summary of matrix/element chat discussion
As promised, a summary of our video call for those who couldn't attend:
Highlights
* Red Hat’s Open Source Program Office is interested in this experiment and
will fund hosted Element out of non-Fedora budget. That makes going ahead
with a practical trial basically a no-brainer.
* We’ll have own hosted server at https://chat.fedoraproject.org/, and
Element will provide a 1-day admin SLA at the level we’re getting. So, it
won’t require ongoing CPE or volunteer resources at the sysadmin level.
We’ll still need moderators and active admins of course.
* Log in will be through FAS, and we’ll also federate the server so you can
come in with a different identity.
* Mozilla has seen a 4× increase in engagement since switching from IRC to
Matrix (also hosted by Element). Also successful for KDE and SUSE. In
progress at GNOME. :)
* IRC isn’t going anywhere. Many people still like it, and Freenode is still
an important hub for free and open source software development. So, we
will provide bridges.
* These bridges will be set up in a way that avoids some of the problems the
GNOME project shared with their deployment.
* I had a concern that Zodbot would need to be ported immediately because of
problems I’d heard about logged meetings, but we’re assured that those
might be non-issues or at least easily fixed, which is nice for a
soft-launch / experiment with no big infrastructure changes right off.
* On a slightly more controversial note: we know that the bridge can be
somewhat annoying when Matrix decides it wants to send a URL rather than a
long message, and that things like reactions just don’t get bridged. Our
plan here, assuming the trial is successful, is to try and minimize these
inconveniences but ultimately steer people to using Matrix natively. Many
popular messaging clients (including weechat, for old-school folks)
support Matrix directly now.
* When will this start? Basically as soon as the money is worked out.
Full notes at:
https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/the-future-of-real-time-chat-discu...
--
Matthew Miller
<mattdm(a)fedoraproject.org>
Fedora Project Leader