Re: BSD Meetup in London?

Good afternoon,

> Fwiw I've watched a couple of GaryHTech's video's. I like his 
> presentation and Imho is doing a good job evangelising for FreeBSD.

I have emailed both youtubers, and I have received one response.

I think the best course of action would be to setup some infrastructure
(mailing list, maybe an IRC channel/daemon), THEN focus on trying to
find people interesting and ultimately setting a date for the first
meetup. This also means that the freebsd/other BSD mailing lists
wouldn't be polluted as people outside the UK are likely not interested
in having UK-focused emails hit their mailbox.

I notice a lot of groups in the UK (hackerspaces, LUGs etc) rely on
meetup (you can't even message anyone on it without paying like £5/month
subscription, plus its privacy invasive), facebook (I don't think I
need to explain why this is bad) or Discord (ditto facebook).

The concern is in recent years communities have been fragmented, IRC
and mailing lists are often considered as "elitist" and blocks younger
people contributing, however adoption of platforms like Discord which
aim to mitigate this also forces a reliance on a proprietary platform.

So I am not really sure what to do, personally I would do mailing list
(everyone has an email) and IRC, and usually with a IRC web client the
accessibility is better, however still not perfect. Would be providing
a free bouncer as part of the BUG be beneficial to make IRC more
accessible?

Personally I only use XMPP, email and IRC. I am a poor example of what
the average person would use. I do not use Matrix (and do not wish to)
which is often seen as a mid-ground between the "old" protocols and the
"new" platforms.

So I am open to advice, or anyone who would like to support.

Thank you,
-- 
Polarian
Jabber/XMPP: polarian@icebound.dev