[announcement] Telegram bridging to be retired Wed. 20 Sept. | 5 to-dos

[Dawid Wrobel]

On Tue, Aug 22, 2023 at 2:02 PM Kai Bojens <kb at kbojens.de> wrote:

> On 22.08.23 12:45, Niccolò Ve wrote:
> > This is a terribly careless decision, for multiple reasons.
>
> No, it's not. This is an Open Source Community in which we all have at
> least one thing in common: our software should be free and we work very
> hard to ensure its freedom. Telegram on the other hand is a closed
> platform, run by, well: run by whom? Where does it have its Headquarter?
> Dubai? Russia? Virgin Islands? Belize? You might get different answers,
> depending on who you're asking. It's a closed platform with no freedom.
> Just like Facebook, Linked.in and all the other places.

So is Windows, so is macOS, and yet effort is continuing to be made
for KDE software to be operational on these platforms.

> I had no say in this decision and was not involved in any way but I
> totally welcome that Telegram is cut off.

The year is 2023 and KDE is still stuck on its crusade to almost
forcefully convince the world to stop using closed software, of any
kind, even if it effectively mens alienating existing users or, more
importantly, developers.

Sure, by all means, but IMHO this is yet another Not Invented Here
move that sidelines KDE, pigeonholing it as "hackers software for
hackers".

Obviously that *is* just my opinion, but let me just give some context for it:
1) Google "matrix how to start"
2) This is where it points to: https://matrix.org/docs/legacy/introduction/
3) Tell me this can convince anyone, be it end users or modern-day
developers, to actually bother with Matrix.

Jabber was just as complicated and it never won over the ICQs and MSNs
of the era. I really find it hard to believe that people will embrace
Matrix anytime soon, considering e-mail is federated in similar
fashion yet 1.8 billion use GMail for this purpose. In the era of
GitHub, Dockerfiles, Codespaces, Discord and similar, modern dev tools
of convenience, which majority of youngest generation of devs use
daily, not making an effort to make contributing to KDE easier and
instead going backwards on that is just unfathomable to me. From where
I stand, the closed-source dev tools adoption is what it is, whether
we like it or not, and KDE in its minisculeness has very little chance
of changing it. So do we really want to alienate devs or compromise a
bit more, in an effort to gain more hands working at bettering the
software and *actually* eventually more regular users to use it?

For the record, since KMyMoney had its Telegram channel, we had way
more users and more developers interacting with us than ever before.
Considering how difficult it still is to set up the project for
development, ditching the convenience of firing up Telegram and within
minutes asking us, the devs, for help, is a step back and I can't
imagine we would continue to get as many ad-hoc contributions going
forward.

Just out of curiosity, was getting in touch with Telegram regarding
potential IRC or Matrix bridge issues considered at all? Since it
works with GitLab, maybe it would work with them? And if not Telegram,
then maybe a bridge with Discord at least?

PS. Excuse my excessive sarcasm, but I personally estimate having
spent 60-70% of my time with KMyMoney on anything but improving the
actual software, and I find it very frustrating considering there's so
many other projects that are so easy to contribute to. It's just
getting harder and harder to justify dedicating those free cycles to
KDE actually.

-- 
Best Regards,
Dawid Wrobel