The chat situation

[Carl Schwan]

The problem with Matrix in KDE is that I'm not even sure someone is actively
working on improving the situation.

I know the KDE sysadmins are not maintaining it and instead, in case of
problem, people should go to #kde-matrix-support:kde.org. So I tried asking
multiple times about why my matrix account doesn't get any message from the
irc and telegram bridge and never got an answer.

Same thing with the lag issue. It could be partially resolved if we were
using the kde.org node instead of the matrix.org for the bridging and it was
asked multiple times in this channel by someone else. But this is still not
solved. I wonder if someone in KDE has some control over it.

The major reason why we chose Matrix was, because it allowed
communication with people still using IRC and was more user friendly. But
actually to be able to interact with those peoples, a new user should
register their nick on Freenode and using this nick on Matrix by using
some commands that need to be repeated every few weeks. I don't think this
process is very user friendly.

Maybe it is the time to consider other open-source alternatives like Mattermost
or Rocket Chat... GNOME did it, Blender did it, we even have a Rocket Chat
client in KDE now!

Le jeudi, juin 11, 2020 6:38 AM, Bernie Innocenti <bernie at codewiz.org> a écrit :

> 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.
>
> On 11/06/2020 09.09, Carl Schwan wrote:
>
> > Hi,
> > Strong +1 on this. The current situation is far from good. Currently to
> > have a good communication application I need to either use a proprietary
> > platform, use a platform who doesn't support images and for which I need
> > to set up a bouncer on my server or use a platform which lags a lot and
> > which doesn't always relays my messages to the bridges.
> > Carl
> > Le mercredi, juin 10, 2020 11:16 PM, Nate Graham nate at kde.org a écrit :
> >
> > > 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?
> >
> > > Nate
>
> --
>
> _ // Bernie Innocenti
> \X/ https://codewiz.org/

</bernie at codewiz.org>
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