[Libre-soc-dev] Freenode IRC and the future

[Jacob Lifshay]

On Wed, May 19, 2021, 13:51 Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton <lkcl at lkcl.net>
wrote:

> On Wednesday, May 19, 2021, Jacob Lifshay <programmerjake at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > matrix is what was used for chat, to great success, for fosdem 2021
>
>
> one of its downsides is the web hosting, its features, and the complexity
> of clients.


Don't confuse Element with Matrix, the reference Matrix server itself is
relatively simple to install, relatively lightweight, written in Python3,
and available on Debian testing:
sudo apt install matrix-synapse

See install instructions (long because it supports every distro under the
sun):
https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/blob/develop/INSTALL.md

The minimal setup is basically: apt install, change config file, and add to
nginx.

  this seriously gets in the way.  IRC is ridiculously simple
> being established during a much simpler era.
>

IRC may be a simpler protocol, but it is missing some very nice (I'd say
must-have) features:
persistence (Matrix saves and lets you see messages even if you were
disconnected, its internal design is much more like BitTorrent or Git)

user friendliness (I still haven't figured out how I'm properly supposed to
join a channel using IRC's default commands; if I can't figure it out,
likely many others will have a harder time figuring it out -- Matrix you
just paste the channel url in the box and your connected, there's also the
nice matrix.to client finder website you can use for linking on the web).

>
> i can't get elements or jitsi upgraded any more because they have increased
> the minimum version of android.


I haven't tried it, but the latest stable version (released within the last
month) of Fluffychat https://fluffychat.im/en/fdroid.html
supports Android >= 5, it's AGPLv3. Since they support Android 5 now, I'd
guess they plan on supporting it for a while -- didn't see any issues on
their gitlab about upgrading the minimum version.

Jacob