Modern XMPP project discussion - 2025-06-27

> Why is "chatroom" considered a historic term we should not use anymore? I don't think it's a great term, but it makes as much sense to me as "channel" Spacial metaphors in computing don't make much sense and are confusing to anyone that didn't grow up with such legacy terms. ↺

> https://docs.modernxmpp.org/rationale/ has a bunch of reasoning for some of the choices, linked in a footnote somewhere 👍 ↺

>> Why is "chatroom" considered a historic term we should not use anymore? I don't think it's a great term, but it makes as much sense to me as "channel" > Spacial metaphors in computing don't make much sense and are confusing to anyone that didn't grow up with such legacy terms. How about people now growing up in "virtual reality" "spaces"

Oops, wrong muc/channel/space/...

In VR spacial metaphors make sense, because it is a virtual space.

> Spacial metaphors in computing don't make much sense and are confusing to anyone that didn't grow up with such legacy terms. I think "channel" is potentially equally confusing on that front, since it's not being transferred on different radio frequencies or a carved strait. I put potentially since I think it is more commonly used in tech ✏ ↺

So one would need to ask random people over the world what terms they would understand. So far I'm happy with the terms that were choosen here. But I didn't really ask others about them.

In foreign languages, group chats are sometimes just called "groups."

Masked Witch: yeah channel is also debateable, but it is much more commonly used and also invokes the analogy of an public broadcasting channel.

But it translates poorly to other languages.

Understandable. Why not just broadly use "Group Chats", then have "Public Group Chats" and "Private Group Chats"? We could even go with what Caleb pointed out and s/"Group Chats"/Groups/ if Groups makes sense

Why not just IM? Oh yeah, not instant.

Aren't channels things dug out of other things to let stuff like water flow through? /0.5 sarcasm

Pretty sure we have had this exact discussion several times in the past.

> Why is "chatroom" considered a historic term we should not use anymore? I don't think it's a great term, but it makes as much sense to me as "channel" I think it is a great term and I use it all the time. ✏ ↺

I guess there will never be a term *everyone* agrees is "the best" So the real question is: are there good enough reasons to change the existing terms, reasons that weight more then the stability and continuity it has to start anew again? If not then the current terms are fine, even if not optimal for everyone. It would be bad to change it like every three years imo.

> Pretty sure we have had this exact discussion several times in the past. Ah sorry, I will drop it then ↺

I do wonder where we could have the arguments written down so we don't end up repeating the exact same discussion every few months.

In the moderation group chat over on Queer Spark, I have a link, in the topic/subject, to a shared notes file on our nextcloud instance where we can keep anything that needs to be kept for reference. That's probably overkill for this, but maybe a Q&A page on modernxmpp.org for questions that have already reached a conclusion here and have that linked in the topic/subject?