Re: Matrix IRC bridge considered harmful

Benjamin Berg <[email protected]> Thu, 13 Feb 2020 11:14:57 +0100
Newsgroups	gmane.comp.gnome.desktop
Message-ID	<[email protected]>
On Wed, 2020-02-12 at 16:35 -0600, Michael Catanzaro wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 12, 2020 at 2:09 pm, Britt Yazel <[email protected]> wrote:
> > I have had horrible experiences with Matrix/Riot.im. I'm not sure 
> > which of those is due to the IRC bridge or which is due to Matrix 
> > itself, or which is due to the clients, but I really shouldn't 'have' 
> > to know the chat system at that level. My experience has been awful.
> 
> Here is my suggestion: fellow Matrix proponents, let's turn off the IRC 
> bridge ASAP. All we've accomplished by running the IRC bridge is 
> convincing GNOME devs that Matrix is awful. I'm pretty sure that all of 
> this negative feedback is about the IRC bridge.

Yeah, I also think most of the Matrix issues that people see are either
related to IRC bridging or that the public servers we rely on were
overloaded.

So, said differently, I would expect that anyone using a walled garden
Rocket.Chat instance (i.e. chat.gnome.org) without all that baggage
will have a great user experience in comparison. But, unfortunately,
that tells us nothing about which chat system is superior.

One could do this comparison properly. But it would need setting up a
private Matrix server for GNOME (possibly without Federation) and then
checking how well it holds up when compared to Rocket.Chat.


I have no idea which option is superior. And that can be a hard
question as it might even differ depending on whether your focus is on
e.g. short term experience vs. long term technical viability. That
said, I would love to see arguments here (for oragainst each chat
system) that I can compare in a useful manner.

Benjamin

PS: I had a nice chat with the Rocket.Chat person at FOSDEM who was
keen on getting IRC bridging up and running on their side. He said that
when I mentioned that Red Hat had experimented with it. If someone is
serious about this, I can pass on the contact.

> (We also need to fix the fractal bug that causes it to create private 
> rooms set to allow participants to view only messages sent after they 
> have joined the room. I guess fractal is sending the wrong permissions 
> enum value when creating rooms, or something similar to that.)
> 
> On Wed, Feb 12, 2020 at 2:09 pm, Britt Yazel <[email protected]> wrote:
> > So, the last thing I'll say is this. As a project that is trying to 
> > attract more users, many of whom are young, new to FOSS, and or are 
> > non-technology skilled professionals such as artists, designers, 
> > writers, etc, is Matrix really the best option? Or do you just want 
> > it to be the best option?
> 
> It's really the best option.
> 
> The problem with Rocket.Chat is that with only a web client, I doubt 
> very many developers would actually be willing to use it. (At least, I 
> don't think I'm the only one who would be hard no to a web client.) And 
> honestly I have no reason to believe Rocket.Chat will exist in five 
> years. Alexandre says it's another silo, rather than an 
> extensively-documented backwards-compatible protocol like Matrix 
> (although since Rocket.Chat is open source, I suppose it might be the 
> best walled garden among walled gardens). Rocket.Chat doesn't seem 
> designed to unify online communication in the same way that Matrix is, 
> and honestly without a desktop client I'd say that alone leaves it far 
> behind IRC. We need to select something that we can really unify our 
> community behind, something that everyone will like, not something 
> that's only going to be used by people who like web clients. In 
> particular, we don't want to wind up with one chat community on 
> Rocket.Chat and another on IRC, which is where we're heading currently 
> if we keep chat.gnome.org online.
> 
> Michael
> 
> 
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