libravatar-fans team mailing list archive

[Sheogorath <ubuntu@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello Libravatars,

As you probably already know, a bit of drama is going on around
freenode. And while the situation is for sure more nuanced than many
any of the article written about it can catch, apparently it motivates
a lot of people to move IRC channels somewhere else.

As someone who has operated a bunch of channels and even an own IRC
networks for years, I can tell: That never works. IRC channels exist
forever and with people joining these even ages after community moved
on to another channel.

However, my motivation here is not that I want to drop Freenode. No, I
would like to drop IRC in first place. As an example I want to provide
with a rather detailed piece from the GNOME discourse instance[1], that
discusses the integration between Gimpnet and the GNOME matrix instance
as well as the issues with the bridges.

TL;DR: The UX on both sides of the bridge is bad. IRC users get non-
sense messages when someone edits a message on Matrix or uses the reply
function. Matrix users get kicked from a channel, because their IRC
puppet was kicked from the room because it joined back before
authenticating to NickServ. All in all, not great at all.

Therefore I would like to push for the more modern matrix protocol and
work towards making the IRC channel obsolete in the mid term.

Why Matrix and not XYZ? Because Matrix is currently adopted by many
major free software organisations. As mentioned GNOME, KDE, Fedora,
Debian, Archlinux, … and so far, I don't know any other messenger
protocol that managed that and remained federated. The integration with
existing communites that were on Gitter before or that currently remain
on Freenode, OFTC or gimpnet exists and allows everyone who wants to
participate in the libravatar community to interact with these projects
without any barrier and all while maintaining an account on a provider
of their choice.

For the libravatar community itself, we can also benefit. Recently we
had it happen multiple times, that help was reaching too late, people
who asked questions, didn't get an answer on time and left again.
Normal on IRC, but sad. In Matrix we keep these around and allow better
asynchonous answers. With the reply function even easy to connect to
the right question again.

As part of this proposal, which I already provided on IRC[2], the idea
was already picked up and moved forward by Julian, who updated the Wiki
to lead people to the Matrix side of things.

Next steps would be to organise some room admins on Matrix, getting a
nice alias, getting listed in room directories and update the main
contact page.

I would obviously love your ideas and opinions on it, hope that I
didn't overrun your with this, and look forward to modernise the
community around libravatar.

[1]:
https://discourse.gnome.org/t/irc-matrix-and-thanks-for-all-the-kicks/6482
[2]:
https://matrix.to/#/!WfzCzMRVEBEnLpUmCb:matrix.org/$1621430743145Hhcyd:shivering-isles.com?via=matrix.org&via=shivering-isles.com&via=foad.me.uk

-- 
Signed
Sheogorath

OpenPGP: https://shivering-isles.com/openpgp/0xFCB98C2A3EC6F601.txt