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

[Alessandro Longo]

Il 20-07-2016 17:57 Christian ha scritto:
> 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

Hi all, I tried Mattermost, but I still think Matrix[1] is better at the 
moment, since it has:

* 2 web clients
* 3 Android clients
* a multi-platform client based on QML
* it's decentralized and also **federated**
* users can be easily found by their email if they setup it, like 
Telegram with phone number
* chat history is fully supported
* push notifications
* a lot of bots, including an official IRC-mirror, already available
* support for calls and video-calls (atm not in every client obviously)
* we can eventually run KDE's instance federated with the other ones

I strongly suggest to ready the Matrix's FAQ[2].

Please, let's discuss Mattermost Vs Matrix because at the moment Matrix 
seems to me better than Mattermost especially for the values shared by 
KDE that Matrix's design bring finally to reality without sacrificing 
user experience. If we have to slowly move away from IRC & Telegram, the 
choice should be Matrix, this is just my opinion after months in Matrix 
rooms.

[1] https://matrix.org/
[2] https://matrix.org/docs/guides/faq.html

-- 
Alessandro Longo