My FOSDEM 2024 Talk: Migrating the WordPress Community from Slack to Matrix

When I submitted my application for a talk at FOSDEM 2024, we were still on for migrating the WordPress community to Matrix.

Alas, there were many factors that led us to pause the transition indefinitely, announced by Matt at the Q&A of State of the Word 2023. The most important factors were accessibility problems, some important feature-imparity compared with Slack, and the license changes at Element (to AGPL, with the requirement to sign a CLA when contributing).

The WordPress community has collected their issues in a Github repository. We tried hard to overcome the issues, through documentation, education (some things just work differently in a federated environment), and upstream patches (for example to address some of the accessibility problems).

In the end, I did not cancel but held my talk on February 4 at FOSDEM 2024 in Brussels, explaining all the things we did to lower the barrier of entry:

As well as bots and integration we created to fulfill the specific needs, such as these Maubot plugins:

  • Post to room: post messages via webhook
  • Relay: an integration can react to room messages via webhook
  • Group mentions: upon command a bot mentions many people
  • Watchdog: alert about community created rooms

Also, we held weekly meetings in the WordPress meta chat throughout the year, and published meeting notes afterwards.

There is a lot more in my presentation, I hope that my presentation slides can be helpful to other communities (or companies) trying to migrate from Slack to Matrix. Maybe some things that were a blocker for the WordPress community are not so important for other communities.

Finally, here is the video of the ~30 minutes presentation:

FOSDEM 2024 talk by Alex Kirk: Embracing Matrix for Enhanced Communication: Migrating the WordPress Community from Slack to Matrix

Kudos to my colleagues Paulo Pinto and Ashish Kumar who did a lot of the heavy lifting in the effort. Together we submitted around 40 upstream pull requests (on Synapse (pre-license change), Element-Web, Slack bridge, and more).

Keeping A Family Wiki

Members of my (some of them extended) family recently entered and left life, which is always an opportunity to think about my family. I’ve written before about my own efforts to keep family history in a wiki which is powered by my Family Wiki WordPress plugin (Github).

Every relative gets their own page, like on Wikipedia, just in private. This is why I am also not sharing screenshots, the plugin page has a few fake ones. Here is one screenshot of the editing page though (you can scroll away the bottom when you enter text):

It is not a very elaborate plugin but it was based on a born and died shortcode to create something like a family birthday calendar as well as a generally notable-dates calendar for your family.

In order to add some structure to this, I have now (manually) migrated this metadata to use Advanced Custom Fields through which you’d now not only enter the birth and death date but also parents and children.

With a new [name_with_bio] shortcode, you’ll then receive automatic output like this:

Name (born as Maiden name on January 1, 1900 in Place, died on March 31, 2000 (aged: 100) in Other Place; daughter of Father and Mother; sibling of Brother and Sister; parent of Daughter and Son)

This metadata might make it possible to render a family tree later on, since now the pages are interconnected with each other. Maybe something like this already exists for ACF, I looked a while back and there wasn’t.

Just to recap: my personal mission is to keep stories of my relatives alive, where and what they worked on, who they visited, what adventures they might have encountered. In general: anecdotes, maybe with some pictures. Also, for living relatives, their contact data.

This is why I deem a wiki format to be superior to all those geneaology sites. I don’t value the huge amout of connections to some far-removed relatives that they encourage to build. I care about those that I might have got to know or just missed.

And, having a WordPress blog (network) already, it’s easy to put this on WordPress vs. using a dedicated wiki (and actually it’s quite easy to find cheap WordPress hosting). I had the original versions on a Mediawiki but it was quite a hassle to maintain, now the data is just in a WordPress. Should my plugin no longer work, nothing is lost since the wiki pages are just plain WordPress pages. Some of the nicities will go away but the meat is in the writing.

Oh, and of course a benefit of a wiki is that other relatives can also contribute. In reality, it’s hard to get them to contribute but when they do, they add some details I didn’t know and that’s just worth so much for me!

I can highly recommend to try keeping family history in such a way. It’s a really nice way to pass this on to further generations of your family, and also for my own reference when my poor memory strikes again.

Posted in Web