Future of the gitter channel

[weiznich]

I'm lately more and more annoyed with the current state of the gitter/matrix channel mostly due to how the Matrix is not working. In detail

• I somehow got stripped of the admin rights of the channel again
• There seems to be more and more spam
• The mobile clients are not really functional for me
• Session state is lost for me for each new login in the same browser

Given that and that I have the feeling that the channel is much less active than in the past I think about closing it down. That raises the question: Do we need another chat solution or should we just shut down the channel without replacement? If we want to have a replacement what would be a good solution?

[dessalines]

I'm guessing this is because of the inadaquate way gitter integrates with matrix? Might be better to just create a fresh matrix room w/o gitter.

[weiznich]

That would at least address my first point, but I fear that it wouldn't change the last three points as those are more fundamental limitations of Matrix?

[dessalines]

We run some larger open matrix rooms for lemmy, and the spam isn't too extreme, maybe once or twice a month, and they can be banned / removed easily. That's a problem you're going to have no matter the chat platform. You can also keep the room unpublished, but available to join by link, which might cut down on spam (but most projects don't do that).

There are a lot of well-done mobile clients now for matrix, especially element, but there's also schildichat and a few others. Not perfect of course, but the app ecosystem is bigger than almost anything else you'd find.

I've never had that problem with session state, and I don't remember it being a problem with element-web (maybe that's another gitter related problem). I've def never had it with element-android.

[weiznich]

I'm already using element-web and element for ios. Maybe I'm just unlucky or it's the room, but I often end up in situations where it tells me that there are new notifications and then there is nothing.

As with the session state: That might actually be my browser configuration, but it seems to lose the verification state every time I restart the browser.

The spam problem is mostly problematic in combination with the lose of admin rights, otherwise I would be able to handle it on my own.

[linrongbin16]

Some projects are using discord, which has a great App for both web and mobile.

[weiznich]

I'm personally not a big fan of discords user interface as I do not find it well organized for complex conversations that might span more than a day. I my experience it's really easy to loose track of previous parts of the same discussion.

Also discord is not an open platform, especially as for as I know it's not possible to access information from the chats without logins which is something that is a huge downside for a open source project in my opinion.

[linrongbin16]

for long conversations, github issue/discussion is the best.

chatting room is just for chatting.

[weiznich]

My experience with having this gitter room for quite some while indicates that quite a few people use these platforms differently. Especially common are cases where people are in opposite time zones, which quickly results in conversions spanning multiple days just due to the time differences.

[DasNaCl]

Looks like, as of now, most people voted for "Something else (please comment below)" without commenting.
I'd be intrigued to find a better alternative than zulip. I think this would be the way to go and am happy that you consider it, weiznich!

[weiznich]

As for as I can see 3 out of those 4 votes are represented by a comment. One seems to be that comment, while the other two seems to be this comment (2 upvotes)

[Sytten]

Gitter is a mess. I would say let's just use github discussions. They are indexed and we can increase the diesel knowledge base that way.

[Sagebati]

Personally, I liked matrix because having others real time chats for other libraries (Rocket, Axum, Rust...) in the same place was pleasant.

If it's shutdown, Github Discussions seems nice. But doesn't fill the same functionality.

[jblachly]

Vote for: start a new room with higher version number (room is v1; current matrix rooms are v10 or 11); will require admin privs (I DM'ed you about this) to keep the same name.

If staying with matrix (same name or new name), ditch the GItter integration

[marvin-hansen]

I vote for just use Github discussions / issues if this is still relevant.

I found so much hidden knowledge in GH issues and discussions just by Googling around, which saved me a ton
of time asking around and, when I asked, I could at least point at some stuff in the repo that helped to elaborate the issue at hand.