Announcing the OCaml Zulip at ocaml.zulipchat.com

Community
,
1

Dear OCaml community,

There has been a recent renewed interest in maintaining an open, organized and synchronous communication channel, and the OCaml Zulip has been revived. It is freely readable without an account at ocaml.zulipchat.com, and can be accessed through various means of authentication, including Github accounts.

On Zulip, we have full access to our data at all time, and should the company change its policy, the data can be retrieved and the current version of Zulip server is self-hostable. In the meantime, we have been graciously offered sponsorship as an open community and can enjoy all features of the platform for free, and we thank Zulip for that.

The platform can be accessed either on the web (one tab per server), or on the desktop and mobile client, which allow for managing multiple organizations.

Talking about multiple organizations, there are already many OCaml, programming languages and verification related Zulip servers, such as Rocq, Types, Why3, Catala, Bytecode alliance, Owi or Aeneas. Check-out the full list of open to the public communities for more.

Finally, we would like to emphasize that any governance team or project is welcome to host their discussions on the Zulip, where a channel can be created and admin rights granted.

Cheers!

PS: For anyone already on the Zulip, as part of this effort, the URL was migrated from caml.zulipchat.com to ocaml.zulipchat.com and you may have to remove the server and login again.

10 Likes
[ANN] Dune dev meeting
2

I clicked on the link. What am I doing wrong? (Do I need to install something first?)

edit: fixed

3

There was a typo in the link, it should be fixed now, sorry! (It is .com and not .org…)

1 Like
4

I personally banned all synchronous messaging systems for myself (they require a discipline not to be distracted by them that I do not have) so I will likely not show up there but it’s quite nice to see a public space online where you are not pestered to login and/or shown ads.

11 Likes
5

That’s very nice to see. Thanks a lot for setting this up.

I have two questions:

I really don’t want to hangout in 4 different places, and would appreciate zulip (+ getting all the messages there).

1 Like
6

Zulip’s a nice choice of technology here (I’ve just been migrating my research group over to using it as well). However, bridging doesn’t work well due to its architecture of topics and channels making it difficult to map it to Matrix/IRC aside from a very simplistic way.

The chat here on this Discourse forum hasn’t taken off at all, so I’m happy enough just turning it off again. I’m against bridging it as I don’t want to give out API tokens to other sites if at all possible, and bridging requires quite a high degree of privilege to mimic messages to/from users.

9 Likes
7

Zulip has a very good story regarding bridges, see the integrations/communication page.

Setting-up an IRC bridge is straightforward. It works quite directly as a Zulip topic ↔ IRC channel bridge. But it requires having a server. I could set it up on my own server but I don’t think it would be a good thing. Is there a way to get access to an “official” server to setup this kind of things? Or simply ask someone with acces to set it up? I guess the discourse and the PeerTube are hosted on such a server that’s why I suppose that they exist.

I also had some experience bridging with Matrix, which is doable as explained here and it was doing quite well. Once again it was a Zulip topic ↔ a Matrix room bridge. But that was in the pre Matrix-thread era and I’m not sure how it would render today.

So I guess, there are two questions to be answered: is there a server available somewhere to host such bridges? Is there someone volunteering to set them up?

8

I disagree that there’s a good bridging story for any of these chat systems:

  • You end up with banhammers being dropped from the other side of the network if a bridging user triggers some abuse threshold. Matrix dropped their public bridges due to the moderation load for this reason.
  • They just diminish the user experience for the native system(s) being used. Squeezing all IRC traffic onto one Zulip channel/topic isn’t how Zulip is intended to be used. Reorganising topics and curating it for future asynchronous readers is a key draw of the Zulip design, and you can’t do that with bridges.
  • Deep bridging requires explicit support from both protocols to mimic users, or else you end up with a wrapper user, which brings its own problems with user spoofing and other security issues.

So feel free to run a server of your own, of course, but I’m not volunteering any of the Cambridge hosting resources for this that currently run watch/ocaml.org as I believe there’s a material risk we’ll attract unwanted security holes if we do so. I think the OCaml Zulip server will do just fine without this, though; I’m enjoying using Zulip for my research group so far.

5 Likes
9

@avsm perhaps you should do that before someone is tempted to talk to themselves there :–)

1 Like