The chat situation

[Ilmari Lauhakangas]

Bernie Innocenti kirjoitti 11.6.2020 klo 9.38:
> Doesn't Riot.im support images well enough for your use-case? It's free 
> software, and it's becoming fairly mature lately.
> 
> The root issue for both Telegram and Matrix seems to be that they're 
> bridging through a legacy platform like IRC. Would it be fair to say 
> that this problem will slowly resolve itself in time, as users leave IRC?
> 
> I don't mean to troll: I've been on IRC myself for 20+ years, but the 
> protocol has been stagnating and clients requires too much setup for 
> newcomers, particularly when you consider identity, presence and 
> persistence. Other open source projects are migrating to Matrix or 
> Gitter, and soon or later KDE will need to make a decision.

While progress with the IRC protocol has been slow, I would say freenode 
is suffering from stagnation the most at the moment. A service like 
KiwiBNC can act as a shim on top of freenode to bring modernity to 
everyone, but obviously limits to UX improvements will be hit. Freenode 
could solve this by moving to an actively-maintained IRCd (or invest a 
lot in their homegrown one).

An alternative would be setting up completely self-hosted IRC infra. 
This would really open up the possibilities as there are solutions like 
https://oragono.io/ which comes with an integrated bouncer.

Ilmari