I’ve noticed that ArduPilot maintains active communities on platforms like Facebook and Discord. However, in my opinion, Facebook feels a bit outdated for such a high-tech project. On the other hand, while Discord is a great platform, it is currently banned or restricted in certain countries, making it difficult for some users to access official channels without using a VPN.
Given these accessibility issues and Telegram’s modern features such as its efficient message history management and broad accessibility I was wondering if there is a specific reason why ArduPilot doesn’t have an official Telegram group. Are there any plans to expand to Telegram to provide a more accessible alternative for the global community?
In my experience telegram is at least as bad as Discord in a role of support forum and IMHO much worse with its mobile-centric UI. I “follow” OpenIPC development which uses Telegram as the primary communication channel and it feels like a stack of consciousness streams.
You should be more specific naming the countries Discord is banned in.
The main problem with Telegram is that it is essentially single-threaded. It’s nice for communication that looks like chatting physically in a single room, but not for highly-branched discussions like what is needed for software support.
Discord and Discourse at least have a hierarchy atop of single threads. Ideally, it should probably be something like Reddit with communication structured in trees, but obviously there are much less platforms that allow things like this.
There are, or were, some unofficial Telegram chats in various languages that I used to be present in, but there just a couple of people yelling at each other can easily ruin every other conversation, just like in real life - so I quit at some point.