Matrix and IRC - Mozillians custom client?

[majken]

As a Telegram user, what I think lead to easy popularity of Telegram is that the contact discovery relies on phone number. This makes it possible for people to figure out when their friends are on Telegram without having to ask. I will go on and say (with no evidence as such) that this single feature is the reason why Telegram became very popular (even among Mozillians). All dinoblah had to do to get drawn into the conversation was join Telegram. A friend (with phone number) would get the notification “dinoblah joined Telegram”. They’d immediately add dinoblah to all relevant groups.

Ah so you’re staying the key is that you get notified when one of your contacts joins Telegram? This is an interesting feature. Though in the context of Mozillians I don’t think this would be a leading wanted feature.

Do facebook and google not also let you search by your contacts to find friends on a messenger service? Or is the process significantly different?

If the vouching process on Mozillians were to work a bit more like friends, and create social links, then we could use the Mozillians API to replicate this sort of notification that a friend has made an account. Also the idea of remembering contacts is not a feature of IRC servers, but could probably be done with matrix.

[asdofindia (Akshay)]

Ah so you’re staying the key is that you get notified when one of your contacts joins Telegram? […]
Do facebook and google not also let you search by your contacts to find friends on a messenger service? Or is the process significantly different?

I’m not sure this is key. But it just occurred to me when I started thinking about it.

Contact discovery. Google shows Google+ profile of people we communicate with right next to emails, also sends notifications when contact joins Google+. Facebook has friend suggestions (which uses gmail contacts if we upload gmail contacts). Instagram notifies you when your facebook friend joins Instagram. LinkedIn has suggestions based on email contacts. Twitter notifies you when your email contact joins Twitter.

Also the idea of remembering contacts is not a feature of IRC servers, but could probably be done with matrix.

Upload contact emails, compare it with email address of new users when they signup, send notifications. (And manage the privacy :P)

[leo (Leo McArdle)]

Totally! I don’t think I have any secret knowledge which isn’t available in the public documentation, but if @JLensmeister wants some help/advice/whatever with config I’m happy to provide it. For the time being I really should be focusing on SSO (when I’m not doing Physics Coursework…)

[alex_mayorga]

¡Hola!

Is Vector fully borked on recent Nightlies for others?

https://vector.im/beta/#/room/#mozilla_#firefox:matrix.org is a never ending “e10s spinner of death” as of today =(

Is it just me and my ISP doing wonky stuff to the packets or general Nightly bugginess?

@matthew Any troubleshooting ideas?

¡Gracias!
Alex

[matthew]

It should be working okay, but the nature of /beta is that it’s not guaranteed to work at any given point. Can you check your javascript console for errors (other than warnings about failing to load avatar images?)

[alex_mayorga]

¡Hola @matthew!
It seems to be working alright now, except for those pesky “(IRC)” appendages that seem to annoy most fellow Mozillian =)
¡Gracias!

[bkerensa (Benjamin Kerensa)]

Just going to drop this here: https://github.com/numixproject/org.numixproject.hermes

You could fork Hermes which is open source

[flaki (Istvan Szmozsanszky)]

It’s been some time, since I’ve last followed up on this conversation, sorry for being late to the party but allow me to share my two cents on this:

I think (at least a good part of) the community has adopted Telegram pretty much okay. I’m not saying it doesn’t have any drawbacks - it has plenty, but is a good place for overall communication, and is polished in ways that’s rather easy to overlook (and this polish goes a long way in enabling the ease of communication).

Also people above taunting Telegram or IRC make it seem like we could just, with a flick of a switch, migrate all the people magically to Matrix (or any other system we decided on using as the “one true open source solution for mozillians’ communication”). I know most of you did not mean it that way, but this might be how people reading this take this, and that’s just not true.
All systems have their own momentum, it will be hard to herd people to any other system, be that from IRC or Telegram. I think the proper glues and connections are invaluable here - and that’s a good point for Matrix, for sure, being open source, and thus, hopefully, highly customizable.

The Telegram bot we were using in the Reps telegram channel solved a lot of the problems (not all, certainly), with more customizations it could solve even more - but that wouldn’t solve the inherent issues in IRC, which was used for the “backend”, or rather, Nexus of conversations happening in Telegram.

I have absolutely no problem with using Matrix as the said nexus where all other channels converge (its mentioned malleability surely helps putting the required glues in place), but I expect that to be more a nexus (such nexus that Slack actually tries to be), at least for a few years, which consumes all the content from other channels (looking at IRC, Telegram, Discourse even), aggregating and storing them (for posterity) in a single central location. On the long term, I can imagine the UX and the inherent pros of Matrix sucking away most of the users from other channels/services (but I’d imagine this would take several years and really excellent UX & performance work to happen on the clients & servers alike), but those glues need to be set in place nevertheless so the conversations are actually less, rather than more fragmented with the introduction of this new system (and we do not fall to prey the Standards-creep, as per this XKCD-classic).

What this means, is I think before any migration could possibly be happening, we need to hose (ideally in a bi-directional way) other channels - IRC and Telegram at a minimum - to this new system.

[majken]

Clearing up one or two things:

Matrix is not a new communication channel. It will not be set up to create its own rooms that are exclusively accessed via itself.

Stage 1: It will be connected to IRC. The goal is to make it as appealing as possible to Telegram users. Not specifically to try to get people to stop using Telegram, but to try to make IRC appealing to the types of people who very much prefer Telegram. If we try to connect Telegram right away then there is less incentive for Telegram users to help give input on making the Vector client better. People can just use Telegram.

There are some questions about Telegram that don’t need to be answered until we think the pilot with IRC is successful. At that point things could have changed with Telegram for good or for bad. But if it’s still popular, and if there aren’t any issues raised about connecting it, then we can use Matrix to connect Telegram to IRC.

[r_TlfPuogHW2i9hdoQY1tGww (Ranjith Raj)]

Super excited to see all the reps and staff having name@moziila.org usernames for matrix federation.

Also I’ld strongly support the all the work groups and regional groups of Mozilla are hosted on room:mozilla.org addresses all of them bridged with their respective IRC rooms.

[shine]

Now, now, now - here I am back almost 3 years after this thread started and 11 months after the last reply; but, I’m very much interested and curious to know what happened to this project after all this amazing discussion.

I hear that we’re all cozy with Slack right now. What happened to Matrix? Where is the discussion that proved @tanner’s comment on Trying out Slack? was wrong?

Or wasn’t the Matrix PoC not sufficiently convincing enough for existing IRC / Telegram users that they had to need Slack? Was there even a Matrix PoC?
Didn’t we even consider Mattermost like @nukeador suggested in Trying out Slack?

I’m still in favor of Matrix. I’d rather see bridges

Matrix is not a new communication channel. It will not be set up to create its own rooms that are exclusively accessed via itself.

Stage 1: It will be connected to IRC. The goal is to make it as appealing as possible to Telegram users. Not specifically to try to get people to stop using Telegram, but to try to make IRC appealing to the types of people who very much prefer Telegram.

than new paved roads.

Please bring back Matrix into the scene. Get rid of Slack (saving a lot of money in the process), that evil resource hog, and herd all of those new and young users (of Slack) back to the good old IRC (via Matrix, if they wish to have a better UI/UX). Please just bring back the Matrix bridges and get rid of Slack altogether.

Matrix FTW!

[majken]

We’re still looking for people interested in driving the Matrix PoC. Lots of people interested in seeing it happen, but no one with time/expertise to get it going.