Replicant

h1. CommunityAndContact

The Replicant community has several places where people interact together.

h2. Mailing list

Most Replicant developers are on the mailing list, as it is also used to review patches. Many non-developers that are contributors or that don't contribute to Replicant are also on the mailing list.

It's being used for many things:

* Ask questions about Replicant, discuss about issues, etc.

* Discuss about Replicant in general.

* Discuss about Replicant contributions and development

* Review patches

The volume is moderate but there are sometimes spikes due to the to a huge patch set being sent.

To register you can use the "Mailman interface":https://lists.osuosl.org/mailman/listinfo/replicant .

h3. Archives

The Mailman interface has a non-searchable archive of the list: "Replicant Archives":https://lists.osuosl.org/pipermail/replicant/

There are independent projects that keep an archive of the list in a searchable format:

* "The Mail Archive - current":https://www.mail-archive.com/replicant@osuosl.org

* "The Mail Archive - old":https://www.mail-archive.com/replicant@lists.osuosl.org

* "Narkive":https://replicant.osuosl.narkive.com (seems to have stalled)

h2. Forums

The "Replicant forums":https://redmine.replicant.us/projects/replicant/boards are used for similar things than the mailing list, however:

* Patches are not reviewed on the forums

* Less developers tend to be active on the forums

h2. IRC

Most Replicant developers and contributors, as well as people who are interested in our project, are present on the Replicant IRC channel(s). People from other communities are also there as we collaborate on various things, like adding support for devices in Upstream Linux.

IRC, or "Internet Relay Chat":https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Relay_Chat/, is our most ephemeral communication platform, in the sense that we do not publish "message logs":https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Log_file#Message_logs of the channel, nor are we aware of anyone else that unofficially does so. It is, however, common for channel participants to collect and store IRC message logs on their local machines or a VPS to catch up on recently missed conversations and search older messages by keyword to help remember details of past discussions.

In practice, Replicant has three IRC channels hosted on three separate IRC chat servers, but it appears as through there is only one channel since they are all bridged together. Bridged means that a user can join only one of the channels and send and receive messages with users on all the other channels because all messages are forwarded across every channel.

Our three IRC Channels are:

* -#replicant on "Freenode":https://freenode.net/- This channel will be closed completely very soon. See "the Replicant article on Freenode":https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenode#Ownership_change_and_conflict for more details on the issue.

* #replicant on "OFTC":https://oftc.net/

* #replicant on "HackInt":https://hackint.org

Replicant has taken a number of steps in order to ensure that "Tor":https://torproject.org/ users who want to connect to our IRC channel are not discriminated against.

Due to Libera Chat's policies, users who wish to regularly connect and engage with our Libera Chat IRC channel via "Tor":https://torproject.org/ need to use the "SASL":https://libera.chat/guides/sasl (Simple Authentication and Security Layer) framework for authentication every time they connect to Libera Chat's server and comply with a couple other restrictions that Freenode outlines "here":https://libera.chat/guides/connect#accessing-liberachat-via-tor. Additionally, they require all new Libera Chat accounts to be created over the "clearnet":https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clearnet_(networking), which allows them to tie their user's personal IP addresses to every account on their network. Since the personal identity of a user can often be determined simply by acquiring that user's IP address, we recommend that users who want to preserve their anonymity not create a Freenode account.

Even though the Freenode IRC channel was our first IRC channel, and that at the time it had similar policies than thoses of Libera, at that time, we decided that Freenode's policies against Tor users didn't meet all of our users' anonymity needs. In order to address this, Replicant created a second IRC channel on the OFTC chat server. As they clearly state "here":https://www.oftc.net/Tor/, OFTC "does not require users to first connect in the "clear":https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clearnet_(networking) and register with services to allow connecting via Tor". While OFTC was an improvement in some ways over Freenode, OFTC doesn't have an officially supported "Tor onion service":https://support.torproject.org/onionservices/, so Tor users that require the utilization of such a feature can't connect to OFTC's server. 

Since the "HackInt":https://hackint.org IRC server allows anonymous connections via their officially supported "Tor onion services":https://support.torproject.org/onionservices/ and also allows users to register accounts while using theese official Tor onion services, we recently created a bridged IRC channel on their server as well. As an added benefit, HackInt also utilizes a privacy preserving "Hashcash":https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash implementation instead of a "CAPTCHA":https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAPTCHA in their account creation process, as is explained "here":https://hackint.org/transport/tor/.

Since then, Freenode has been the victim of a "hostile takeover" according to their former volounteer staff members, we are now in the process of closing the #replicant channel on Freenode. See the "Wikipedia page":https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenode#Ownership_change_and_conflict about this issue for more details and for references.

h2. Matrix room

There is a Matrix room which is bridged to all three of our IRC channels. 

Our Matrix room is:

* "#freenode_#replicant:matrix.org":https://app.element.io/#/room/#freenode_#replicant:matrix.org 

The room was first created in 2015 through a partnership between Freenode and Matrix.org, which you can read about in this "blog post":https://www.matrix.org/blog/2015/06/22/the-matrix-org-irc-bridge-now-bridges-all-of-freenode/.

A "Matrix client":https://matrix.org/clients/ is needed in order to connect to Replicant's Matrix room. 

Please note that while Replicant's Matrix room name above, when clicked, links to "Matrix.org's":https://Matrix.org/ hosted instance of the "Element web client":https://github.com/vector-im/element-web/, it does not mean that the Replicant project endorses this Matrix client or Matrix server host above any other Matrix client or Matrix server host.

h2. XMPP Multi-User Chat

There is an "XMPP MUC":https://xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0045.html which is bridged to our Freenode IRC channel. 

The bridged XMPP MUC is:

* @#replicant%irc.freenode.net@irc.disroot.org@

h2. Private contact address

We also have a private contact address for the project, for inquiries that are private / confidential. 

Very few people receive that list, and the ones that do tend to be very busy. So if your question can be answered on the "mailing list":https://lists.osuosl.org/mailman/listinfo/replicant, please use the mailing list. Unless you are writing about an explicitly private matter, we will likely advise you to write to the mailing list as we want to respond publicly when answering inquires as often as possible. We also won't forward your mail to the mailing list ourselves as otherwise we could mistakenly publish information that you wanted to keep private. See the [[PrivateContact]] page for use case and on how to use such contact address.

If you didn't manage to register to the mailing list, or if it doesn't work for you for some reasons, it's still possible to send a mail to the mailing list address without being registered. In that case we will be notified about it and we will be able to make it go through by manually going to the mailing list interface.