The chat situation

[Ilmari Lauhakangas]

Bernie Innocenti kirjoitti 11.6.2020 klo 14.02:
> 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.

Well, there is even one KDE/freenode hybrid contributor in our known 
galaxy :)

>> 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 ;-)

Yeah, it feels like a "boiling the ocean" type of scenario for sure with 
the ideal being clients advancing in lockstep with servers on the spec 
implementation. Threaded replies is a good example as the client-only 
reply tag has a single implementation: IRCCloud.

Image & file sharing I feel could be addressed by self-hosting, but of 
course it would need client support as well for the upload. For example, 
there is a file uploader plugin for the KiwiIRC webclient: 
https://github.com/kiwiirc/plugin-fileuploader

Profile pics / avatars as metadata have some implementations (at least 
IRCCloud). The metadata spec actually got a rewrite already (in draft 
status currently): https://github.com/ircv3/ircv3-specifications/pull/339

Ilmari