Chat is now readonly. Does this limit our freedom of speech

kristof · November 18, 2021, 11:58am

When we launched this forum on Jan 21 2020 we made our public chat readonly to make sure that people would start using this forum and our social media tool called freeflow pages.

The purpose is not to limit freedom of speech, in fact the opposite.
A chat tool is not a very good tool to let many people collaborate or find information.
It becomes very quickly a noisy tool and only the “die hard” supports stay following which is no the intention.

We believe the ThreeFold Forum is a great way to share information, collaborate, let people give feedback and ask questions. It has many useful features to make it more efficient.

Please read our getting started post for more info:

We hope you support our decision to improve our communication flow

regards

Kristof

MikeWW · January 21, 2020, 8:08am

This is an excellent move and long overdue in my opinion. Those people who genuinely care about ThreeFold, the outlook for TFT and our Community values and who want to contribute should have no trouble identifying themselves. Anonymity all too often gives cover to disgruntled ex colleagues, trolls, and others who mean harm. We have established FreeFlow pages and these forums we should use them. The hysterical overreaction to the recent change of course has been pathetic IMO. Just last week the SEC made an official announcement that they saw no difference between an IEO and an ICO. Other regulators will follow their lead. It is time For participants in our chats to “Wake up and smell the coffee”

Sacha · January 21, 2020, 8:18am

Totally agree. The network chat was pumping our energy rather than being helpful in anyway. Happy to see some changes that are more aligned with who we are.

Sacha.

aernoud · January 21, 2020, 8:25am

Good move. These telegram chat channels are better suited as a broadcast medium. Moderated forums with rules of engagement are a time proven concept for quality discussions. Much easier to follow too and less intrusive.

weynandkuijpers · January 21, 2020, 8:29am

I don’t think freedom of speech is affected, everyone is still more than welcome to be participate on this forum and have / share an opinion. It’s all about quality and having constructive debate

gosam · January 21, 2020, 8:29am

I think it’s very much within our rights to decide where and how we’d like to have conversations / build community. And hopefully our intention is clearly understood.

Ultimately, the Telegram channel was distracting and counterproductive. We’ll continue to use the channel to keep people updated – and we still have multiple places where folks can come to discuss, ask questions, and collaborate.

michael · January 21, 2020, 1:24pm

Are there plans to move this new chanel to mobile / app as well? Would make life easier to follow

zaibon · January 21, 2020, 1:26pm

yes this is planned to be integrated within the app too.

Otto_B · January 21, 2020, 2:10pm

A communication strategy is certainly not a bad idea and has nothing to do with limiting free speech. Coming from the ‘old style’ corporate world I would see a need to separate internal affairs from public information. There might be certain technical or strategical issues discussed within TF-Tech only. There might be areas, where a broader ‘selected audience’s’ info or contribution might be valuable. However this audience,when not part of TF-Tech needs to be ‘selected’, due to competitive reasons. For example, a serious investor has different interests compared to a freelance speculator. A marketing channel is different compared to Now, new times might also use new technologies or tools, which need to be evaluated, like Slack. ‘Corporate Values’ might only be posted pubicly, and commented upon request by an appointed person, in order not to waste time and resources.

Benjelloun.Oussama · January 22, 2020, 11:58am

I personally think this Forum is a fantastic idea, Great to drive people to engage with the team and with each other within Threefold’s sites: This forum, freeFlow pages, or on 3bot.

The only constraint is that it adds some friction to the onboarding process of a community member in comparison to a telegram chat or a discord server. We need to make sure that people understand where and how they can ask their questions, and openly discuss, and this across all devices

** Make a step by step guide to download 3bot, join the forum, and connect it to mobile
** Include CTAs on the website to join the forum, and download 3bot
** Clarify on telegram ( and pin the message ) that the chat is no longer live and will be reserved for news, and that All interaction will be hosted on this forum/3bot
** Email all previous campaign participants and ambassadors to let them know of the update and the new process.

zaibon · January 22, 2020, 9:48pm

I don’t really understand your arguments @LucyVanPelt.
You say it is harder for participant to access? In what is it harder to access? There is not special requirement or limitation. Anyone can join. Can you be more specific so we can make the process as smooth as possible?

Then you said participant need to be “qualified”. What’s do you mean by “qualified”?

About the decentralization part. I didn’t see anywhere that we prevent someone from having its own opinion. This place remains a space where people can exchange and have contradictory ideas. I believe diversity is important. What make you think the opposite?

What would need to change according to you to make it more “decentralized”?

Then finally about the amount of person in the chat compare to the forum now. I think we need to give it a bit more time. Forum is still new I’m sure it will get some attention over time. It’s up to everyone to make it an interesting place to exchange . Also the forum is linked from the chat. So anyone that want to take part of the conversation is able too. And person that didn’t look at the chat were already not reached by the chat. So nothing lost there IMO.

I also want to state that any idea to improve thing is welcome.

gosam · January 23, 2020, 10:22am

Thank you for your honest thoughts.

I myself have a bit of internal conflict about some of these things. I fully believe in free speech. But I also believe in transparency. And verifiability of information.

I’d like to highlight that many projects use Telegram in the way that we have transitioned to, as a channel for broadcasting news and updates. For me, it’s not about silencing anybody. It’s something we should have done months ago, to be honest. There’s no rule that says Telegram has to be the place we grow community.

I do think we do have to be careful about “centralization” in what we do. But for me, true / total decentralization is chaos. So, there needs to be some order. Which we all agree. Is that centralization? It’s not that we want to make all the rules. Everyone should feel like they have a say.

We just have to continue to be clear about our intentions, listen to the community’s feedback, and grow and evolve over time. We are a work in progress, as are all things.

TFFarmer · January 23, 2020, 2:17pm

The fact that you need to download and install the 3Bot app to be able to login and participate is kind of a hurdle…

wimvdb · January 23, 2020, 9:00pm

I think we make it to difficult to keep track of all
Things going on: telegram, freeflow and forum…

zaibon · January 27, 2020, 8:48am

2 posts were split to a new topic: Error while trying to connect to the forum using 3bot connect

TFFarmer · January 27, 2020, 9:16am

I am unable to post on the FFP IEO space, while I can on other spaces?
I wanted to ask if there is an update on Liquid registrations, I added 2 more the past days…
Cheers!

rebelcode · June 28, 2020, 6:31pm

@kristof I think it was a great idea move chat discussions to threaded discussions, but converting a “Telegram group” to a “Telegram readonly group” is not the same thing of having a “real Telegram channel”:

a Telegram channel gives anonymity to its followers
this is very important: spammers cannot target followers since only admins can see the user profiles. this happens very often: bots steal users data really easy in public group.
"xyz joined/left the group" annoying messages
even if you put the readonly mode, you should add a bot to remove those messages
200.000 users limit:
it might not be important/relevant today, but if you want to exponentially grow your audience, this will be sooner or later a limit since the project news could be followed worldwide by a limited amount of people
statistics
right now Telegram channel statistics are only for channels (and they are great), so you are missing an opportunity/tool to know better your audience

There’re for sure other differences, but these for me are enough to advise you to move immediately people inside the current “readonly group” to a real Telegram channel which is the best way to digitally broadcast information today!

IMPORTANT
You don’t need to lose the t.me/nickname, just switch the group to private to free the nickname, create immediately a channel with the same nickname and then invite (with a bot) all the people inside the old group to the new channel.

kristof · June 29, 2020, 6:21am

super useful, we will try to implement things from this in July
thank you for this input

such a pity there is no way how to convert from group to channel

looks like you have a lot of experience with this, can you help us?

rebelcode · June 29, 2020, 11:42am

I agree, would be very useful to have a built-in function, but is not a big deal. What you can do with zero efforts (without the bot) is to put a post where you ask people to join the channel (after doing the steps I explained to keep the nickname), then you can later add who is missing if you feel that is necessary (maybe 90% of the people will join by themselves and there’s no need to do it).

Sure, I’m here to help, but the only person able to do the “nickname change” operation is the founder of the group, nobody else (not “normal admins”). Anyway it’s super easy and fast!

**STEPS: GROUP CHANNEL **

the group founder needs to put the group private (you will free the nickname, so anybody can register it, so jump quick to step 2)
create immediately a channel with the same nickname of the group
create a post in the group where you ask people to join the channel, explaining that the group is going to be deprecated (or used for something else, personally I would keep it and think about the proper way to use it)
the first post of the channel would be better to be the project logo with the website and a short description of the project, followed by a second post with a video introduction