Where to coordinate WG work?

At today's WG meeting we began a discussion
<https://github.com/w3c/socialwg/blob/main/meetings/2026/2026-03-06-WG-kickoff.md#cadence-of-work>
of where to have real-time-(ish) and ad-hoc chat related to work items. As
there is a lot of need to get work done not just during meetings but *in
between* meetings, we're going to need to coordinate work on the various
projects we spin up.

To be clear I am not talking about queuing comments for meetings or for
scribing minutes. I'm talking about places to discuss ongoing working items
in the WG.
Some thoughts

Currently there are two venues for work we are actively using:

   -

   This mailing list
   -

   The WG Github repository <https://github.com/w3c/socialwg>

The mailing list and/or Github repo may suffice, but other options floated
during and after the meeting include:

   -

   W3C Slack
   -

   W3C IRC
   -

   Zulip
   -

   Matrix
   -

   "Threadiverse group <https://activitypub.space/post/1459>"
   ActivityPub-native discussion

I proposed the W3C Community Slack as a pre-existing tool but it's a
non-starter since it doesn't retain records indefinitely.

The W3C IRC server is configured to retain records, but I witnessed
firsthand at TPAC that many many people found the IRC impenetrable and
difficult to use, and simply did not bother. In general I think IRC is
beloved by a small group of people and feared by others!

Zulip was floated during the meeting as an open-source Slack alternative. I
have no experience with it personally, but reading the website there would
be a cost of either the $7/mo for hosting with indefinite retention, or the
sanity and time cost of WG members managing a self-hosted server.

Matrix is an interesting option for something vaguely Slack-and-IRC-like.
It's never stuck for me but maybe it could work. I don't know what the
retention story is there.

I would obviously love to use ActivityPub technology to solve this problem
but my current understanding of forum/group style communication via
ActivityPub (informally called the "Threadiverse") is that the closed or
semi-closed group/channel user story is not addressed at this time. I'm
100% open to being proved wrong here though.

Honestly I might have talked myself back into just using the mailing list
and Github issues/PRs as the primary place for discussion. The mailing list
in particular has the advantage of being world-readable but
group-member-writeable.

Interested in everyone else's feedback here!

Darius Kazemi Chair, W3C Social Web WG