Introducing Discourse Chat (BETA)

[erlend_sh (Erlend Sogge Heggen)]

Bridging is planned, albeit in a limited capacity. We’re looking into replicating what @merefield put together for Discord for other platforms.

[mattdm (Matthew Miller)]

Of course, the most exciting thing from my point of view would be for Discourse chat to act as a Matrix homeserver and Matrix client, rather than having a new separate protocol. But simple bridging would be okay as long as it’s relatively seamless.

[CaptainZac]

Hey, just a quick question. Is this plugin a permanent overlay to Discourse, or is it just in the places you chose for it to be? That is, if you choose to install it, will your entire community change to that, or will it only change in the categories you select?

[meglio (Anton)]

Congrats on the first publicly accessible release.

For our goat farmers and cheese makers community, my master plan long term is to move some people who spend time in Facebook for chats only over to our Discourse community.

For the professional Jai programming language developer online community I’m building from ground up, my plan is to demonstrate Discourse Chat as an alternative to Discord chat.

For some of my clients who use Slack basic features only, I already managed to move project management over to Discourse, but once this plugin becomes stable-ready-for-production, I’ll start offering it as a complete Slack replacement.

Finally, my big-dream-almost-unrealistic plan would be to convince Toptal management to abandon Slack and move onto Discourse completely. Slack sucks big time by not giving a way to organize knowledge into searchable, collectively editable, categorizable, watchable threads.

[quimgil]

Very interesting news, thank you.

My first thought was… time to polish emoji reactions and support them officially?

I swear I’m not kidding.

(Yes, Retort - a reaction-style plugin for Discourse exists.)

[Moin]

@quimgil

time to polish emoji reactions and support them officially?

There is an official plugin similar to retort

Discourse Reactions - Beyond Likes

Bored of likes in discourse? Here’s something you will definitely love. Overview Discourse-reactions is a plugin that allows user to add their reactions to the post. This plugin can engage more audiences to the post. Users who may not have previously wanted to Like your content are now able to send more specific signals about how your content makes them feel. Users who may not have wanted to use their phones to post can now use them to “react” much easier. Reactions can be different on each w…

[sunjam (james.network)]

My suggestions. I have not actually tested the plugin yet, but I find these even more important than bridging (also useful):

• Allow access to the chat by group.
• optionally Allow r/w access to the chat by anonymous.
  • Allow groups to have their own chats
• Optionally remove chat comments after X hours / days / weeks by group
• Optionally Allow sidebar visibility for tags / groups in chat
• Make it easy for someone to “convert” comment(s) into the body of a topic, perhaps by trust level/group. Perhaps handled by flagging.
• Convert comments(s) into reply on an existing topic would also rock by trust level/group. Perhaps handled by flagging.
• Tags within chat
• If a group is mentioned which allows a user to join / request membership, allow that person to immediately join / request group membership from within chat.
• Contact Discobot directly within chat, both publicly or convert to private message.
• Assign chat visibility to relate to a particular topic / reply / tag for a duration
• Allow users to quickly mention existing posts within chat.
  • If a post mentioned gets a heart in chat, add that heart to the original post as well (assuming such an action is supported, lol)

Search topics/posts integration
It would be interesting to add automatic searching when a user is attempting to post in chat, so when they type: Hi, I cannot find music... music post they need automatically appears as a link.

Moderation.

• Slow users posting too much in chat.
• Allow group/trust to ignore a user/group in chat permanently (all of their comments are no longer visible once ignored)
• Flag / Silence / Ban user within chat.
• restrict words if blacklisted
• allow attachments by group

Anything encouraging others to join up or expound within a larger post appreciated.
Tag support would also allow chat integration plugin support, covering all existing Discourse bridging.

[erlend_sh (Erlend Sogge Heggen)]

@CaptainZac

if you choose to install it, will your entire community change to that, or will it only change in the categories you select?

Only the ones you select!

[hellekin]

This is awesome! But as others suggested, having yet another source of instant messaging can be problematic. Although I love IRC, I think a better integration would be with XMPP as its federation is larger. I would not go the Matrix way, because Matrix federation is so greedy. There are good bridges between Matrix and ActivityPub and XMPP and ActivityPub being worked on.

[Jagster (Jakke Lehtonen)]

The chat uses slug of category as name of that channel. That is not perhaps the best solution?

[meglio (Anton)]

@hellekin

But as others suggested, having yet another source of instant messaging can be problematic.

I’d like to re-frame the problem.

For some reason, people see this Chat feature as a +1 source of instant messaging. Instead, I’d suggest to primarily see it (at this stage) as a replacement for existing instant messaging platforms that don’t give a way to organize knowledge into searchable, collectively editable, categorizable, watchable threads.

In fact, Discourse Chats is capable of not just replacing an existing platform functionality wise, but also eliminating the old platform, thus decreasing the number of platforms you use, not increasing it.

So, for example, if you’ve been using Slack basic features (mostly simple chat), you just stop using it and start using Discourse Chat – now you have -1 platform to think about and to integrate with.

Same goes for Discord and other “heavy” chats. If you only ever used it for simple stuff, you’re now better off migrating to Discourse Chat and discarding the old platform. Not only will it decease the number of platforms you use, but it will also make your chat integrate with your forum / wiki / knowledge base / documentation / project management more tightly.

On the other hand, if you’ve been using Facebook Messenger that integrates tightly with Facebook, and you need that, why would you consider to start using Discourse Chats and thus adding one more source of instant messages? You should not until Discourse Chats can integrate with Facebook Messenger and let you use the latter through the former, i.e. without leaving the Discourse Chat.

Same goes for Telegram, Viber, and whatnot.

So my advice would be to re-frame the problem and to think about the Discourse Chat feature from a different prospective. It’s a great opportunity to start using less tools/platforms, not more of them. That’s how I’ve been thinking about it all time from the very first notion about the Chat feature from the Discourse team. And it’s actually very exciting.

[mattdm (Matthew Miller)]

@meglio

In fact, Discourse Chats is capable of not just replacing an existing platform functionality wise, but also eliminating the old platform, thus decreasing the number of platforms you use, not increasing it.

This only seems possible if you are talking about a very small group. I have Slack, Matrix, Keybase, Telegram, Signal, Google Chat, Twitter, Discord, Mattermost, and Rocketchat just to communicate with co-workers. Not to mention IRC, although Matrix bridges mostly take care of that. Oh, and Zulip. There’s probably more. And that’s not considering friends, family, hobbies. Literally all of those are for work-related communication.

Most of those are “capable” of replacing most of the others, but they do not. Instead they accumulate.

Famously…

Note the parenthetical, which directly mentions instant messaging. This is why I very strongly hope any new things on the pile at least intercommunicate — and do so using an existing standard.

Don’t get me wrong — sure, try something new. But for me, the only really compelling new thing at this point would be interoperability.

[meglio (Anton)]

All correct except that it has nothing to do with the idea I tried to convey. Maybe I failed to explain. Might try to explain in different words sometime later.

[jrgong]

@RGJ

In all seriousness: I think it’s a great idea to integrate a chat into a discourse community. In our forum we ended up only using one single channel in Rocket Chat via Communiteq integration as well as for internal communication concerning one time questions which don’t have long term value.

The only reason we are not expanding is because the chat might
a) cannibalize the activity in the forum
b) chats end up in long form discussions which are more suited for the forum

IMHO: I think there are great chat platforms out there if there is a more complex and extensive demand in a community. Hence I would love to see a more KISS chat integration that might as well act as “Private Messages v2” and later on replace the current messages UX/UI in the long run.

[Jagster (Jakke Lehtonen)]

I’m not fan to chats, but it is just me.

But how expensive is this? Meaning RAM, processors and storage.

[hellekin]

@meglio

In fact, Discourse Chats is capable of not just replacing an existing platform functionality wise, but also eliminating the old platform, thus decreasing the number of platforms you use, not increasing it.

This is entirely theoretical. The reality is different: people use a combination of networks, e.g., IRC, XMPP, Matrix, to circumvent the situation where Discourse does not have a chat channel. However, these networks are also used for different usage than just Discourse; in other words, many communities continue to exist without Discourse on those synchronous networks, and it would be a complete delusion to ignore this fact.

[meglio (Anton)]

If you read my messages again, you’ll see that I’m only talking about communities that DO use forum / wiki / knowledge base / collaboration of other form. So if you’re answering me, the answer is offtopic.

[Alec]

I am super excited about this.

Few months ago I was in the process of incorporating babble. Just before I was about to roll it out the plugin broke.

For my community (demographic largely 40-60 year olds) many of them technophobic. For me the integration within the same platform is exactly what I need. I was super reluctant to introduce something like discord despite all its benefits.

I am lucky to be part of the test group and even at this early stage it looks ideal for my forum. Massive upgrade on babble. I can see how it will compliment my forum. How it will be intuitive to my community who have now adapted and become familiar with Discourse.

I appreciate different forums have different use cases with different chat needs. But for forums like mine this is a ideal. Much more preferential to chat software.

[Canapin (Coin-coin le Canapin)]

Am I allowed to share some screenshots of the closed chat feature from meta, to give a preview of what it looks like to my communities?