A few graduate student users of Artiq met up around @rmcgill9's poster today at DAMOP. We discussed how a more causal online space for users of Artiq would be really useful. It would be to: discuss debugging, code share, best practices, how to avoid common pitfalls (per @rmcgill9's poster), etc. Does such an online space for user to user dialogue currently exist? If not, how could we self organize as a user community?

A discord or slack channel might work best. Many other open source projects (qiskit, unitary fund, ...) have discord or slack channels for user to user dialogue. It's worth considering as artiq adoption grows and there are more graduate student users. I'd like to hear others' opinions on this idea.

    6 days later

    How do Mattermost/Matrix compare to slack/discord? Do they have similar features and organization?

    Yes, Mattermost is essentially an open source and self-hostable clone of Slack.

    22 days later

    I think a more commonly used online workspace such as Slack would find larger adoption as most people already use it.

    Have you actually tried https://chat.m-labs.hk ? It only takes a few minutes to sign up, the interface and features are very similar to Slack, and many people who are the most familiar with ARTIQ already use it.

    It's also ad- and tracker-free, whereas I get 19 uBlock Origin alerts about various Silly Valley spy widgets by simply opening the Slack homepage. Discord is similar. Wouldn't surprise me if they used the contents of private conversations in an unethical manner as well.

    Matrix would be an option if you are against Mattermost. It's also open, free from trackers and other garbage, and one big advantage over Mattermost is it supports federation.

    20 days later

    I don't mean to rock the boat too much. If there's already a base of people using Mattermost, then there's no need to use a different platform. I'm going to make an account rn. Thanks @sb10q!