On Sat, Jun 20, 2020 at 3:24 PM Reuben Staley via agora-discussion <agora-discussion@agoranomic.org> wrote: > So here comes the poll part: what does everyone think about a chat client? > IRC or Discord? Something open like Matrix? There are lots of options here. > What's the call?
In addition to Matrix, open source options include Mattermost, Rocket.Chat, and Zulip. I'm willing to host any of those if desired, although that would probably not be necessary for Matrix since it has existing free public servers. As far as I know, those alternatives are largely on par with Discord in terms of pure functionality. But that's only part of the story. If you're on Discord, you can see all your Discord "servers" (i.e. communities; they're not actually independently hosted) in one integrated interface. That makes it easy and convenient to add another server; personally, I'm on dozens of servers, even though I rarely even use Discord! In contrast, using another chat site, even if it looks like Discord, requires you to actively keep that site open in your browser. In other words, Discord has a strong proprietary lock-in. I'm pretty annoyed by it, but I don't much blame Discord itself. I blame the world for not coming up with better third-party chat clients, ones capable of integrating multiple independent chat services into one interface. There are many IRC clients; there were many AIM/Yahoo/MSN clients back in the day; where are the "Slack-alike" clients? There are ways to connect IRC clients to these services, but they tend to lose functionality (e.g. edits and formatting). You'd think it would be possible to connect Matrix clients to them, but I haven't seen a gateway that works well for personal use. On the other hand, more on-topic, there *is* a relatively robust ecosystem of tools to publicly bridge channels on different services, where a bot connects to each channel and relays all messages from the other channel. For example, there's matterbridge, which, despite its name referring to Mattermost, is a: > bridge between mattermost, IRC, gitter, xmpp, slack, discord, > telegram, rocketchat, steam, twitch, ssh-chat, zulip, whatsapp, > keybase, matrix, microsoft teams and more with REST API (mattermost > not required!) So we could set up a Discord community and then bridge it with IRC. This can sometimes have awkward results [1], but from what I've heard it basically works. [1] https://drewdevault.com/2019/07/01/Absence-of-features-in-IRC.html (I disagree with the overall thesis, but it shows the problem with bridges)
