Forum/gitter. mailing-list/IRC?

Hi,
just accepted the muut ToS: https://muut.com/terms/
which are pretty long and scary (don't even know if GPL-ed code would be
postable here with this:

grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, perpetual, irrevocable,
royalty-free, sublicensable (through multiple tiers) right AND LICENSE
to exercise any and all copyright, trademark, publicity, and database
rights you have in the content

mailing-list are future-proof, common and usable by anyone using its
preferred email client. Archives can be searched online or offline, are
often downloadable gziped, exportable and search-engine friendly.

About the IRC, I just registered to gitter (after they accessed
read-only to my personal information) and found that it's
irssi-incompatible (if not IRC-client incompatible).
In 5 of 6 attempts I ended as having "joined" the channel, but no
incoming message appear and what I write does not seem to reach the
channel. The fact that it worked one is a clear hint in the bitter-side
bug. That's a shame that when IRC works pretty robustly for decades,
this IRC "wrapper" makes things work so poorly.

Why not just create something on #freenode (or any other) and get done
with it?

thx

I've been doing this kinda thing for a LONG time, and have used many mailing lists and frankly they are much less user friendly and definitely much slower and clunkier than a more interactive solution such as Muut. Must is far from perfect, but it was quick and easy to setup. As we progress as a community, we might look at alternative options such as nodebb.org.

The same can be said for IRC. I've used IRC for years, but its not very reliable, unfriendly and complex for new users, doesn't provide any history at all, or search capabilities. Nor does IRC have any way to integrate services (such as GitHub and Twitter). Gitter is working out great for us and with its very tight integration to GitHub, I see no reason to seek alternatives. Their web client is pretty decent, and they have native clients available for Mac and Windows and also iPhone.

I won't argue much. So far none of the web UI out-performs my email client and my text editor (and that's why freedom is good too).
And about IRC, I never experienced, in (many) years, a situation where nothing comes in/out after having joined a chan. My IRC client (irssi) is pretty robust and I'm worried "features" could justify the introduction of such terrible bugs.
Once again and as with email/SMTP, the IRC protocol is a standard allowing anyone to communicate with the tool of their choice.

BTW, you can use gitter with an IRC client via the bridge, but frankly your going to miss out on all the cool markdown features and integrations.