radical proposal: move IRC to Rocket.Chat

[Riccardo Iaconelli]

On 8 August 2017 at 20:01, Luigi Toscano <luigi.toscano at tiscali.it> wrote:
> Can rocket.chat be bridged too? If not, promoting it would create another island.

With Brooklyn, you can create n-ways bridges between Rocket.chat, IRC,
Telegram and possibly many more. All of this while handling attachment
support, replies, and other nifty features where the protocol supports
them (or falling back to the best support possible - e.g. if I send an
image on Telegram you would see a URL on IRC to download the image).
Since Matrix supports watching IRC, this means that we could in theory
keep the four systems together with some level of interoperability,
especially during a transition phase. I am not sure we really want to
do this though.

Now, my personal opionion - Rocket.chat has been a blood bath for
WikiToLearn (most newbies are there, most old-timers are on Telegram,
and they communicate through bridges, we lost several people in the
migration), but in spite of this I still consider myself in favor of
switching to it, for a few reasons. The problem is that all tools have
their big drawbacks, and we need to keep using communication methods
which are used by the rest of the world, to lower the access barrier
for new contributors, and for leveraging on tools created by others.

Several software compete in this arena: Mattermost, Rocket.Chat and
Matrix are some of the big contenders. Matrix is a great idea but its
federated nature give it a very confusing feeling for a newcomer. I
understand that it needs to be easy for people to join our
communication channels, but for this usecase I prefer supporting
federated logins (so that you get one-click registrations with already
existing accounts) to the full federation of the protocol. But the
bigger reason for which I think that RC will be our best bet, is that
several big teams (e.g. KDAB) are migrating to Rocket.chat, which
means that even if the software is definitely perfectible (to say the
least), it's gravitating towards critical mass.

I believe that we will only solve this problem when, no matter what
underlying technologies we choose, we will be able to provide a user
experience as nice as Telegram with a simple server, hosted by us,
which allows for federated login. And with a nice interface it can be
actually usable. Vasudha and I are working on Ruqola to solve exactly
this problem with Rocket.Chat, creating a great mobile client in the
meantime. I am not sure this will be the definitive server, but this
is something we want to try. Anyone is welcome to help us in this
regard.

Bye,
-Riccardo
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