The chat situation

[Bernie Innocenti]

On 11/06/2020 19.28, Ilmari Lauhakangas wrote:
> 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).

Maybe a member of the KDE community could go on on #freenode and bring 
up the issue of stagnation in a civilized manner (like... without saying 
"give us $FEATURE or else we walk away" :-)

I'm sure they're already aware of it, and perhaps they're already 
working on a plan to address some of our issues, and looking for 
volunteers who want to help.


> 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.

A modern IRCd that doesn't look like it was written back in the 80's? 
WOW. It has all green boxes except for setname:

  https://ircv3.net/software/servers.html

Still... it feels like IRCv3 is still doing too little, too late. The 
design team needs to share images and short videos. Everyone wants 
threaded replies, profile pics...

So we need to wait for IRCv4, or switch to things like Matrix and 
Gitter, which are *already* IRCv4 ;-)

-- 
  _ // Bernie Innocenti
  \X/  https://codewiz.org/