Concerns

Intro

We will probably consolidate and prioritize concerns that people have at some point and on some other page. In the mean time, treat this like a big whiteboard where anyone can just add a section voicing their concerns. Keep in mind that others will be reviewing and prioritizing them at some point and we will take all of them seriously, but only to the extent that we are able to understand what you have written. So do your best to express yourself fully and clearly, perhaps even with examples, and we can summarize and shorten elsewhere.

Q1

Is there going to be a monetary cost to be a user? I can't afford to pay for chat, or I have a philosophical or moral objection to money or the idea of charging for this service.

C1

I don't think it's unreasonable to ask consistently active users to help support the service. I support Grimoire on the basis of a handful of users who elect to donate between $1 and $5/mo. While I concede that getting started should be free, the notion that it needs to be free is pretty outlandish. There are concrete costs to the developers and administrators in terms of their time, as well financial costs of running the service. I think it's more than reasonable to expect and request some service charge. ~ arrdem

Q2

Is it realistic to think that an unpaid community effort will succeed? Aren't you being foolish? You got us all to use Slack, which we like, and now it might go away and you aren't doing the right thing(s) to address that problem.

#Q3

I want to offer financial support for this effort because it is important to me and/or my business but I don't know how to do that and I certainly don't want to give my hard earned money to someone I don't trust so why don't you have some trustworthy third-party organization like one of those OSS non-profits provide financial oversight and make it easy for me to donate funds for hosting and admin costs?

#Q4

Who is going to host this chat service? How is hosting going to be paid for? Is it going to be secured against hackers and evil elements, like denial of service attacks? These things all take resources of time, skill, and money. How is that going to be handled in a safe, secure, professional manner so we don't have performance, security and other problems. If this succeeds and is popular it is going to have to be able to support that growth and handle those loads or it won't be any good.

#Q5

Just a note for discussion, I don't know how many of you use lobste.rs (see login page), but I'm ​_highly_​ opposed to having whatever it is we switch to be truly open access.

I think that the history of IRC servers and IRC drama is evidence enough that if we offer a properly open chat platform, it will eventually be abused and used to harass people in manners which the unfortunate administrators will have great difficulty responding to. I think that the Lobsters approach of making you get an invite from an existing user is interesting in that it means you can't just spam smurf accounts and there is a chain of accountability in the case of a user who invites multiple abusive accounts to prevent such abuse.

I understand that we want a low friction "newcommer first join" UX, but I think this does also need to be weighed with the potential for abuse.

#Q6

Who gets to act as a chat moderator?

#Q7

What to what Code of Conduct will we hold participants and use for resolving disputes? See also Q6

See the existing Code of Conduct

#Q8

What is the choice/succession mechanism for administrators?

#Q9

Who gets to run bots? Where do bots get to post? Who has oversight of bots to make sure they don't do arbitrary and rude things like ignore particular people, post spam or otherwise detract from the community?