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FreeHugs

So how do you sign in / sign up without installing additional software on your machine?

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Open up https://chat.mozilla.org in your browser. Although there are multiple apps, you don't need one.

That link just tells me to go visit an AppStore.

I thought you said it was web-based?

desktop view shows me a full web client.

Click through to the desktop site.

It took me some tries to log in, because my first chosen user name started with a capital letter.

They mean it when they say "User ID can only contain characters a-z, 0-9, or '=_-./".

Is that really so esoteric?

I tried to register and was met with this message:

Cannot reach homeserver Ensure you have a stable internet connection, or get in touch with the server admin

https://chat.mozilla.org/#/register

It's trying to make a GET request to this URL and 404'ing:

https://chat.mozilla.org/config.chat.mozilla.org.json?cacheb...

You have to click on "Sign In" and use the Mozilla SSO. Hiding the registration link is an open issue.

I did so. Followed the steps to provide an email and then click the link in the email.

That brought me to this page:

https://mozilla.modular.im/_matrix/saml2/authn_response

Which only displayed the word

    Forbidden

Queue the "I don't have a graphical web browser installed, and I don't want to" comments.

For the people considering leaving such comments, there are terminal clients available https://matrix.org/clients/

Presumably those people can find their way to the weechat plugin :)

If you insist: https://github.com/ara4n/random/blob/master/bashtrix.sh

How is installing a matrix client any different than installing an IRC client?

Can I "apt install" a terminal Matrix-client, like I can probably apt install more IRC-clients than I can count?

It's unclear to me whether any command-line based Matrix clients are in major package managers, for one thing. Going by Github the only one that looks like it's active is written in Python. Other, non-CLI desktop clients look variously half-finished or abandoned. Looks like mobile and web get all the attention.

weechat-matrix gets a lot of attention, works really well, has full E2EE support, and weechat at least is in major package managers. Matrix is evolving pretty fast though, so you'll probably have to install your own matrix plugin from https://github.com/poljar/weechat-matrix.

Meanwhile gomuks also exists and is usable and not abandoned.

On GUI Desktop, various clients are in active dev - e.g. Fractal for GTK/Rust, Quaternion for Qt/C++, Nheko for Qt/QML, etc. They are not as complete as Riot yet, but I'm sure PRs are welcome...

> On GUI Desktop, various clients are in active dev

... although if I'm not mistaken, unfortunately none of them supports Single Sign-On yet, which is required for joining the Mozilla instance.

Gomuks[1] is a maintained Matrix cli client that works well in my personal experience.

[1] https://github.com/tulir/gomuks

That looks less friendly then irssi.

Also straight from the readme:

"Basic usage is possible, but expect bugs and missing features."

Not very promising.

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