MagnusPrime
Also the choice to bridge platforms together with bots means no matter what platform your on you are bound to each one's privacy policy because your chat is shared across all platforms.
These are completely public chat rooms with thousands or tens of thousands of users. The Matrix rooms can even be fully viewed without joining. It's as public as posting on our forum. The privacy policy of the services is irrelevant to what's publicly posted in the chat rooms. The bridges never reduced people's privacy in the way you're claiming and the rooms also aren't bridged anymore due to degrading quality of the bridge software and bridging enabling cross-platform abuse.
Most people seeking these alternatives are trying to move away from spyware technologies so to me it seems like an contradiction to be on telegram & discord.
People are welcome to use Matrix instead of Telegram or Discord. We had Matrix chat rooms long before those options, especially Discord. Far more people use the Discord server despite it being less than 3 years old compared to our Matrix chat rooms existing for over 10 years.
Like if you really want an instant messenger it would be better in my opinion to use a shoutbox in this forum or create a group on simplex.chat which currently seems to be the most private open source instant messenger in comparison to others. Matrix could be somewhat okay if you're hosting your own homeserver but I know synapse has some issues & there are flaws with element/matrix that some may say it's not secure enough because of the metadata leaks which may cause some people to be deturred to even the matrix.
The chat rooms are completely public. A fully public chat room on our forum would not be any more private beyond not connecting to a non-GrapheneOS service with an account not requiring any personal information to be connected to it.
In my opinion this controversy should be corrected by shutting down these groups & only relying on the forums as a one stop place for information, support, & discussions. With browsers people can use the page as a pwa if they really want to have a feel of an app experience. I've seen many projects do this try to branch out to multiple platforms & in my opinion it creates more issues as i've seen in some projects such as for example podman.
Less than 6 people complaining about something in a massive community with tens of thousands of people active in it across platform is hardly a controversy.
This is just a small example of branching out to multiple platforms & how it can cause problems requiring you to scour multiple places for info, register to multiple tos & be subjected to all their pp just because your trying to get help with the product. Then the deadness because everyones spread out you don't need to be like a spider building a web making every connecting point another platform. In my opinion all this does is irritate people having to jump through these hoops just to try to get some help it wouldn't be even worth it & 7/10 would probably look for the next thing because when they need help maybe they will get it there.
Our chat rooms existed before the forum and the forum doesn't replace real-time chat. The forum doesn't overlap as much as you're saying it does. Getting rid of the chat rooms wouldn't mean the forum would become a higher quality source of information. More content is not inherently better.
MagnusPrime
I saw you had the simplex group thats cool. I believe your question was already answered in my first post. But as you said the bridges have been down cool just remove them. It's nice if you have the staff to answer everyone on every platform immediately but if your spread out thin that's a problem in my eyes so it's better to keep support in one place.
You were directly told the bridges were removed. However, your claims about the privacy impact are illogical nonsense. Public chat rooms with tens of thousands of members aren't private in any way. Fully public Matrix rooms can be viewed without joining too and get publicly archived. Bots can still publicly archive chat rooms regardless and that's common. You're posting on a forum where every thread and reply gets quickly and relentlessly crawled by many bots which mostly aren't going to remove the data if the thread or reply is removed.
So to answer your next question I would say yes tell all the reddit users if you need support come to the forums. Reddit is a place to advertise I know the users look at is like oh ask anything need help go get it till reddit starts messing with you for no reason. At least on the forums you can give more options they don't want to register okay we can create a support forum & enable guess users to view & post in it while keeping the rest of the forums view & no post for those.
We already heavily steer people on Reddit towards the forum. It doesn't mean they'll use it. If we weren't present on Reddit then we'd be conceding the overall platform to misinformation. That's already happening in a lot of privacy communities where misinformation about GrapheneOS is rampant including from malicious people.
I wouldn't tell the people we don't care about you if that's what your thinking. I would probably say if I were you we've decided to condense our official support to one location for the reasons being easier to communicate directly, faster solutions whether the user looks around the forum while waiting or you only got one place to look at for Q&A's. Then I would probably explain how guest users can post in this help section without registration for those who are self conscious about it.
That's never going to happen. You're ignoring abuse and the growing moderation burden from having more users.
The oh sorry you been waiting for days we been focused on the irc or forums we only look at discord or reddit sometimes. Vice versa most of the projects do not have enough staff members to dedicate their time to all these places to be the support & answer immediately. That's why I use the shop metaphor because people come to a shop when they have trouble the shop don't do block services unless your an electric or construction company.
This is not the case at all and is completely backwards. It's also not the responsibility of mods, developers or overall project to answer most of people's questions. Forcing people to only use the forum means a lot of people won't get help and would empower already rampant misinformation about GrapheneOS which you're completely disregarding. Being active on more platforms is important for countering people getting mislead by the massive amount of inaccurate content including malicious content that's being churned out. Once we expand a lot more as an organization, we'll expand our presence elsewhere instead of doing what you're proposing. It's the opposite of the direction we need to go.