radical proposal: move IRC to Rocket.Chat

[Cristian Baldi]

Hey there,

I mainly contribute to the WikiToLearn project and for some months we have
been using Rocket.Chat (instead of Telegram and IRC which we used in the
beginning).

First of all let me tell you that it is very hard to migrate users from an
existing communication service to a new service. Even if at WikiToLearn we
officially moved to Rocket.Chat some users still use the old communications
means daily (mostly for the offtopic channels but some users still write in
the main/official/support channel too).

Rocket.Chat still has a lot of issues (mostly in term of user interface and
interaction, many little annoying things that make you hate the platform,
unless you get used to it). It is getting better daily but there is still
many work to do (just to give an insight they have 1.7k issues open on
their bug tracker, many are help requests and duplicates but many other are
proper bugs).

The native client could be a solution to many of these UI problem but after
talking with a few people that developed software based on Rocket.Chat (for
example Davide Riva (which I am cc-ing, he will tell you more) the KDE
student working on the Chat Bridge project) there are also a lot of issues
with their API and inner functionalities (undocumented or wrongly
documented features).

Rocket.Chat does not have an official mobile client as of today, again
Ruquola could solve this once it is compiled for Android. Right now the
official way to use Rocket.Chat on mobile is to use some kind of wrapped
WebView which does not work well (when I had that installed I did not
receive notifications or received them randomly).

As Jonathan said Rocket.Chat (but really, any modern messaging system)
offers tons of features missing from IRC.

Telegram works (outside the open source world) because it has great native
clients, cool features and it is easy to use.
I have not tried matrix but it looks promising.
A few months ago we also tried Mattermost (similar to Rocket.Chat but it
seems to have gotten much better).
IRC gets the job done but it lacks the features that everyone is used to in
2017.

I would suggest investigating all the alternatives and going with the one
that works and feels better, offering the best native experience and having
the most stable core.

Cristian


On Tue, Aug 8, 2017 at 7:08 PM, Luca Beltrame <lbeltrame at kde.org> wrote:

> Il giorno Tue, 08 Aug 2017 18:16:17 +0200
> Luigi Toscano <luigi.toscano at tiscali.it>
> ha scritto:
>
> > So -1 for moving to Rocket.Chat.
>
> -1 as well. As Luigi said, matrix.org is a better replacement because
> the bridge is already up there. Also, it is federated, and FOSS.
>
> --
> Luca Beltrame - KDE Forums team
> KDE Science supporter
> GPG key ID: 6E1A4E79
>
>
>
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