matrix.org as a replacement for IRC?

Hi all,

Was there any discussion around using matrix.org or any other alternative as a replacement for IRC? This should help to avoid setting up irc proxy to keep track of discussion when the users are not online.

IIUC both KDE and mozilla switched to matrix as their IRC replacement.

-aneesh

Hard NACK from me.

I'd never heard of matrix.org and don't have an opinion either way. I do find IRC useful. Proxies make it much more useful, and if I have a choice, I'd rather not pay $50/year to irccloud just for a permanent presence.

I'd be interested to hear the details of your NACK, because they'd likely be informative and useful to me.

Bjorn

$50/year is offset by one fewer cup of coffee per month.

In any case, bouncers are not as necessary as they might seem. The idea of an infinite backlog encourages you to keep up with discussions you missed, which is a bad way of approaching IRC. Docs don't live in IRC, projects don't live in IRC, tickets don't live in IRC - any discussion that people shouldn't be fine with missing should be summarized and forwarded to a more appropriate medium.

I use a bouncer mainly because IRC is such an important part of my life that it's helpful for organization, and it's nice for people to be able to drop me a quick note while I'm offline. Nice, but easily replaced with email for anyone without a bouncer.

Given that we are a global community, you can't take the US living standard as an argument that something is affordable to everyone.

I use both matrix and IRC, you can use matrix as a IRC bouncer but it got blocked on some channels. Anyway I don't think that IRC is a must-have in our community as you can always fall-back to email. That holds at least for the part of the kernel I'm involved. So, from my point of view, no need for action.

Regards,
Matthias

Given that there is no kernel.org irc channel (officially), I don't see how the tool that different developers use to chat matters, do you?

Also, there are tools like irccloud if you don't like running your own irc proxy. Or better yet, just be fine with being offline :)

thanks,

greg k-h

Going off on a tangent here, I've been thinking about detecting and displaying Subject-Says-It-All (SSIA) emails in a more concise way for public-inbox.

That would give some benefits of chat and save readers' time in having less text to wade through; while still retaining threading and offline capability of email.

I'm not aware of any existing MUAs which support, it, though; so I'm hesitant to have public-inbox be the first...

Not sure how those orgs operate, but I find synchronous communication tiring and difficult when people are operating between several different timezones. It's especially difficult when several topics are being discussed in parallel.

I still use IRC privately, but only with small groups and mostly for non-technical topics ("watercooler talk"); but some of my fellow chatters have been wanting to move over to proprietary replacements :<

Full disclosure: I use both Martrix and IRC.

I think that matrix.org is very useful. However, I wouldn't replace IRC with it.

I use Matrix's bridging functionality to basically act as a cloud IRC client (since it's free and I only use it with IRC channels which are public anyway), but I do mostly use a local IRC client for my day to day.

I like the features that Matrix gives you, and I think that it provides a web interface which is less unfamiliar to a newbie. However, I do think for someone who knows IRC, the overhead of joining Matrix is meaningfully higher than joining a new IRC server/channel. Also, the features Matrix provides are not very useful if you either have a bouncer, a cloud IRC client, or you don't care about history or access from a mobile device.

So I definitely see Matrix vs. IRC as a tradeoff if you are living in the all-or-nothing world, and a tradeoff that many people would reasonably not want to make. Nevertheless, as I mentioned, it doesn't have to be that way: just use the Matrix bridge feature and then everyone is happy. You get to use Matrix if you want, everyone who just wants to keep using IRC is happy too. (Also, you don't need to ask for permission to do this either.)

Cheers