Telegram Community Group & its future

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Hey again everyone, It’s been some time :stuck_out_tongue:
First things first, if this is the wrong category, please move it (but make sure I’m able to edit/answer in where you move it)

TL;DR

I don’t want to be the owner of the group anymore, but there is no replacement. (Please read the full thing now, if you’re interested in this topic)

Me

For everyone unaware of, let me introduce you to myself a bit:
I’m Fabian, the owner of the Manjaro Telegram Community group @Manjaro[0]. At some point in the past I was a community member of Manjaro, low level package maintainer (something with MHWD, Steam, AMD drivers things). Many of you might have game-devices-udev[1] installed that was created back in that time (and is still going). That should do it :smiling_face_with_tear:

The Past

I’m here to talk about the potential future of the unofficial telegram “community group”… I started the group in 2016 and it grew pretty fast. It was fun and the community helped a lot. Telegram as young, fresh platform was easy to handle and since I was using Manjaro myself there was much potential to learn, have some feedback and of course to help people. It was great. We set up a “contest” for special events. Such as pride month, breast cancer awareness month as well as different little things where people could create custom logos for the group, or push ideas to me for the logo. See this repo[2].

Welcome To Reality

Nowadays however I pretty much lost interest in Manjaro. I still use it to catch some feedback of packaging issues, but even for this the Fediverse[3] is just better (Why is Manjaro not on the Fedi?). The more often I feel like the "old man" in the group. I clean up things, yell here and there at clouds[4] and delete the latest wave of cryptobro content. Nothing fun, not much talkitalks or fun conversations. As the RSS bot broke, it took me way to long to fix, because I don’t care much (But also because ifttt[5] is not a nice place anymore and it actually should replaced by just a python script). …Whatever.
Over the last few years I tried to find people / build a small team to do the usual maintenance work to, at some point take over the group. But sadly this failed. I can’t say that there is a person I trust enough to give the ownership to. From the recent xz-backdoor you can see that social engineering can be fatal[6] and with a title of “Admin” in a bigger group, even if it’s unofficial, you can possibly do a lot of harm to some people.

Some Stats

  • @Manjaro[0] (User Chat)
    • User count: 2058 (Slowly declining)
    • Total messages: 400k (everything 2023 and newer will be cleared after 2 month)
    • Daily reader: 380 (slowly growing)
  • @ManjaroUpdates[7] (News Channel)
    • Subscribers Count: 882
    • Readers per Post: 1000-1500 (testing announcements); 2000-2500 (stable announcements)

So why do I post this in here?

As you could have guessed I don’t know where to go with the group, I don’t know the value of it either. From time to time there is an offering to buy the handle @Manjaro off of me. There are lots of nice people in the group to help others. Lots of knowledge, love for Manjaro and Linux, fun stories, sh!tpostings and so on. Nothing I would want to just let end. That’s the real value.

So this brings me to my options… Of course the easiest is

1. Close It Up (the worst)

But this would make a few people unhappy, as there is currently no replacement (don’t even try to say the forums).

2. Go On As It Is Now

While this is possible, this will not end in a positive way and would actually not be fair to the users who want to have fun in there.

3. Manjaro Peeps Taking Over

Make it (semi-)official and take the ownership. Probably the best option, but since the official-official one faded away rather quickly (I’m a bit sad about our interactions at that time) I don’t have high hopes with this option.

4. Ask The Community Who Should Be The Next Owner

There was some talk about it a few years ago but it would most likely end on a person that doesn’t want to do this at all, or at some person that might abuse the position.

5. Your Idea?

If you have another idea, tell me.

So what is your take on it? :smile:

[0] https://t.me/Manjaro
[1] https://codeberg.org/fabiscafe/game-devices-udev
[2] https://gitlab.com/fabiscafe/manjaro-telegram-artwork
[3] https://www.fediverse.to/
[4] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/old-man-yells-at-cloud
[5] https://ifttt.com/
[6] https://robmensching.com/blog/posts/2024/03/30/a-microcosm-of-the-interactions-in-open-source-projects/
[7] https://t.me/ManjaroUpdates
1 Like
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It’s a pain that you cant post links as new user :upside_down_face:

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best would be to have manjaro project take it over once you think it’s better than you handling it as a side project.

To be a good admin you don’t need to spend every day chatting there. You just need to exercise good judgement.

1 Like
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New users are not allowed to post active links to keep the spammers out
(no fantastic bitcoin investment opportunities on here!)
New users can post inactive links in preformatted text

https://t.me/Manjaro

But this needs a proper link in post #1 so I have edited your post

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Users of Telegram are used that there is a bot that provides a custom command /report, that notifies all the admins. We don’t have such a thing so you have to be there or all the “reports” end up in the void. But even if someone tags me I’m probably not around for hours. :slight_smile:
That said it also brings no joy to only look into a group because you have administration work to do.

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I feel you, i have same situation, but i have managed to delegate the moderation tasks to few active users. I don’t know about telegram and it’s techincal limitations, my situation is message board.

This once again demonstrates possibly how bad it is to get to be a consumer of telegram, instead of a hoster of a forum.

1 Like