[kde-community] possible foss alternative to telegram/slack

[Christian]

Marco Martin <notmart at ...> writes:
 
> Hi all,

Hi all, sorry, I'm a bit late to the party, but I just got pointed at this
thread due to bringing it up on IRC, due to the recent blog post about the
Telegram / IRC tunnel: 

> Right now many groups are using Telegram as their primary communication
medium 
> due to some limitations in IRC (mainly due to the ease of pasting images 
> inline the channel and the lack of fancy mobile clients for IRC), there
may be 
> other valid reasons i'm not aware of
> today i randomly stumbled upon
> http://www.mattermost.org/
> 
> it seems to tick all the boxes: 
> * open source
> * we can self host an instance
> * fancy mobile and desktop apps
> * inline multimedia attachments into messages
> * and most important for us old farts: bridge to IRC :p
> 
> didn't try it, just stumbled upon it but may be something to be considered?

I maintain a personal mattermost setup because we are currently evaluating
it at work. 

Maybe I have to say first that due to my background (I am a former freenode
staff member) I am heavily biased towards IRC. But: if you plan to have an
alternative to IRC, mattermost would be my recommendation. 
Mostly due to, compared to telegram, you having actual control over the
server as well and the server being FOSS, not a proprietary thing running
through a third party company. It also is very much aimed at development due
to features like code blocks with syntax highlighting. It also is a bit less
of a mess because it provides Teams (similar to what IRC Networks are) and
rooms (similar to what IRC channels are) and can be well structured.

It can also integrate rather well with various ticketing and monitoring
solutions, plus, similar to telegram, can tunnel to / from IRC. 

So if some people, for whatever reasons, want to use anything else than IRC:
my recommendation is that KDE infra provides something. Else there will be
an uncontrollable mess of various protocols used by various groups, so
people end up with n clients just to stay in touch with various parts. I
assume if there was an official tool provided people would be less likely to
use whatever alternatives they know from personal use. Also at least it
could be centralized still, some protocols do not work terribly well with
IRC tunnels.



tl;dr recommendation: if some people really can't deal with IRC and need
alternatives: go with mattermost, but provide an official instance. 

Kind regards, 

Christian