Online MacPorts Meeting on 21st April at 13:00 UTC - suggestion

[Rainer Müller]

On 2018-04-07 14:18, William H. Magill wrote:
> IRC is still quite popular in Europe, but is little used in the US.
IRC on our #macports channel is fine to ask questions for which you do
not want to write a lengthy email or to debug problems with quick
back-and-forth on what to check or try.

However, meetings on IRC are slow, as you have to wait for others to
type, you have no notifications whether others still have something to
say, etc.

For such a scheduled meeting, I would prefer audio chat as that would
make the communication more direct and faster.

> One alternative to IRC is “Discord” — it has the same “type text” capabilities as IRC, but as far as I’m concerned, it is MUCH easier to use.
> It also supports voice channels.
> 
> And, yes, there is a Mac client - OSX and IOS - as well as access through the browser.
> 
> https://discordapp.com
> 
> It is pitched as “for gamers,” mainly because of its voice capabilities.

Discord looks fine to me. Apparently we would not even be the first open
source project to use it [1]. Apparently you can use it directly in a
browser without registration ("claiming the account").

The other well-known option would of course be Skype. However, with
Skype one person would have to collect interested developers first and
then invite them to a group call. With Discord it seems like you can
just create a room that everyone can join, which would be a lot simpler.

There is also Jitsi [2], an open source solution for video conferencing
via WebRTC in the browser. However, browser support seems to be limited,
especially with Safari.

Rainer

[1] https://discordapp.com/open-source
[2] https://jitsi.org/