The chat situation

[Martin Steigerwald]

XYQuadrat - 11.06.20, 16:15:04 CEST:
> 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-requireme
> nts-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.

I am not really opposed to Matrix… I just didn't use it so far, cause I… 
meanwhile hate Google Recaptcha with a passion. As far as I read it is a 
privacy nightmare in that if it can it gather all kinds of data from the 
client browser, it provides free machine learning data for Google… and 
it just does not fit in how I think the internet should work.

I understand why it is so often used… however I have also seen 
alternatives, like for example on the register page of dismail.de – but 
there is also some open source self host-able alternative I have come 
across once. I do not recall the name currently. I am also pretty sure I 
did not need to answer a Recaptcha for registering with disroot.org

Also for chat I do prefer to use a real desktop client. No website. And 
also no website in a desktop client, although I put up with Rocket.Chat 
electron client so far even if it mainly is just that as far as I 
understand. Mobile phone app would be optional for me but I bet it is 
important for many people.

Anyway, yeah… good would be to get an idea how to continue?

Is there any short-term things that can be done about the Matrix 
situation so that the currently felt pain can be relieved a bit? This 
would give more time to focus on a longer term approach.

I still recall it, it was quite a discussion about chat systems before 
Matrix was chosen and I do believe there have been good reasons for the 
choice.

-- 
Martin