Autistic in NYC

Resources and new ideas for the autistic adult community in the New York City metro area.

Zulip chat for Autistic in NYC / Queens groups.

To help incubate the various kinds of groups this site calls for the formation of, a Zulip chat site has been set up.

The various NYC-based groups led by members of the Autistic Peer Leadership Group are invited to use our Zulip chat site to hold online meetings. See the Autistic in NYC / Queens Meetup.com site for announcements of meetings. Please RSVP on Meetup.com if you plan to attend a meeting.

It is our hope that, once the CoViD-19 crisis is over with, some of these groups will be big enough to hold in-person meetings. As groups form, announcements will be posted both on Meetup.com and here.

Note: The instructions below assume you are using a laptop or desktop. Zulip can be used on phones too, but some of the details will be different.

To protect your privacy

For now, anyone can join our Zulip chat site. (Eventually we'll make it by-invitation-only, to keep out spammers.)

Basic Zulip how-to, and rules for our chatroom

A Zulip chatroom is organized into streams, similar to channels on some other chat sites. You can subscribe to whichever streams you want, and you can unsubscribe from streams you are not interested in.

Once you've registered and then reached the main chat area, here's how to access the streams:

Important information about particular streams:

Topics within a stream, and how to post a chat message:

When participating in a scheduled chat meeting, please follow the group leader's instructions as to (1) how closely messages within a "topic" should stick to the topic, and (2) whether, and if so how often and under what circumstances, you should be starting new "topics."

In MOST of our groups at least, please do NOT start new Zulip "topics." We generally prefer to have one Zulip "topic" per meeting. Please reespond to the already-existing "topic" rather than start new "topics."

Note: The chat log is not permanent!:

We are using a free Zulip account, which holds only a limited number of messages. Therefore, previous chats disappear eventually.

Private messages:

Feel free to use Meetup.com private messages to exchange contact info with other members. Private messages via Zulip are disallowed in our chatroom (mainly to save space on the Zulip server, given the limitations of our free account as noted above, and also to avoid distracting private discussions during meetings).

Your identity:

As noted earlier, you are welcome to use a pseudonym. However, please do NOT use multiple identities, and do NOT impersonate other people.

Miscellaneous:

Zulip chat can be used either as a website or an app. Once you are familiar with Zulip, you may (optionally) want to download the relevant Zulip app for more convenient use on your smartphone or your laptop/desktop.

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