Slack-like chat (also for GSOC)

[Mojca Miklavec]

On Tue, 14 May 2019 at 18:11, Rainer Müller wrote:
>
> I think Slack workspaces are also always invite only, but please correct
> me if I am wrong (maybe only for paid plans?). Assuming we might want to
> replace IRC one day as the official development and support chat, that
> would not work well.
>
> I think it is important that this would be open for anyone interested to
> join, with private group chats as an optional feature.

+1

> > We don't need to all agree at once. I don't see anything wrong with
> > giving it some testing first and decide what's best (no need to ask
> > everyone to turn IRC off :).
>
> I recently tried the Matrix IRC Bridge to FreeNode IRC. By using riot.im
> it actually works quite well and was easy to set up. It also solves the
> "always-on" problem of IRC as it acts like a bouncer.
>
> >>> Would it be realistic to install such a service on breaburn if needed?
> >>> (Or is it too complex / too much work?)
> >>
> >> I'd prefer a SaaS offering here. Self-hosting just increases the
> >> maintenance burden and I don't think we need the configurability.
>
> For the self-hosted options, Rocket Chat would be an option. However,
> when we used it at work, after a while I started to miss some kind of
> threading for longer conversations. Although we also usually do not have
> long conversations or that much activity on IRC, so maybe this is not
> that important here.

I don't have any experience with Matrix, but I maybe I should try it once.

I'm not familiar with Rocket Chat either, but if you missed a feature,
I trust your opinion.

I do believe that longer conversations are important. Think of GSOC,
where the same project runs for 5 months or longer. It does make sense
to keep it well-organised.

Zulip offers topics (which they heavily advertise as one of their
"superpowers") which I find to be quite a nice "substitute" for
threads like those in emails. If we pick that one, I would certainly
go for GitHub OAuth and IRC mirror.

I would discard the idea of using Slack. Based on general feedback
that probably leaves the following top candidates?
- Matrix (might work without self-hosting)
- Zulip
- Mattermost

Rainer, you did not answer about whether you would be willing to try
to install / maintain one of those on the server if we wanted to
self-host the chat?

Regarding Matrix: is anyone willing to set up one ("in the cloud") for testing?

Mojca