Re: Thoughs about communication

[Michael Catanzaro <mcatanzaro gnome org>]

On Fri, 2017-01-13 at 23:45 +1100, George Barrett wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 13, 2017 at 08:37:30AM +0000, Alberto Fanjul Alonso
> wrote:
> > Hi, hackers
> >
> > Do anybody though about trying new services for communication?
> >
> > - signal https://whispersystems.org/
> > - telegram https://telegram.org/
> > - matrix.org http://matrix.org/
> > - gitter https://gitter.im/
>
> None of these platforms have an official Telepathy protocol
> implementation.
> That people will have a lessened ability to access chat already seems
> like a
> non-starter.

Hi,

I've been assured that Matrix works well enough via telepathy-haze,
although I've never tried it myself and wouldn't want to recommend it.
Anyway, telepathy has been unmaintained for years and is frankly
totally dead, so the real problem here is that GNOME Shell still uses
Telepathy at all.

(This is a real shame, by the way. If only somebody cared enough to
maintain it....)

> > pros/cons irc:
> >
> > pros:
> > <snip>
> > - is widespread
> > - integrated in gnome environment (bots, bugzilla)
>
> I would argue these two features are critical to any prospective chat
> platform. If people can't access chat in a way that suits their
> workflow, they
> probably won't. And it'd be a step backwards if automation suddenly
> became a
> stumbling block.
>
> In terms of universality, the only chat platform rivalling IRC (that
> I can
> think of, at least) is XMPP. I don't know enough about it to
> seriously
> recommend it, though; does it support the requested features?

Matrix solves this by bridging to both IRC and XMPP, so you can
continue using your existing client.

As far as GNOME integration, our Telepathy integration in GNOME Shell
has been very lacking since GNOME 3.8 and probably worse than no
integration since GNOME 3.16. I would really, really like to see a
decent GNOME Chat app, or just improved Empathy, but in the meantime
we're already in a very bad position with Telepathy.

(And don't say "Polari"... unfortunately, as Polari can only handle
IRC, it's not an option for those of us who need to use any other
protocol.)

> > - signal is aware of privacy
>
> What does this mean? If the plan is that public chats are logged, is
> there any
> room for privacy considerations? I'm probably misunderstanding, but
> being
> privacy-aware seems moot in this instance.

Signal offers end-to-end encryption. So does Matrix. I don't know how
this feature interacts with chat room logging (though I'd presume that
the developers are not stupid).

> The proposal for a IRC bridge with Matrix strikes me as the most
> sensible and
> potentially an interesting experiment, but I have doubts wrt its
> adoption.

Seems like it can't hurt anything, at least! On the other hand, it
doesn't solve our identification problem.

Michael