I think there is a good chance that many more people would participate in NEAD discussions if NEAD had started with Slack rather than Signal first and then Zulip. Even with Mattermost (arguably more user-friendly & intuitive than Signal and Zulip), there might be differences. Mattermost still uses markdown formatting, and this does not seem intuitive for non-technical people (I found it confusing at first and now I still find it quite inconvenient compared to extra buttons or keyboard shortcuts like “Ctrl + B” for “bold”).
Maybe we could survey everyone who has a profile on Zulip now (and ideally also those who were invited but declined) and ask them if the platform choice had made a difference for their engagement? (though that would only yield data for Zulip, not for Mattermost)
+1 on convenience is also important
I think there is a good chance that many more people would participate in NEAD discussions if NEAD had started with Slack rather than Signal first and then Zulip. Even with Mattermost (arguably more user-friendly & intuitive than Signal and Zulip), there might be differences. Mattermost still uses markdown formatting, and this does not seem intuitive for non-technical people (I found it confusing at first and now I still find it quite inconvenient compared to extra buttons or keyboard shortcuts like “Ctrl + B” for “bold”).
Maybe we could survey everyone who has a profile on Zulip now (and ideally also those who were invited but declined) and ask them if the platform choice had made a difference for their engagement? (though that would only yield data for Zulip, not for Mattermost)