In Canonical-specific work rooms, it’s generally a policy that the first message in a conversation should be a normal message, then the rest of the conversation should happen in a thread (at least, that’s the pattern I’ve seen). This is important for Canonical employees to be able to work in parallel without drowning each other out. This is in stark contrast to many of the community-specific rooms (most notably flavor dev channels), which seem to have a much more IRC-like “throw everything into one chatroom and hope for the best” mode of operation. These two ways of operating are fundamentally incompatible and result in confusion in some instances - someone used to the Canonical way of chatting might start a thread in the middle of a large IRC-style conversation and then get lost in the flow, while someone used to IRC-style conversation might send five messages in a Canonical-chat-style room and disrupt work on accident.
Each room’s admins are obviously free to set and enforce whatever policies they want with threading. However, for the rooms that are maintained primarily by the Matrix Ops team (Ubuntu Support, Ubuntu Discussion, Ubuntu Matrix Ops, and arguably maybe also Ubuntu Flavors, Ubuntu Development, and maaaaybe Ubuntu Release though I think that one isn’t under Matrix Ops jurisdiction), I think we should stick with one method of doing things so that we have the least chance of causing problems. Either we should require things to be done in threads, or we should require things to be done IRC-style, not both. Otherwise important chats will get lost or people will get sorely frustrated.
There are good arguments for and against using threads - some arguments for both sides are:
- For threads:
- Canonical employees are used to using threads since they have to in their rooms. Many of the most notable community members in Ubuntu are Canonical employees, so this represents a significant portion of our userbase that we want to support.
- Element is the only client that really supports threads well (specifically Element Desktop/Web), but Element is also the only Matrix client the Matrix Council recommends, and other clients are basically unsupported (you can use them if you want but be ready to solve problems on your own).
- Threads really do help keep a room from being too noisy, which can be of great value in highly active rooms.
- Against threads:
- We may have our recommendations about what Matrix clients to use, but let’s face it - people are going to use whatever Matrix client they want. juliank uses Fractal, irihapeti uses Nheko, eeickmeyer uses or at least used to use NeoChat, I’ve played with Nheko, NeoChat, and Gomuks, etc. Virtually every single Matrix client except Element handles threads horribly, even Nheko which is supposed to have support for them to some degree. Thus a threads-first policy makes life horrible for a substantial portion of our users.
- Threads are just hard to follow. Doesn’t matter what client, even Element struggles with this. If you ping someone in a thread, chances are they will never see it because they won’t be able to even tell you pinged them, and even if they figure it out they might not find the thread you tried to ping them in. I had this happen to me just recently, and left rbasak without admin rights in a room he needed them in for multiple hours because I just didn’t see his ping.
- Threads are hard to hold a large conversation in. Element seems to think that a chat pane the width of dining fork and a half is plenty enough room to hold a conversation in, when it’s really just not. Once people start writing large messages (and we have a lot of those kinds of people in this community, myself included), it becomes cumbersome to scroll through and read the conversation.
Ideas? Personally I’m undecided here - I don’t want to make life harder for Canonical people or end up with rooms that are too chaotic to follow along in, but as you can probably tell I really do not like threads personally.
Again, this is NOT talking about an Ubuntu Community wide policy. Each room should do with threads what it feels is right. This is just talking about policies for a subset of rooms that the Ubuntu Matrix Ops oversee.