The chat situation

[Nate Graham]

Carson's email about bridging #kde-devel to Telegram got me thinking: we 
should have a discussion about the situation we're in regarding chat 
services in KDE.

The current Matrix solution does not seem not optimal to me. I have 
really tried my best to be a good citizen and use Matrix as much as 
possible over the last year but I find myself gravitating back towards 
Telegram because of how much better the overall UX is, especially for 
fast-moving discussions and those involving images.

I haven't found a Matrix client that offers both a half-decent UX and 
also a reasonable featureset. The service suffers from lag, sometimes 
severe. Periodically the federation breaks, or the bridge between IRC 
and Telegram breaks, leading to people's messages silently vanishing. 
The implementation of the bridge itself impedes discussions between 
Telegram users and IRC/Matrix users because when a Telegram user replies 
to a post made by someone on IRC or Matrix, that person person can't see 
the message being replied to. Overall it just does not feel like a great 
user experience.

This situation really needs to be fixed, somehow. I'm not knowledgeable 
enough regarding chat software to be able to propose solution, but I 
don't feel like the status quo is something we should live with. Can we 
fix Matrix? Or should we migrate to something that offers a better UX?

Nate