GitHub Discussions for Scala

Community
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This scratches a personal itch: I’m often answering the same questions over and over again on Gitter, I feel. From now on, I’m going to try to notice when I’m doing that, and add it to the FAQ.

Is GitHub Discussions being considered?

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Great question. I haven’t tried it yet, myself, and I’m not aware of any previous discussions about adopting it in the Scala org. Opinions?

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The only problem I see with it, is that it could be overwhelming if the general audience will choose this over users.scala-lang.org or the scala/scala gitter.

So the scope of it should be clearly defined, and have ready contributors participating in it.

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I’m a bit worried about relying for too many service on one platform—GitHub. Source hosting, issues, CI, now chat. Not that Gitter is a particularly great software. I would prefer if some Scala org (Scala Center probably?) put up an open source software on their own server. At my institute, we run a Mattermost instance; it’s a quite well working piece of software.

Also—isn’t GitHub discussions more akin to Discourse (i.e. users.scala-lang.org)?

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I love Discourse forums: great UI, flexible subscriptions/notifications, etc. We’re having great discussions here and I think it works for Scala community very well.

I’m also generally excited about GitHub Discussions. One thing it has that Discourse doesn’t (AFAIK) is the StackOverflow-like Q&A, where people can ask questions, upvote them, get some feedback and highlight an answer. I think this is very useful in general. But then again, we already have StackOverflow and people use it for Scala-related questions very actively.

So IMO GH Discussions could be more useful for particular Scala projects (e.g. see Metals), but for Scala language in general it doesn’t seem to offer anything on top of existing community platforms.

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Piggybacking on what @laughedelic said, I think GitHub discussions would be a suitable replacement for users.scala-lang.org (mostly Q&As) but not for contributors (lengthy open ended discussions where Discourse really shines)

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