The chat situation

[XYQuadrat]

Hi,

First off, let me say that I personally have been increasingly satisfied 
with Matrix and am of the opinion that once an alternative homeserver 
implementation (Dendrite or conduit.rs come to mind, both of them have 
top-notch performance) is ready for production, it will be the optimal 
solution for KDE. Additionally, as a young developer (< 20 years old), I 
very much appreciate how similar Matrix is to other chat services and 
would likely be less active if I had to participate via IRC.

What I am asking myself right now is how to lead this discussion into 
the most productive way possible. I have gathered from the current mails 
in this thread that there is a wide variety of opinions, preferences and 
approaches to this problem. There has already been a community-wide poll 
(https://sessellift.wordpress.com/2017/09/05/results-of-the-requirements-survey-for-a-kde-wide-chat-solution/) 
back in 2017 - are the requirements based on this survey still accurate? 
Additionally, how can we most efficiently reach a decision on what to 
do? I suspect that simply talking about the pros and cons of Matrix and 
IRC will not get us anywhere.

Best wishes,
Julian

On 11.06.20 01:16, Nate Graham wrote:
> 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