No, as clearly stated by the official website, the Zig community is decentralized, people have the right to open a space wherever they feel like and have their own personalized set of rules. This is our policy and it’s not going to change.
Again, r/Zig is owned by Andrew, the discord server is not. We don’t have official communties and the biggest Zig community on Discord is owned by somebody else. What that person decides to do with their community is up to them.
You’re making that assertion in a freely accessible Zig community that has a help section where asking a question will get you an answer just like it does in the Discord communities. Ziggit has been here for you to use for more than a year. Try to participate to communities hosted on platforms you like instead of complaining about the success of communities hosted on platforms you don’t like.
I would recommend to newcomers to get familiar with how the Zig project works before coming in guns blazing.
the difference is that whoever created the discord community agreed with all the drawbacks that platform provides during the initial setup, whereas reddit announced some major shift in usability (by shutting down third-party Apps) from what the users were used to as well as some outlook about what the future might bring. (which boils down to more monetization of the platform)
If discord suddenly announces some significant change (like shutting down the discord app, I don’t use discord, so I’m not able to come up with a good analogy) then I’m sure many users and communities will rethink that platform as well.
I know. My posts are what I think.Let me expand. This means entire zig community nodes can just explode over night for no reason and everything on them is lost, case in point with the biggest discord channel.
What’s the point in participating in these communities then ?
It’s not about asking and receiving help, it’s about maintaining the information that was already provided. Archiving, tracing, discussions. This has value for me, personally.
I do not think we have the same perspective as you seem to have misinterpreted my rather uncharitable but kind of clear post as you’ve glossed over everything. I’ve achieved my goal of expressing my dismay. Have a nice day.
There’s no difference between reddit and discord. What has happened to reddit, will happen to Discord. I don’t know how to say this without sounding immature, but I fail to see how this is Zig’s problem. What exactly is the argument here ? What’s the difference I’m not seeing ?
each of those (sub)communities have their own preference when it comes to choosing a platform to built their community around.
The discord zig community owner might be happy about using discord as a platform for their use-case and might even have no issue with building a community on reddit so they can feel free to do so.
The community owners on /r/zig however decided that the upcoming API changes are significant enough to decide against continuing to spend effort in building a community on that platform and decided to move elsewhere. Similar to how many IRC communities decided to move to libera.chat after Andrew Lee’s hostile takeover of freenode.
That’s the beauty about having options (or being decentralized), because in the end you can choose whatever fits you most - so if some OnlyFans girls decide that they like zig, they can also build a zig community on OnlyFans!
I have to say I understand the appeal of the decentralized nature for the Zig community, however, there is most certainly value in having official channels which will not disappear as well.
I get that the reddit subreddit was a community run channel that just happened to be run by Andrew, but it showcases the issue with this. Overnight the community lost a whole host of very valuable information because 1 person decided it shouldn’t exit. If dude_the_builder decides he doesn’t want to do this anymore this community channel and all of it’s information may be gone tomorrow. (btw very very much appreciate you dude_the_builder)
This is certainly an issue for the long-term success of the Zig community
I think exactly for that reason, platforms based around discourse are the way to go for programming communities, since you can use them like mailing lists and/or use them as rss feeds (this is built-in and no addons are needed for that) - so that archiving posts / knowledge is being done automatically.
No they don’t, most people just use what they use. Nobody cares about anything except if everyone pesters them or it’s right in their face. Was there a poll before the closing of the zig subreddit that I’m not aware of regarding the permanent “protest” ?
I’m not saying you’re wrong. I agree with what you say, but in practice, it doesn’t work like that.
It is my opinion that in the long run discord and reddit are of the same cloth and closing the subreddit while keeping a blind eye towards discord is selective enforcing of principles at best as they are both closed platforms with priority in monetization.
Zig is not turning a blind eye because it had no control over the subreddit nor does it the discord.
The subreddit was a community run channel that just happened to be owned by Andrew. It’s not affiliated with Zig as a whole so he could do whatever he wanted with it. No poll needed much like you can delete your personal reddit account without requiring a poll. Andrew does not control the discord so he cannot shut it down should he not agree with their practices (I have no idea his feelings on this). Zig does not have any official community channels and their policy does not restrict where the community creates channels. If you created a new Zig subreddit and it was widely successful no one would tell you to shut it down as shutting it down was not a Zig policy
I do personally believe having some permanent, official community channels may be valuable as this was a large loss of information and if channels keep disappearing people may stop participating, but I think you’re misunderstanding a bit what happened with the subreddit
Amidst the issues of hostile corporate tactics, platform preferences, and profiteering, I see an underlying issue which to me is the most important one: content preservation (especially valuable knowledge transfer). A centralized / official community would offer an increased chance of preserving its content longterm; at least for as long as the project exists (although not guaranteed).
But I believe there’s a middle ground here. You can have de-centralized communities with their respective content and an official project-owned central repository to store backups of those communities’ content. For example, in the case of Discourse, I have already reached out to Loris Cro, from the Zig core team, to see if they can provide such a central space where I can deposit backups of this forum. If for whatever reason this forum disappears, someone else could step up to the plate and with the recent backup, restore the forum and both preserve the content and keep the community alive.
But we have to be clear that that initiative to restore and prolong the community in question is not the responsibility of the Zig core team nor the Zig Software Foundation. The community must act.
I believe that with this model, we can maintain the free and organic growth of Zig communities while at the same time provide an increased level of sustainability, consistency, and content preservation.
This sentiment is probably the point of friction between my POV and others that are in support of the subreddit closure. I don’t feel like a moderator owns a community, to do with it whatever they please, but is rather responsible towards it. I feel like there is a little double think going on to say that Andrew (or anyone) is free to do with /r/zig whatever he wants, and then protest against reddit for doing what they want with the site. In both cases, I see a singular entity with power over the community (whose value was built collaboratively with said community) decide to upend that community’s norms - 3rd party API in one case, the whole existence of a subreddit in another.
/r/elixir polled the community for guidance and decided to stay open. To me, this demonstrates that the /r/elixir mods value their members and their contributions. I admit that the decision to close the zig subreddit and Andrew’s implication in this thread that nothing of value was lost by its closure has me really re-thinking my optimism toward the language, whether I will invest my time/money into it, and whether I want to contribute. A lot of redditors trust reddit less now, and for the same reason I trust Zig less now. I don’t expect to change the decision with my viewpoint but want to let the VIPs know how this decision has impacted my potential to “pick up a shovel and start digging.”
Finally, I don’t think it’s fair to say that the subreddit was not “official” and instead belonged to Andrew the person and not Andrew the zig BDFL and headperson of the ZSF. That’s de-facto official in my book, and I will view other communities that live or die at Andrew’s discretion the same way.
This will be my last post in this thread, but I do plan to read any further responses. Thanks for the consideration all 'round.
On the topic of having official communication channels:
I agree it would be nice, the problem of making it happen for real though is that it would mean having to grow the ZSF to include also moderators, which is not what we’re going for in terms of financial strategy.
The ZSF is trying really hard to stay lean and mean so that we can get Zig to v1.0 without having to agree to deals we don’t like with big tech, and that means necessarily having to make do without some things that cost head count / effort / money.
Another example of this is the fact that we’re not going to have an official package index. We could debate whether it’s a good thing to have in the first place or not (ultimately I believe it’s not), but regardless not having a package index plays into the aforementioned strategy. A package index comes with some serious costs attached to it, and in turn it would require us to smile and bend the knee to AWS or one of the other clouds in order to have free credits to run it.
I was a while ago in a discussion with somebody from the (old) Rust Core team and I was told the cost for them just to offer the compiler (so not of crates.io, just the cost generated by people downloading the rust compiler) was in the high tens of thousands of dollars every month. Just the compiler, not the packages.
Rust must receive a constant stream of free Amazon credits for this to be sustainable, and we just don’t want to do that (nor could probably).
So, to stay sustainable, we opted to not have an official package index (among other considerations), and no official communication channels that require institutional moderation.
One crazy thought here, given Zig’s (and the ZFS’s) inclinations, would be to leverage some sort of peer to peer network and push the decentralization even further. As long as you can bootstrap a minimal thing, you could “ask around” your peers for current versions of the tooling and download those from the peers to your machine. Something similar might work for packages, and even a package index that “emerges” from your peers.
Is it possible to export r/Zig in some form, even if as PDF file(s)?
I mean, free of charge, just to have a read-only snapshot, not to migrate it somewhere else.
I also don’t think /r/zig should be closed. We can close it temporarily to show solidarity with what’s going on.
I don’t think just because reddit is for-profit that it’s inherently evil.
I don’t want to get into ideological argument but it’s important for many normal people looking for zig answers to have access to the information on reddit. In any case, we allow people to log in using github, which is owned by microsoft, and if there is an archetype of for-profit software company, microsoft is up there.
I’m all for decentralization (those of you who met me know what I’m building) but I do wish the “core” team of Zig, which is a programming language would be more open to people who have different opinions because a programming langauge is a tool that’s open for everyone.
Also, Tiger Beetle and Bun both are well-loved of this community are for profit as well.
Nobody has said this. If anything most of the the complaints related to reddit are about it not being good at the business it’s supposed to be in. I think everybody would be happy if reddit made sure to be a sustainable image and discussion board, but instead it’s playing some other kind of game at the expense of its customer base. This was my latest comment on HN on the topic, some replies are also interesting:
Also the people running the company have been lying about the entire process:
I’m not a native speaker but, according to the dictionary, “to profiteer” means seeking profit past what’s considered reasonable and that does align with my description.