radical proposal: move IRC to Rocket.Chat

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On Dienstag, 8. August 2017 22:46:18 CEST Elvis Angelaccio wrote:
> 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/ ?

We do have evidence. For example a significant portion of the VDG has never 
been in any of our IRC channels and would never want to go there.
I bet that the same goes for WtL. 

> 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.

Of course rocket.chat is not used more than IRC at the moment. It's still a 
quite new technology.
I bet that if you'd show some 20-year-old rocket.chat and 
http://webchat.freenode.net/ side-by-side and asked them which one they'd 
prefer, the clear majority would go with the former.
bet as in put actual money on it.