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While I applaud the initiative of Gitlab to opensource Gitter I think the target audience for self hosting is rather small. I think alternatives like Zulip or M

While I applaud the initiative of Gitlab to opensource Gitter I think the target audience for self hosting is rather small. I think alternatives like Zulip or Mattermost are probably better suited for most organizations. I am however interested to see if the community starts making the "main instance" (gitter.im) better. Interested to know what the Gitlab / Gitter guys and gals think what the target audience is.

mydigitalself 9y ago
Great question. We're trying to achieve two things with open sourcing Gitter. Firstly, we see Gitter as more of a community than a product. That we have nearly 1,000,000 developers coming together on the platform to talk about code and open source software where public rooms far, far outweigh private rooms, is testament to that. So we're not trying to compete with MatterMost. What we're trying to facilitate is to allow the community and users of GitLab to contribute to the experience of the community. We've always had a very small team at Gitter and the surface area of the product is massive. This way the community can help us make it a better place by improving the product. We also have some communities who are interested in running their own public instance entirely. Sure they could use other products, but Gitter is built community and public first and suits a lot of different needs that other products don't necessarily facilitate out of the box.
kronos29296 9y ago
Maybe something like GNU social. They already use Gitlab CE for the repos. Add gitter and we have replaced IRC.
- kobeya 9y ago
  You say that as if it's a good thing...
  - kronos29296 9y ago
    IRC is not going anywhere but projects like neovim use gitter primarily while IRC is linked using a bot. They view the IRC chat in gitter. Dunno if Gitter is better than IRC as I have only used for help and support (for me) but Gitter was far easier to use than IRC. Just Login and start chatting. I don't think IRC is going anywhere either... We just have alternatives to freenode now in Gitter
    - mydigitalself 9y ago
      Gitter has had an IRC bridge since pretty much day 1. This allows you to connect to Gitter via any IRC client. https://irc.gitter.im https://irc.gitter.im
      - detaro 9y ago
        it's not very comfortable to use though. Partially because the gitter features don't match how IRC is used 1:1, partially because it seems to have some bugs and sometimes does the simplest possible but uncomfortable thing (which might now get fixed!)
    - unhammer 9y ago
      Apropos, does anyone know of a hosting provider with one-click installs of Weechat? It would be nice to have something slightly more self-hosted than irccloud to recommend to the GsoC/GCI students who keep disconnecting from freenode :) (You'd think with all the Wordpress one-click-installs that this would exists, but I can't find any yet at least.)
      - l2dy 9y ago
        I'd suggest using Riot. See https://opensource.com/article/17/5/introducing-riot-IRC https://opensource.com/article/17/5/introducing-riot-IRC, https://about.riot.im/ https://about.riot.im/ and https://matrix.org/ https://matrix.org/.
      - kuschku 9y ago
        Actually, there is. There’s a sandstorm config for Quassel, with webinterface, quassel bouncer, etc included. I’m not sure if quassel-irssi is also included, but that and quassel-rest-search should be easy to add.
hobarrera 9y ago
I agree that self-hosting audience is probably small for this, but open sourcing also changes its image and workflow a bit. I'd much rather pay for a hosted FLOSS app, than a hosted closed source app (assuming similar capabilities). Being able to inspect the code, and knowing that anyone's free to collaborate or reuse the code really makes a difference on where I choose to put my money.
owebmaster 9y ago
They are creating the infrastructure for some kind of projects that currently don't exist. Local / national Githubs/software communities might be a thing soon, and Gitlab will be powering it if happens.
bikezen 9y ago
Self-hosting market isn't that small. The entire gov/aerospace/anything with ITAR/ETAR etc is stuck with very few options that are self-hosted or fedramp approved cloud options.

mydigitalself 9y ago

Great question. We're trying to achieve two things with open sourcing Gitter. Firstly, we see Gitter as more of a community than a product. That we have nearly 1,000,000 developers coming together on the platform to talk about code and open source software where public rooms far, far outweigh private rooms, is testament to that. So we're not trying to compete with MatterMost. What we're trying to facilitate is to allow the community and users of GitLab to contribute to the experience of the community. We've always had a very small team at Gitter and the surface area of the product is massive. This way the community can help us make it a better place by improving the product. We also have some communities who are interested in running their own public instance entirely. Sure they could use other products, but Gitter is built community and public first and suits a lot of different needs that other products don't necessarily facilitate out of the box.

kronos29296 9y ago

Maybe something like GNU social. They already use Gitlab CE for the repos. Add gitter and we have replaced IRC.

kobeya 9y ago
You say that as if it's a good thing...
- kronos29296 9y ago
  IRC is not going anywhere but projects like neovim use gitter primarily while IRC is linked using a bot. They view the IRC chat in gitter. Dunno if Gitter is better than IRC as I have only used for help and support (for me) but Gitter was far easier to use than IRC. Just Login and start chatting. I don't think IRC is going anywhere either... We just have alternatives to freenode now in Gitter
  - mydigitalself 9y ago
    Gitter has had an IRC bridge since pretty much day 1. This allows you to connect to Gitter via any IRC client. https://irc.gitter.im https://irc.gitter.im
    - detaro 9y ago
      it's not very comfortable to use though. Partially because the gitter features don't match how IRC is used 1:1, partially because it seems to have some bugs and sometimes does the simplest possible but uncomfortable thing (which might now get fixed!)
  - unhammer 9y ago
    Apropos, does anyone know of a hosting provider with one-click installs of Weechat? It would be nice to have something slightly more self-hosted than irccloud to recommend to the GsoC/GCI students who keep disconnecting from freenode :) (You'd think with all the Wordpress one-click-installs that this would exists, but I can't find any yet at least.)
    - l2dy 9y ago
      I'd suggest using Riot. See https://opensource.com/article/17/5/introducing-riot-IRC https://opensource.com/article/17/5/introducing-riot-IRC, https://about.riot.im/ https://about.riot.im/ and https://matrix.org/ https://matrix.org/.
    - kuschku 9y ago
      Actually, there is. There’s a sandstorm config for Quassel, with webinterface, quassel bouncer, etc included. I’m not sure if quassel-irssi is also included, but that and quassel-rest-search should be easy to add.

hobarrera 9y ago

I agree that self-hosting audience is probably small for this, but open sourcing also changes its image and workflow a bit. I'd much rather pay for a hosted FLOSS app, than a hosted closed source app (assuming similar capabilities). Being able to inspect the code, and knowing that anyone's free to collaborate or reuse the code really makes a difference on where I choose to put my money.

owebmaster 9y ago

They are creating the infrastructure for some kind of projects that currently don't exist. Local / national Githubs/software communities might be a thing soon, and Gitlab will be powering it if happens.

bikezen 9y ago

Self-hosting market isn't that small. The entire gov/aerospace/anything with ITAR/ETAR etc is stuck with very few options that are self-hosted or fedramp approved cloud options.