On Fri, Jan 13, 2017 at 7:02 PM, Michael Catanzaro <mcatanzaro gnome org> wrote:
> The rest of your points are still valid, though. Sounds like they could
> be resolved by improving the Matrix website (maybe needs a big "take me
> to chat" button).
The matrix.org homepage has two "Try Matrix Now!" links, one in the
menu (second item) on top and one in the middle of the screen. The
page that leads to has a selection of four clients for four platforms
(command line, desktop/web, ios and Android) and only below that is
there a more exhaustive list. Clicking on Riot links to a presentation
page with a link to launch it directly.
I think that's rather reasonable.
I tried Riot, the web client, again today and I must say I was pleasantly surprised! As others have noted it's improved by leaps and bounds in one year.
There are IRC bridges to freenode and moznet on
matrix.org, and you can join IRC channels on those servers using the Matrix client. We could probably set up a bridge to gimpnet, although I have no idea how much hassle it is to do that. If it's not too much hassle, I'd say let's do it as soon as possible!
I think the friction could still be reduced by quite a lot, particularly since (for me) the main reason to direct people to Matrix is to make chatting in the GNOME community more open to new community members, inexperienced ones, and non-software-oriented ones.
Here are my suggestions for reducing the friction, both for newbies (maybe coming from Slack) and for old hands coming from IRC:
- The front page of the web site is really not suitable for us to redirect people to as part of a "welcome to the GNOME community" process. It's pretty sleek but its target audience is ... well ... Matrix developers. Here is my tongue-in-cheek analysis of my thought process on seeing it, with and without my techy hat... [1]
- The client is described as "If you like glossy and feature-rich web clients, try Riot." In other words, "normal" unless you come from IRC :-) As a new contributor to GNOME, am I going to be judged for being too "glossy" and not hardcore enough if I click on that? Maybe we could just link people directly to [2] and only secondarily to
matrix.org if they wanted a phone app or commandline client.
- You have to turn on the RTF message editor to get some features like emoji that people would expect coming from other messaging apps, but it's buried in Settings and is marked "experimental". I'd suggest we wait until it's stable and enabled by default before recommending a switch for the GNOME community.
- Searching for information about how to connect to IRC rooms or set up an IRC bridge on
matrix.org, the best I could find was this: [3] :-(
Re. the last point, I eventually discovered how to connect to already-bridged IRC rooms though in another link posted elsewhere in this thread [4]. After a bit of experimentation I determined that if a particular room hasn't been used yet on the bridge, it won't show up in search results, but you can just type the name it would be expected to have, and it'll get created on demand. So, e.g., I created #freenode_#hotdoc:
matrix.org.
Regards,
Philip C
