The chat situation

[Ilmari Lauhakangas]

Nate Graham kirjoitti 11.6.2020 klo 2.16:
> 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?

As an alternative, we can also "fix" IRC, meaning to improve its UX.

For offering a KDE-hosted always-online experience to everyone, there 
are modern solutions such as

https://convos.chat/
https://thelounge.chat/
https://github.com/kiwiirc/kiwibnc

Of these, KiwiBNC is a general purpose bouncer, which means you can 
attach any mobile or desktop client to it. Account creation could be 
tied to KDE Identity.

What is needed on the UX side is to make sure there is no requirement 
for command-line style interaction.

Ilmari