Re: Thoughs about communication

[Matthew Hodgson <matthew matrix org>]

On 23/01/2017 08:05, philip chimento gmail com wrote:
> On Fri, Jan 13, 2017 at 10:16 AM Alexandre Franke <afranke gnome org
> <mailto:afranke gnome org>> wrote:
>
> On Fri, Jan 13, 2017 at 7:02 PM, Michael Catanzaro
> <mcatanzaro gnome org <mailto: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 <http://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.

In practice we do find a lot of people manage not to find the 'try 
matrix now' links on Matrix.org, unfortunately.  Thanks both for the 
datapoints; there's a new version of the website being planned currently 
that should fix this.

> 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.

yay!

> Anyone else who wants to try it out, come chat in #gnome:matrix.org
> <http://matrix.org>! (link for web client:
> https://riot.im/app/#/room/#gnome:matrix.org) You don't even need to
> create an account to try it out. It's really low friction.
>
> There are IRC bridges to freenode and moznet on matrix.org
> <http://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!

We'd be very haappy to run an official gimpnet bridge hosted by 
matrix.org; we'll drop by the ops channel on gimpnet to coordinate the 
details (which is basically just ensuring there's an I:line or similar 
to allow all the connections in from the matrix.org bridge instance).

> 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 <http://matrix.org> if they wanted a phone app or
> commandline client.

The way we normally expect people to onboard their community is to link 
straight through to a page like 
https://riot.im/app/#/room/#gnome:matrix.org like you did above.  Or 
possibly https://matrix.to/#/#gnome:matrix.org (although this needs to 
be much glossier).

> - You have to turn on the RTE 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.

The RTE editor was a 2016 GSoC project which sadly hasn't quite made it 
ready to be enabled by default (and the student is now focused on 
studies).  We can try to expedite its development or find someone to 
take it over - it's just a simple matter of debugging the various 
remaining issues it has, but we've been prioritising other stuff so far. 
 Is it specifically the emoji-picker that you're after?

> - Searching for information about how to connect to IRC rooms or set
> up an IRC bridge on matrix.org <http://matrix.org>, the best I could
> find was this: [3] :-(

That's for running your own bridge.  Agreed that the UX for joining new 
channels (and in future servers) in Riot could be improved better; it's 
already improved quite a lot, but we'll be landing stuff over the next 
few weeks to hopefully make it more intuitive.

> 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 <http://matrix.org>.

Yup. this is precisely the UX mess we're trying to fix atm.

thanks for all the feedback; we're really trying to make Riot the holy 
grail for this kind of use case :)

Matthew

> Regards, Philip C
>
> [1] http://pasteboard.co/pqKKmBt7l.png [2] https://riot.im/app/ [3]
> http://matrix.org/docs/guides/application_services.html [4]
> https://solson.me/2016/10/08/irccloud-to-matrix.html#irc-bridges
>
>
>
>
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--
Matthew Hodgson
Director, Engineering, Next Generation Telephony - OpenMarket
Director, Amdocs Unified Communications - Amdocs

--
Matthew Hodgson
Matrix.org