Some discussion on Discord went on regarding this, about how it's felt Tildes doesn't do a very good job of this yet, and right now too much responsibility may be resting on too few shoulders. Some suggestions for ways to improve this were:
Start doing Daily/Weekly Discussions on ~tildes.official again (I wouldn't mind taking over this task BTW)
p.s. I think a good first topic would be "How to make users feel less intimidated contributing to the site" in light of several people saying that simply tagging a topic was making them hesitate to submit things for fear of making a mistake.
Launch an Official Wiki. The unofficial one is already being used to decide community standards (e.g. the hierarchical tagging guide being worked on by alyaza, Tildes "how to" guide by Algernon_asimov, etc), which is probably better done on an official one
Consider adopting the new Unofficial Tildes Discord (admin'd by @Bauke, WandaSeldon, Deing and Clerical_Terrors) as the official Discord and start promoting it (as well as getting @Deimorz to start using it ;)
Create some more ~tildes groups that mirror things on gitlab (e.g. commits to ~tildes.commits, issues to ~tildes.issues) so people can be more aware and can participate more easily.
Edited
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cfabbrochanged title from Ways to increase community engagement and increase delegation of tasks to Ways to increase community engagement and delegation of tasks
changed title from Ways to increase community engagement and increase delegation of tasks to Ways to increase community engagement and delegation of tasks
Consider adopting the new Unofficial Tildes Discord (admin'd by @Bauke, WandaSeldon, Deing and Clerical_Terrors) as the official Discord and start promoting it (as well as getting @Deimorz to start using it ;)
I think using Discord as a platform for this could be a bad idea considering the "privacy by default" nature of Tildes. If we were to make it official, I think it could prevent people who want to continue engaging in the community without being on Discord.
I personally think a Rocket.Chat would fair fairly well but we'd need to host it ourselves. XMPP or IRC could also work (XMPP being my preference out of the latter two since it still sends you the messages even if offline and has an actually working account system)
The problem with hosting it ourselves is that it requires work on the part of Deimos, which is exactly what we're trying to prevent. Yes, Discord is far from an ideological ideal platform however we already have it set up and there are already a couple of admins, the only change here would be to recognize it as official and endorse it.
Then there also comes the point of accessibility, there are already a number of unofficial chats and as far as I'm aware the only one that's remotely active is the Discord server. It seems that even with alternatives the one most active is Discord and I think it's safe to say these days Discord is quite the popular option. Tildes itself will still be the place to discuss important things regarding itself, having a chat platform like this available is nice for coordinating people and talking about things in real time. Commenting and private messaging are great but there's a much bigger latency and it causes a lot of slowdown.
In the end it doesn't matter what platform it is as long as it can bring more efficient communication to the table. That Discord server right now is the one most equipped to just get that ball rolling, so it's the most straightforward option.
Yes, Discord is far from an ideological ideal platform however we already have it set up and there are already a couple of admins, the only change here would be to recognize it as official and endorse it.
For Deimos to count it as official, he should be the one moderating in the end so it'd still be some level of effort.
Then there also comes the point of accessibility, there are already a number of unofficial chats and as far as I'm aware the only one that's remotely active is the Discord server. It seems that even with alternatives the one most active is Discord and I think it's safe to say these days Discord is quite the popular option.
Let's go over them and see why Discord would obviously be the most popular.
Discord
Easy to use, many people already have an account.
Keybase
Quite unaccessible and very little documentation at all. I looked for a long time before realising there was just nothing on their website.
IRC
IRC is an antiquated mess which is unfriendly as hell and doesn't have any sort of history making chatting is a painful experience most of the time.
Matrix
I have personal gripes with it and it's not a very popular service either, the UX/UI is... not great,let's put it that way.
I think if you look at it from this perspective, it's fairly obvious why Discord would go on top. Rocket.Chat is very easy to install and maintain from my knowledge so it really shouldn't be a problem on that front. And for the chatting experience, it's fairly good and ideologically safe.
Just chiming in as another Discord UTC admin, I personally do not believe that officializing it should be a goal for us or the site. Raising it into any official status would require more moderation as it needs currently thanks to higher influx. So, we'd get a second, exceedingly high-traffic, place Deimos would have to moderate (it being official) or a potential ugly disagreement source when someone other than Deimos does the moddery there.
That is an issue regardless of platform, obviously. Also, Deimos has made some valid points against any real-time chats here.
A quicker way of communication than Tildes PMs will probably be needed at some point, though. It must, however, be accessible to non-techies, i.e. people that do not want to or cannot use IRC or other frankly rather exotic self-hosted solutions. Mozilla is currently searching for an IRC replacement, I think we should take note on what they wind up using.
Thanks, there are some good suggestions and thoughts in here, and I appreciate you writing them up.
First, I'm working on a basic wiki system now. I agree that getting something like that integrated properly would make a big difference and allow a lot of this collaboration to take place on the site itself. It'll probably start out being extremely minimal, but I think I can get something to start with in the next couple of days.
I also still won't join or officially endorse the Discord server. It's great if you want to run it and some people want to hang out in there, but my concerns from the comment @deing linked are still there, and always will be. I know it seems like a pretty straightforward thing, but it adds a lot of potential issues. For example, if someone acts like an asshole in chat, do I need to ban them from the site? What if someone joins the chat and impersonates a Tildes user, how could we verify anything about that?
Some of the other suggestions are good and include things that do need to be done, but I think it's important to recognize that they're mostly important to people who are already heavily invested and engaged with Tildes. For example, one of the reasons that I stopped doing daily discussions is because several people told me that they felt like Tildes was a site almost entirely for talking about Tildes. Meta topics always cause large discussions, which is great and I always enjoy (and I'm sure the people looking at an issue like this do too), but they're actually kind of tiresome to a lot of others.
I'm still not in favour of using Discord but regarding :
What if someone joins the chat and impersonates a Tildes user, how could we verify anything about that?
It'd be easy to ask them to prove it by putting their username#0000 inside their bio which a bot can check as a first step to be able to participate in the chat.
Oh also, I'm going to try and find time to do a full sweep through all the issues this week and label them, close some, etc. I'm planning to try and add some form of ranking on everything for both "priority" as well as "complexity" (and will use the "Weight" field for one or the other). Is there anything else specific that any of you think I should make sure to do while I'm going through them?
several people told me that they felt like Tildes was a site almost entirely for talking about Tildes
Going from one extreme to the other isn't much better IMO. People can always filter Daily Discussions out, and if it's that much of an issue, ~tildes.discussions or similar could always be created, that way people could unsubscribe from it if they don't want to partake (or make it opt-in in the first place). I know I am a bit of the odd one out enjoying meta as much as I do... but I honestly can't help but feel that something very important was lost when regular community discussions, brainstorming of ideas and feedback stopped occurring regularly.
Those are only options for people that are logged-in, and also that understand filtering (very few people have any filters set up, so I'm not sure it's very well-understood). Anyway, it's probably tilted too far in the other direction now and I'd like to start doing some again, maybe weekly or so.
I was thinking that a decent compromise might be to make a subgroup like cfabbro mentioned, but make it opt-in like ~test. Before I saw his comment on this I was thinking the same thing but I thought it should be ~tildes.meta. The opt-in would not pollute the main site with meta. There might be a side benefit too. If you are into meta stuff and have something to offer, the fact that you would have had to find ~tildes.meta and subscribe, might be a decent filter to make sure you are actually familiar with the site prior to participating in the meta threads.
~tildes itself is already entirely meta, there's not really any need for a subgroup. Making ~tildes opt-in might be reasonable (but probably leaving ~tildes.official opt-out), but it would need some larger changes. Multiple people have expressed confusion about the ability to subscribe/unsubscribe from particular groups, it doesn't seem to very clear at all right now that it's even a possibility and people don't know how to find groups.