The chat situation

[Christian Loosli]

Hi Carl, 

Am Donnerstag, 11. Juni 2020, 15:15:36 CEST schrieb 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.

So far my experiences in there were okay, but it might depend on various 
things, such as timezones, day of the week or just being lucky. 

Our KDE instance is, as far as I am aware, sponsored, so we (KDE, also for 
follow-up-we) do not only not give them any money, but by using their support 
sort of "costing them" money. This is an issue we will have with any chat 
system: either we are willing to maintain our own (which I assume we'd have to 
with Rocket), so we'd need to check if we have the ressources, both server- 
and people wise. 
Or, as we currently do with freenode IRC and Matrix, we outsource that, then 
we need to see if we trust the entity we outsource to, and if we are happy 
with their support. 

> 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.

Uh, I'm not sure where you got that, but: 

1) nickserv registration is _not_ mandatory. IRC on freenode, compared to 
other solutions, does not force you to register and thus giving an e-mail 
address (Matrix), phone number (like Telegram) or similar.
However, we (freenode) give channel operators the possibility to (temporarily 
or for good) make the channel only accessible to registered users, which can 
be used to cut down abuse / spam. However, I haven't seen any of that in 
recent months, so channels should be fine without this setting. 

2) the process should not have to be repeated. You only have to register once, 
and unless Matrix is doing something silly, you should auto-authenticate on 
connect. 

3) the process itself could be improved, however, we (freenode) on the IRC 
side can't really do anything more on that end, that would have to come from 
Matrix  (I assume it shouldn't be too hard to have a proper GUI for that)

> 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!

I'd have to go back to the requirement collecting and voting process we had in 
2017 on why Rocket didn't make it (because it was a candidate), as far as I 
remember it isn't trivial to maintain (only docker? Something like that) and I 
am not aware of any company or entity that would sponsor us an instance and 
take care of it, so if we wanted to switch, we'd need to ensure that our infra 
is willing and able to set it up and maintain  / support it. 

Kind regards, 

Christian