radical proposal: move IRC to Rocket.Chat

[Eike Hein]

On 08/12/2017 04:22 AM, Boudewijn Rempt wrote:
> On Fri, 11 Aug 2017, Boudhayan Gupta wrote:
> 
>> Here's a radical proposal: why don't we just work towards improving the IRC
>> protocol, make the protocol available over WebSockets, and try to push the
>> whole thing as a W3C informational RFC?
> 
> Best idea yet!

IRCv3 is working on things like that, including features like
chat history, replies, even edits. There's a lot of spec work
there that's done or in flight.

Frankly, most chat protocols / systems are currently conver-
ging on the same feature set right now, arguably led by Slack
and Discord (who copy each other's features in turns).

The problem the IRC world has (aside from legacy cruft) is
that it's less vertically integrated than others and has less
momentum behind it right now. For example, if the Matrix
community hammers out a new spec feature, it tends to be
implemented in Synapse (reference server) and Riot (glitzy
web client) quickly, which are codebases that are really
deployed and really in use.

In IRC on the other hand, Konversation does support some IRCv3
things, but only to the extent that freenode and znc actually
support them, which is a very small extent compared to all the
IRCv3 things you need to clone Discord.

>From the Konversation side: We've long had ambitions to make
a Qt Quick-based successor UI to the current QWidget-based
version, and did some preliminary engineering work on that
last year (e.g. writing a prototype of a high-performance
chat text display system for Qt Quick, with lots of nifty
abilities like managing text elements as scene graph nodes
and using texture atlases smartly). We'll eventually resume
work on that.

I think there's still a calling for a modern chat client
built on the Qt/KDE stack - we've got a lot of goodies in
Frameworks that align with its needs very well, and the
desktop apps for things like Slack or Discord are just
websites wrapped in Electron and giant resource hogs with
poor platform integration. It's not-so-hard to do better,
and the 10+ years of experience in making a chat app for
people also don't hurt.

Now whether that Konvi-NG is an IRC client or a Matrix
client I personally actually don't care so much, because
they're both free and have values that I feel are
compatible with me and KDE.


Cheers,
Eike