Re: Matrix as a replacement for Telepathy

[Matthew Hodgson <matthew matrix org>]

Matrix is about much more than IRC-style communication, although it's a 
common misunderstanding given most of the popular use of Matrix today 
happens to be as a decentralised IRC/Slack/Gitter/Telegram alternative.

We have Skype-style voice and video calls too, as well as conference 
calls (and as of two days ago, integration with other conferencing 
platforms like Jitsi).  For instance, we've just teamed up with the 
Purism guys to deliver a VoIP/messaging app for their new Librem 5 FLOSS 
smartphone: 
https://matrix.org/blog/2017/08/24/the-librem-5-from-purism-a-matrix-native-smartphone/.

I'm obviously biased, but I think that using Matrix as an alternative to 
Telepathy would be a great idea.  One of the proposed pieces of work for 
the Purism deal in fact would be to run a background Matrix client on 
the phone which can receive Matrix push notifications, inbound messages 
& calls etc, and expose them via DBUS or similar for the rest of the OS 
to use.  Thus applications could either talk HTTP direct to their 
preferred Matrix server, or use a Matrix-over-DBUS style API to share 
the same daemon across all apps.  This could also be super-useful for 
E2E crypto, as the heavy lifting crypto work could be done by a shared 
daemon, and expose a simple plaintext API through to the client apps on 
the machine itself (assuming you trusted the host sufficiently).

This work is currently a stretch goal for the Purism campaign though if 
they significantly overshoot their funding target, so if the wider GNOME 
or Matrix or Linux community was interested in pursuing this sooner than 
later it would only be a Good Thing.

thanks,

Matthew

On 24/08/2017 23:15, Alejandro HC wrote:
> A comment as a user. Since Empathy ceased to be maintained, there has
>  been little concern for the communication system that is available
> in gnome focused to end user (gnome-polari is targeted to IRC which
> is mostly used by developer communities).
>
> Matrix is great, but I feel it points to the same, so why not support
>  GNU Ring in GNOME ... Ring is a project that aims to be a free 
> replacement for Skype, in addition already has a good integration in
>  gnome and it's easy to use, offering its own communication protocol
> it offers support for SIP.
>
> 2017-08-24 17:40 GMT-03:00 Sriram Ramkrishna <sri ramkrishna me 
> <mailto:sri ramkrishna me>>:
>
> I thought I would put it out there after some discussion to make sure
> it isn't a completely crazy idea.
>
> What do people think about integrating directly with Matrix as a 
> replacement for Telepathy?  This would mean that we can focus on 
> chat, video-conferencing, and anything else through Matrix.  We'd 
> have to abandon clients like empathy (or modify).  For IRC we would 
> use our own library or use matrix's bridge.
>
> This way, we can push this support to an upstream that cares and is 
> culturally compatible with us.  Matrix of course gets a boost from a 
> major group relying on them and providing alternative clients and a 
> superior (hopefully) user experience.
>
> sri
>
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> -- *Hugo*
>
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--
Matthew Hodgson
Matrix.org