radical proposal: move IRC to Rocket.Chat

[Jonathan Riddell]

LibreOffice are having a similar discussion

https://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/projects/msg02257.html

They want to continue using IRC though which means fragmentation would continue.

They find rocket.chat to have some limitations including that the
clients aren't as bug free as they ought to be.

Jonathan


On 8 August 2017 at 16:52, Jonathan Riddell <jr at jriddell.org> wrote:
> 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