radical proposal: move IRC to Rocket.Chat

[Eike Hein]

I've given some more thought to Matrix as a contender and I'm
increasingly liking this option among the available contenders.

The available Matrix clients are currently not quite as polished
as their competition (specifically Slack/Discord), but Matrix
does have their features in its scope, including things like
replies and edits which Thomas and others consider important
(I also like them sometimes, though they're no dealbreakers
for me personally). The mobile Riot client already looks better
that Rocket.Chat's though, which is just a wrapped web app.

Moreover, as a client dev (Konvi maintainer) I could actually
see myself making or contributing to a Matrix client built on
our stack (which I think offers some great tooling for a modern
chat client, e.g. previews for media embeds are a snap for our
machinery). With Rocket.Chat I would have no interest in doing
so, because it's a one-off web app and doesn't actually have a
seperate spec for its protocol, nor stability guarantees for it,
nor a governance model ... it's just not something that tries
to build a durable technology/platform.

Some of the feature plans for Matrix also sound super great
for our plans. For example, keep in mind every Rocket.Chat
instance is an island, but Matrix is actually a fully-federated
network, so it's a wider world. One thing on the horizon for
organizing that world is groups:

"These will probably be the single biggest change to Matrix that we’ve
seen since E2E encryption landed: it changes the dynamic of the whole
network, given users can explicitly declare allegiance to different
groups, which in turn have their own home pages and directories etc.  It
lets users form communities, and declare their participation in those
communities (if desired), and also lets rooms be grouped together.  One
of our single biggest requests has been “subrooms” and we’re incredibly
excited to see how well Groups solve this."

Having a KDE group on Matrix and getting a channel directory
out of it seems like exactly what we need (and is a little
like our group and namespace on freenode).

I also personally heavily sympathize with their self-conception
as a project and community:

"There are very very few people actually working professionally on
trying to build general-purpose open communication networks and
protocols.  There’s us, some XMPP, IRCv3 and GNU Social/Mastodon folks,
GNU Ring, Tox, Briar, Secure Scuttlebutt, IPFS, Status.im, Ricochet… and
that’s literally all the major projects I can think of (sorry if I
missed you!).  There’s probably only 50 developers in total working in
this domain as their day job.

Meanwhile, there are literally hundreds of thousands of folks trudging
away building more and more near-indistinguishable proprietary closed
communication systems – trapping users inside ever more silos and
fragmenting the basic ability to communicate on the ‘net.  It’s like a
world where the open web was pushed into a tiny underground resistance,
and everyone else was trapped in the walled gardens of AOL and
Compuserve (or more contemporarily: Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp etc)."

I guess I like what these guys are doing.

Other points:
- Bridging: exists and works
- Sticker packs: Currently being worked on for Matrix and Riot


Cheers,
Eike