radical proposal: move IRC to Rocket.Chat

[Elvis Angelaccio]

On martedì 8 agosto 2017 21:46:58 CEST, Riccardo Iaconelli wrote:
> 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.

I'm not sure I get this argument. Do we have evidence that new contributors 
are scared by IRC? How is signin up on RocketChat/Telegram/whatever easier 
than using http://webchat.freenode.net/ ?


> 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.

Again, do we have evidence that Rocket chat is more used than IRC or other 
protocols? I'd be very surprised if that's the case.

> 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