.

And regarding the /u/nixos reddit, as said, I hope to add more of such resources and not less.

As last, I'd like to thank everybody who chimed in and help keep the discussion reasonably civil, despite strong disagreements. Also, I'm going to close this issue since I don't think any further is going to bring anything fruitful.