immich community as an entry point, easily searchable knowledge database, for exchange

[aisbergde]

I believe that a community and technical documentation should make it as easy as possible for users and administrators to use products. Perhaps because I myself work very intensively on the subject of technical documentation, docs-as-code, automated documentation, etc.

This does not mean that the documentation should be bloated to describe every possible tool. But helpful and further links would often be useful. Just to give the idea that there is something out there.

immich has quite good documentation, but it is still incomplete in many places. This makes it difficult to get started. You have to find a lot of things somewhere. On the other hand, the knowledge is there. It is often difficult to find and there is no easy entry point. Let's take the topic of CLIP.

Other projects use very good communication tools such as https://zulip.com/, which can be used excellently as a standardized place for synchronous and asynchronous communication between developers, users, for questions, FAQ etc., especially as a knowledge database. This is in addition to and independent of documentation, which should also remain "clean". Not everything has to be in the documentation, I completely agree with the developers. An additional standardized, easily searchable space that serves as a knowledge database makes it much easier to use products and software.

At immich, a lot of knowledge is distributed somewhere: some of it can be found on github in discussions or issues, although topics are often closed quickly. Then there's Discord. Then there's Reddit and all sorts of things. This means that the knowledge of individual users is available, but the exchange of knowledge between users is suboptimal. So everyone has to find individual solutions, even though others have already solved it several times.

I can't contribute much to development as I don't have the necessary skills. I could get involved in building a community.

[jrasm91]

IMHO we should take useful information from the other channels and add them into the docs website. There is some WIP for this in #5958. Other PRs are welcome that improve the official docs, etc.

[bo0tzz]

These discussions right here are a community like that, no?

[aisbergde]

Github discussions could be used as a community. But that would require some other item-close-policies.

[jrasm91]

You opened that in the feature request category, which is why it was closed. I think that is fine TBH. You could open a separate post in show and tell or Question and Answer that asks how to connect to the database or show cases different UI tools you can use.

[aisbergde]

Yes, perhaps only the correct categories need to be used.
However, some feature requests are also closed because they are supposedly duplicates of other requests. However, this is sometimes not the case.

[jrasm91]

In those situations we can probably re-open the request.

[aisbergde]

You are right, for now, github discussions are fine, if we use it the right way, correctly distinguish between feature request, questions, and so on. And if we can request to reopen issues.