radical proposal: move IRC to Rocket.Chat

[Christian Loosli]

Hi list, 

first of all a disclaimer: 

As someone heavily involved with IRC (I am freenode staff) I am of course 
slightly biased. 

However: various communities I am in, including freenode, frequently has a 
look as alternative protocols. They come and, compared to IRC, they also go.
(https://xkcd.com/1782/) 

There are various good reasons in my opinion to not move:

First of all: FOSS is not only KDE. Quite a lot of us are in various 
communities, and a lot of them still reside on IRC. So adding another protocol 
and another client just increases the amount of things you need to have open 
and to have an eye on. Yes, there are bridges, recently even a KDE project 
(brooklyn), but all of them I have seen so far get various things wrong and 
are not as stable as IRC is. 

And there we come to the technical side: IRC is super lightweight. Other 
protocols and their clients eat tons of memory, basically "I am in 6 slack 
channels. 1.5GB RAM consumed by the desktop app. In 100+ IRC channels. 25MB 
consumed by irssi. The future is rubbish." from https://twitter.com/popey/
status/793399003463516160

I can also have IRC run on my server and connect from anywhere to it just via 
SSH. I can even run it on a raspberry pi or a free amazon AWS instance. 

So despite all these fancy features the new protocols and clients like slack, 
rocket, Telegram and whatnot offer: they do come at a price. 
With IRC we have a lightweight, well established protcol that works everywhere 
and we have well established communities. 

Switching would not help preventing the community from fragmenting. The 
opposite would happen, it would fragment the community even more, with 
questionable benefits and high prices on a resource end. I highly recommend not 
to. 

Kind regards, 

Christian  (Fuchs on freenode) 

PS: if proprietary is an issue, which indeed it should be: with Mattermost 
there is a free, slack compatible thing, and Telegram is not terribly 
proprietary, neither the client(s) nor the protocol. I obviously still prefer 
IRC, just pointing out. 

Am Dienstag, 8. August 2017, 16:52:00 CEST schrieb Jonathan Riddell:
> Like all sensible open source communities we use IRC lots for real
> time communication essential to making low bandwidth decisions in a
> reasonable timeframe as well as socialising.
> 
> 20 years ago IRC was cool but these days real-time communication in
> the non-geek world long since moved other places such as WhatsApp,
> Facebook Messenger which are infinately more user friendly than IRC.
> In the geek-world it has moved to Slack and Telegram. So KDE finds
> itself spread between three real time communication methods with IRC
> still the strongest but many new people reluctant to use it as scary
> and unfamiliar while Slack and Telegram smell of being proprietary and
> lacking some of the free-form nature of IRC.
> 
> So my radical proposal for today is to consider moving all our
> real-time communications wholesale to Rocket.Chat. Like Slack it takes
> much of it's basic setup from IRC with #channels that anyone can set
> up. Unlike Slack it's all free software and we can run our own
> servers.  Like Telegram it works on phones fine. Unlike IRC it
> supports media files and friendly user names.
> 
> It has a native desktop client and we have a KDE one in progress with
> Ruqola. https://rocket.chat/
> 
> I setup up a temporary server, do come along and say hi to evaluate it.
> http://ec2-34-203-38-236.compute-1.amazonaws.com:3000/
> 
> I'm aware this will probably end up as a case of XCKD standards
> https://xkcd.com/927/ but I thought it worth a shot.  We have
> difficulty attracting new contributors and our community is
> fragmenting because of the dominance of IRC so worth considering
> alternatives.
> 
> Jonathan