How viable is a lightweight desktop app for Discourse, and could it improve engagement and/or notification awareness?

[Tris20 (Tristan)]

@mcwumbly

There’s been some experiments with an electron app for Discourse (especially the chat part). So it’s feasible to do something like that, but nothing has been attempted that fully considers what it means to maintain something like that for a wide user base.

Interesting to hear it’s been investigated in the past, particularly with electron, though I imagine it would be quite a sizeable effort to produce and maintain properly.

@mcwumbly

In this scenario, I think chat is the likely thing people are going to reach for.

This is true but unfortunately it is MSTeams, and I don’t think we can use Discourse Chat: we’re encouraging users to share information between customer projects on Discourse, but that needs to be moderated strictly – Customer A cannot learn about Customer B’s secret sauce and vice versa. By using chat we muddy that behavioural expectation in Discourse, and sciphon good information from the shared/open part of the platform into fully private conversations. Even the “move conversation from chat to topic” functionality may not help here - people rush directly to the next thing in a work environment, and many of them will never learn to use this functionality.

@mcwumbly

What if you could just drop a link to that discussion in chat instead?

I think that’s the angle here. Move discussions from email to Discourse. Then MS teams is even better because you can easily link to those conversations without all that other nonsense.

This is completely true and thankfully hasn’t taken much encouragement.

How do we solve information going in the other direction though? The questions that are asked in MSTeams don’t result in links, don’t get broadcast and are lost in the Microsoft Ether. The user knows their recipient will recieve a notification immediately. With Discourse this is not the case. Even with email notifications, those are mixed with other messages, and typically get filtered into a folder. This immediacy is a key reason those questions are asked in MSTeams rather than Discourse.

@mcwumbly

OK, yeah, some those docs might be better discussed on Discourse too. That’s a harder move though in my experience. One thing that helps is that copy/paste from docs to Discourse is pretty good. Let people do their drafting in docs, but if they expectation is that the doc needs to be discussed, copy/paste it into Discourse and discuss a snapshot of it there.

I can vouch for this as a good process. It’s had decent success, particularly when we can sync those topics from another platform with the same markdown flavour like Gitlab.

@mcwumbly

• https://works.hashicorp.com/articles/standard-communication-tools
• https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/communication/

Thank you for providing these guidelines as reference. Our internal process for this has been a mess and remains undefined. There’s too many platforms, and too many chefs. I’ll bring these up as good examples.

@mcwumbly

I’m tempted to retitle this to be all about the why and move it to #community::category, but will let you chew on that idea first.

If you feel it’s better suited in that direction I’m happy for you to move it. For us the key problem is losing great long term conversations to MSTeams. Whilst we can continue to insist on asking those questions in Discourse instead, one part of the why is the immediacy of MSTeams. That’s a point where Discourse is currently losing and I think it’s a massive shame. I don’t see us replacing MSTeams with Discourse chat, so I feel like there needs to be another way of competing on a technical level.

In terms of the what, a desktop app could be a way forward, but I can see it being a lot of effort and is it really worth that effort? Probably not.

On the other hand, my search lead me to a few notification mulitplexers/centres. Perhaps it’s worth monitoring projects like these for future integrations? I suspect the ideal solution would be a single platform that centralises all of these notifications, similar to how Discourse Hub centralises a user’s Discourse notifications.

I had a 3-4 minute look at the following options. Not sure if you guys have looked in to them in terms of providing integrations? Would something like this even make sense?

https://novu.co/ - looks promising, though I couldn’t see a list of supported platforms
Pushover: Applications and Plugins - not sure if enterprise would go for this
GitHub - notifo-io/notifo: Multi channel notification service for collaboration tools, e-commerce, news service and more. · GitHub looks pretty nice, web interface seemed pretty slick and easy.