Hacker News Reader

Depending on definitions, you could also include rocket.chat, and Zulip (open core). There's a bunch.

As to federation, the ActivityPub protocol underlying Mastodon, and a bunch of other projects, was originally designed to support it -- but the devil's in the details, particularly regarding finding a common data model (do you have topics within channels, like Zulip does? what do you support within a channel beyond plain text messages? etc)

> Zulip (open core)

Isn't Zulip fully open source? That's what they say on their site: https://zulipchat.com/

yup, Zulip is fully open source. I believe Mattermost is actually open core.

Apparently so. I misread the website; their "Enterprise" support package offers better support, but no extra features.

There is so riot.im which is built on top of Matrix.org (which was built for federation and E2E encryption). There are already IRC and Discord bridges to matrix.

Riot is being deployed as the govt chat infrastructure for 5 million users in France.

The SaaS version is modular.im (much cheaper than slack)

> Riot is being deployed as the govt chat infrastructure for 5 million users in France.

Is that a done thing ? I haven't heard about it in a while.

That's the next thing on my list to setup. I want to get a synapse server up with FB Messenger/Hangouts/IRC/Discord and Slack bridges to bring all my messaging back under a gateway I control (even if I have no control over the actual chat services) and a unified accessible history.

I'd like to read about how that goes! This is exactly what I want as well. I hear synapse requires a good amount of resources

That seems to be confirmed by admins running bigger servers such as disroot [0].

[0]: https://disroot.org/en/blog/matrix-closure

It's worth sharing that the RAM and CPU usage requirements have gone down monumentally since the migration to python3.

Disroot's announcement was before the switch.

The team even talked about it with one of the devs in the latest Matrix Live: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ad3oqEo5leM

fwiw, i have another bridge Matterbridge, running on a free heroku instance: https://github.com/patcon/matterbridge-heroku

It's pretty great. (Not just for mattermost, but most major chat plaforms)

I used riot.im as my primary IRC client (via its IRC bridge) from home, work, and on mobile, for a year or so. Unfortunately there were lots of issues and bugs, to the point where I couldn't trust that when I wrote someone a message they would get it, or vice versa, so I had to give up on it. I'm now a happy IRCCloud user.

We're dropping riot because of the same reason right now. Sometimes messages do not pop up as push and that makes communication unreliable.

Are you facing this issue with chats on Riot itself or as a bridge to IRC ?

Because as a slack replacement, riot is pretty cool (and there some redesign happening ). Most of the criticism is around its IRC bridging, which I agree is a little unstable. But let's face it - nobody else (slack et al) even tries.

Only with the IRC bridge, which is the primary use-case for me since so much of my existing community chats are on IRC still. IRCCloud also bridges to Slack, so I get both in the same (synced across devices) interface.

Zulip has a matrix bridge (https://zulip.com/integrations/doc/matrix)

Also, Zulip is full open source, not open core (meant as a response to rst's comment, not the parent...). Mattermost is open core.

The matrix bridge is _quite_ limited

Thanks, I haven't used it myself. Do you know it is limited due to being new and underdeveloped, or are there missing features/hooks in Zulip that would make it difficult to have a more complete integration?

Well I'd prefer that all those solutions relies on standards such as XMPP better than having the NIH syndrome.

You should check on XMPP web solutions such as Movim https://movim.eu/ (P.S. I'm the author).

Well I think the new "hot" community standard is turning to be ActivityPub

Hint: maybe people are not interested in using XMPP anymore and it is time to move on?

It's like gelatine salad. It's food but people these days do not have much appetite for it anymore.

I like Gitter, the Scala community is on Gitter.

However I wish they'd fix their IRC bridge, which has some issues, like not reporting the full list of users, which is driving me insane.

Speaking of Slack-like, the best alternative remains in my opinion good old IRC. I'm a user of https://irccloud.com for always-on presence on IRC and it has better clients than Gitter.

Personally I'm really annoyed with Scala community's obsession with Gitter. It's such an inferior tool.

Gitter search UI is the worst, and search itself is useless, often returning no results when you can spend an hour scrolling to find what you want manually.

This is inexcusable when Gitter is your project's de facto Q&A place instead of more structured places like StackOverflow or Github issues.

And so the users are left with a messy stream of collective consciousness that is impossible no search or navigate effectively.

Chat works better than forums.

Speaking as a library maintainer, I've got GitHub issue that stayed there for months before I replied. That's because my time as a contributor is very limited and I get fatigue when replying to too many support tickets.

And you'd think, oh wait but there are other people willing to reply. But not really. Forum, email groups, even StackOverflow only work when the projects you're talking about are insanely popular.

This is because of two reasons:

1. people with problems are bad at describing those problems — this is why StackOverflow answers often don't answer the freaking question, but rather try to guess what the author wanted, a trend that's driving me insane, because I often want the answer to the question being asked and not something else; whereas on a chat channel, people have conversations, which helps clarify the intent

2. people are afraid of being wrong; but chat is more casual, so in my experience more people end up participating

Chat has other benefits. You can have off topic conversations, you can make jokes, you can make friends. I do wish Gitter had threaded conversations. They promised it at some point but nothing came of it.

Also, I do like Discourse (https://discourse.org). It does a good job to mix some chat features with forums. Scala has Discourse forums, like for example https://users.scala-lang.org ... but the Scala Gitter channel is way more popular.

And one final thought: I know communities that have virtually no meaningful online presence. You might be annoyed at our choice for using Gitter, but at least you've got some chat channels to go to.

> Chat works better than forums.

I've never had much satisfactory help from chat. I think I've never quite understood the social element of it. Do I wait for a pause? Do I make friends first? Just ask my question and wait?

Ask a question and hang around for half hour to see if anyone replies?

And in the meanwhile 6 different conversations, statements, off-topic chats and other noise is scrolling past me completely ruining any focus I had.

I find them utterly hateful things when I'm in problem-solving mode. Maybe they are more fun when you're in a "sort of working" mode but that's not when I need help.

Gitter sends you an email when you’re being mentioned.

Our experiences are wildly different.

On Gitter, on the channels I hang out, I think I got answers to my problems in 99% of cases.

As someone who interacts a lot with front line support for a fairly large organisation I find this balance interesting. Support channels are often a strange mix of FIFO with priority based queue jumping. I was at a talk by Kate Russell of BBC Click recently where she showed some stats on customer service based interactions heavily moving towards chat based interaction, obviously more and more backed by AI chat bots with human fallback. The next step on this path being voice chat also with bots.

Without the AI tier though scaling this is near impossible as you tend to a "most recent loudest" priority system, certainly if your support case to support rep ratio isn't balanced. Users also have to resort to repeating requests in a chat-only forgetful system.

This is why I ended up investigating hybrid sync/async interaction systems that cater better for not forgetting threads.

Heya, Gitter developer here,

Search definitely needs improvement and is on the roadmap. You can track these issues,

- https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitter/webapp/issues/1925 - https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/387

Heya, Gitter developer here

You can track https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitter/irc-bridge/issues/52 for seeing more users in the member list/roster. There is a proposal there to trickle in new users to the list every time a new message comes through the bridge with relevant code linked (merge request welcome).

+1 to irccloud.

that said, gitter has many useful features that aren't available on irc: inline code with syntax highlighting, inline images, etc.

Gitter has this annoying bug where it'll email you for every message in any channel you're in and you can't turn it off. How such an egregious bug still hasn't been fixed, I don't know, but it doesn't inspire much trust.

Heya, Gitter developer here,

If you want to stop email notifications, https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitter/webapp/blob/develop/doc...

You could also adjust your notification settings to "Mute", https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitter/webapp/blob/develop/doc...

But the real problem is that unread item count is coupled to the emails being sent out, https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitter/webapp/issues/1205. So if you have notifications set to "All" or "Announcements" which track unreads, you will get emails for any unread messages in the room which isn't desirable.

Gitter is open source. Do you maybe have a link to an issue about the IRC bridge?

For Slack to do this would be lowering the drawbridge across their moat. I don’t see it happening.

they even removed their irc support. i lost any interest i had left in slack at that point

Just because I'm a big fan and new contributor :) https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge

The problem is: lock-in is a feature, not a bug.

It’s a feature for the company creating the lock-in, and a bug for the users.

It's not quite federation, but I've been contributing to an amaaaaazing bridge tool called Matterbridge: https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge

Works for: Slack, Zulip, Mattermost, IRC, Telegram, Gitter, Rocketchat, XMPP, Steam, Twitch, Riot, and some others.

Some of the nifty things it supports (to various degrees): - rethreading of Slack messages between instances. (future) interop with Mattermost possible. - edits and deletions going through most platforms. - relaying of "user is typing" messages on Slack. (future) interop with Mattermost possible. - (future) hack to relay emoji reactions via editting a "prosthetic attachment" in Slack. - sync'ing channel topics. - (future) still not generalized, but on a local branch, I've been using an option to set a channel with a language, and have all incoming messages translate via Google Translate.

This last feature I'm pretty excited about. The goal is to allow anyone who finds themselves interested in #un-projet (that's french) to simply create #un-projet-en, and have everything auto-translated to Ye Olde English. If people in #un-projet don't understand your english replies to their french nonsense (ha!), they can create #un-projet-fr and have all your english belligerence translated into their One True Glorious Language.

As stated, this allows bridging between many different services. It's config is via toml file, and not a UI, but I am excited to later build that out. I'm particularly excited to explore how public chat gateways could be offered as a community service, kinda like TravisCI.

Like imagine if someone could send you a link, as a member of a Slack or Mattermost team, and logging in would allow you to join a giant multi-team/multi-platform gateway that others were already using. I feel that this could help un-silo us until we all figure out the one true protocol ;)

And I'll never get to use any of them usefully because every company says "can't we use whatever Atlassian tells us to use?"

> Spectrum, now owned by GitHub

Sign up for Spectrum, go to 'sign in with github' as there's no option but to sign up through another system (FB, Google, or Twitter {sigh}), and then get the standard warning on the Authorise page:

"Not owned or operated by GitHub"

No doubt it'll be updated soon.

They need to develop a standard protocol, like with IRC

That's basically what Matrix aims to be (and XMPP almost managed to be, a few years ago).

Can something owned by Microsoft be really considered less of a "proprietary behemoth"?

If it's open source, yes.

And Microsoft already has Teams

And Skype. And Lync.

Lync is now Skype for Business... I mean in the splash and window title because the executable is still "lync.exe".

Ah, Skype for Business. Which can't actually call other Skype accounts, and requires a desktop executable if you want clients to be able to call you. Meaning it is neither "Skype" nor is it useful "for business".

Reminds me of the joke about the "Holy Roman Empire."

S4B really has nothing to do with Skype. It's a VOIP phone with a half-baked SIP client that connects to AD and Exchange.

Very useful for organizations replacing phone workflows, not useful for replacing conferencing and chat workflows.

They are moving Skype4business to Teams anyway.