[Nix-dev] Open source team messaging: mattermost

[Jonn Mostovoy]

Tomasz, these all are not valid reasons to split the community.
There are *no* valid reasons to split the community.
There is always irccloud engine for people who fail to set a bouncer
up with an amazing Android application and even more amazing Web UI.
Besides, you should remember that IRC is simple. It's difficult to get
IRC wrong, even the distributed part of it. Modern chat applications
promise a lot, but most of the times do not deliver.
Gitter is utter garbage (it doesn't work), hipchat doesn't work
properly, slack is amazing but expensive and proprietary, open source
slack clones even though luring, seem rather unstable.

And once you have committed to some other platform and moved, say, 70%
of the community there, forcing the remaining 30% to follow, people
won't be extremely happy when the platform will turn out to be
garbage.
That happened with Russian-speaking Haskell community, they have
picked Gitter to be the platform and *a lot* of people went inactive
because it loses messages and is buggy as hell. The dreadful thing is
— now administration of Russian-speaking Haskell community can't do
anything about it. It's impossible to move a huge innert mass to
another chat platform after one was chosen over IRC, so people who are
left there have no choice but to suffer.

TL;DR:
IRC isn't modern, but it is stable and its shortcomings can be solved
*in distributed manner*, or via irccloud; Freenode is a de facto
standard for serious projects to host IM chats dedicated to those;
there is no reason to split the community over bikeshedding.
—
Kindest regards,
¬Σ


On Tue, Mar 1, 2016 at 9:06 AM, Tomasz Kontusz <tomasz.kontusz at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> Dnia 29 lutego 2016 20:59:06 CET, Arseniy Seroka <ars.seroka at gmail.com> napisał(a):
>>IRC is awesome thing, why do we need to replace it?
> IRC replacements typically offer:
> * history
> * long messages with sane visualisation (like hiding parts of them in history until requested) - this greatly reduces the need for pastebins, and keeps everything in one place
> * email notifications
> * some light styling that works the same for everyone in the channel
>
> And all of that is integrated from the start, without the need to setup bouncers and looking through history on some other service.
> Also, IIRC mattermost has a nice visualisation of threads of discussion while still keeping the "common channel" feel (but I might be mistaking it with other service).
>
> As much as I like IRC for being a standardised protocol with many clients, it has not aged well. And movements to refresh it (like IRCv3) are pretty slow. Also you can't ignore the barrier to entry being much higher than for a browser-based chat app.
> --
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