The chat situation

[Christian Loosli]

Hi all, 

couple of inputs from my side, with both a KDE and a freenode hat on: 

First of all, I do agree that the situation is not great and could be 
improved. However, I doubt that "switching to a single product" / "abandon 
bridging" would really improve the situation. Projects that went that path, 
e.g. Mozilla, suffered from even more community fragmentation, because some 
people are not happy with $product for various valid reasons  (forced 
registration, not-open, lack of well integrating or accessible clients etc.) 
This is something we wanted to avoid back when the discussion came up that did 
lead to the current situation.
Also Matrix, from what I can see, seems to have bridging issues that do not 
include IRC, so e.g. bridging Telegram and Matrix directly might improve the 
situation, but not fully solve it. 

And while IRC is improving  (and you are very welcome to participate e.g. in 
#ircv3 or #freenode-dev on freenode) two of the main pain points people 
mention   (lack of an endless scrollback / offline history, uploading media 
directly) are unlikely to fully happen on freenode / IRC, due to both 
technical and privacy / legal reasons. There is very likely to be (offline) 
backlog, but it will be time-limited due to the above constraints. Not having 
these constraints means someone else (neither freenode nor probably KDE) has 
both the storage and the legal willingness to store that data, with all 
implications this brings (DSVGO, security and privacy, ...) 
These are usually profit oriented companies, and having to rely on these 
brings up some new issues.

Some of these issues can be solved already though, various well improving 
bouncer solutions have been mentioned, and exchanging media / displaying it 
can be solved in the frontend, as some clients already do. It just means 
relying on an external service, but we already do that in other areas. 

On the XMPP / messenger end I can't really say much other than the situation 
being most likely not satisfactory, but as people around me stopped using 
these protocols and switched to (semi)proprietary solutions, so unfortunately 
did I. 

Kind regards, 

Christian