Re: Matrix IRC bridge considered harmful

[Michael Catanzaro <mcatanzaro gnome org>]

On Wed, Feb 12, 2020 at 4:23 pm, Georges Basile Stavracas Neto via 
desktop-devel-list <desktop-devel-list gnome org> wrote:
> The Riot application is hard to use. It took me days to figure out 
> how to connect
> to a GNOME room. It doesn't allow me to log out of the servers.

These are all problems with the IRC bridge, not with normal Matrix. I 
agree the quality of the IRC bridge is catastrophic. Joining rooms is 
extremely difficult, and it is a Hotel California bridge (you can check 
out, but you can never leave! that's why we have all these trap ghost 
accounts from Matrix who never see the PMs you send them, basically the 
inverse of the problem I started this thread to complain about).

Anyway, normal Matrix has none of those problems. Please don't judge it 
based on the quality of the IRC bridge.

It is a shame that the Matrix developers continue to operate IRC 
bridges that are clearly serving to harm the reputation of Matrix. I 
know there's value in bridging to IRC, but it should be done well if 
it's going to be done at all. No doubt the Matrix developers have 
limited time and competing priorities, just like we do ourselves....

> Fractal is nice,
> as I really like native clients, but Polari feels more polished. 
> Matrix apparently
> doesn't allow turning off federation, and to me that's a no-go aspect 
> of it. At
> last, I have a strong impression that Matrix suffers from feature 
> bloat.

Fractal needs some love, for sure. I wouldn't want Matrix to be judged 
by the quality of Fractal today. (In particular, all PMs you send to 
users are silently discarded until the other user joins the room, and 
there is no UI to indicate the user has joined the room. You really 
have to create PMs from Riot, which is pretty awful.) But Fractal's 
problems are all well within the skills of our community to solve.

Jan-Michael also likes the Chatty app from Purism. I didn't realize 
that was a Matrix client until today, so I haven't tried it and can't 
vouch for it myself, but it looks similar to Polari or Fractal. So it 
seems we have two GNOME clients for Matrix, zero for Rocket.Chat....

> Rocket.Chat has been apparently more responsive to out contact, and 
> even
> accepted a few pull requests from us. I believe it has a brighter 
> future, specially
> if a native GTK client shows up.

I've never seen any core Rocket.Chat developers flying to us to give 
talks at GUADEC, like Matthew has done. I think Matthew has perhaps 
stopped focusing on GNOME due to perceived lack of interest on our side 
(and competing time pressures; I guess keeping Mozilla and the France 
government connected is not easy. ;)

Basically my opinion would be: there's a pretty clear industry leader 
here, other open organizations are selecting Matrix after investigating 
available options, why not go with what everybody else is doing? Goal 
should be for GNOME developers to only need *one* chat app to do their 
jobs. Let's go with whatever has the best chance of obsoleting IRC, 
which looks like Matrix.

That said, I don't know much about Rocket.Chat. Honestly, I don't think 
I'd heard of it before I rediscovered chat.gnome.org a couple weeks 
ago. So if Rocket.Chat really is open protocol like Matrix -- a 
backwards-compatible protocol that encourages the creation of diverse 
clients, rather than something we just have to hope doesn't change and 
break a future GNOME client -- and if we really seriously plan to write 
a GNOME-style client, then I guess that might turn out just fine, and 
allow us to finally move on from IRC. (I really want to see a GNOME 
client though; a web client is just not good enough.) But Matrix is 
good today. I guess all we need to do is redirect chat.gnome.org to 
gnome.modular.im, turn off GIMPNet, and call it a day. Bonus points if 
we can keep the string "poop" out of any of the domain names.

Michael