16 ms·

I didn't know Spectrum until today. It looks similar to Gitter. As I understand it, it means we now have at least three “slack-like”, well-backed, open-source,

I didn't know Spectrum until today. It looks similar to Gitter. As I understand it, it means we now have at least three “slack-like”, well-backed, open-source, community-centered chats: - Gitter, now owned by GitLab; - Spectrum, now owned by GitHub; - Mattermost, independent, but fully integrated within GitLab. That's great to have credible alternatives to the proprietary behemots that are Slack, Discord and others, but I wish they were able to federate somehow, so that as a user, I don't have to have an account and a browser tab on each instance of each platform, with slightly different user interfaces and features (in addition to my IRC client). I remember there was a suggestion for Gitter to use the Matrix protocol at some point, but it doesn't seem to have gained much traction. That would be so awesome to have all of them using it, so that one could keep all their discussions in the same place (eg. same mobile application, same user-chosen chat client…).

jeremyjh 8y ago
For Slack to do this would be lowering the drawbridge across their moat. I don’t see it happening.
- em-bee 8y ago
  they even removed their irc support. i lost any interest i had left in slack at that point
  - patcon 8y ago
    Just because I'm a big fan and new contributor :) https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge
sandGorgon 8y ago
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)
- djsumdog 8y ago
  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.
  - petejodo 8y ago
    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
    - Leace 8y ago
      That seems to be confirmed by admins running bigger servers such as disroot [0]. [0]: https://disroot.org/en/blog/matrix-closure https://disroot.org/en/blog/matrix-closure
      - xf86alsa 8y ago
        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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ad3oqEo5leM
    - patcon 8y ago
      fwiw, i have another bridge Matterbridge, running on a free heroku instance: https://github.com/patcon/matterbridge-heroku https://github.com/patcon/matterbridge-heroku It's pretty great. (Not just for mattermost, but most major chat plaforms)
- torarnv 8y ago
  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.
paxys 8y ago
Can something owned by Microsoft be really considered less of a "proprietary behemoth"?
- l9k 8y ago
  And Microsoft already has Teams
  - Nullabillity 8y ago
    And Skype. And Lync.
    - Leace 8y ago
      Lync is now Skype for Business... I mean in the splash and window title because the executable is still "lync.exe".
      - legostormtroopr 8y ago
        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".
        mixmastamyk 8y ago
        Reminds me of the joke about the "Holy Roman Empire."
        Spivak 8y ago
        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.
      - vitorgrs 8y ago
        They are moving Skype4business to Teams anyway.
bad_user 8y ago
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 https://irccloud.com for always-on presence on IRC and it has better clients than Gitter.
- jonahx 8y ago
  +1 to irccloud. that said, gitter has many useful features that aren't available on irc: inline code with syntax highlighting, inline images, etc.
- sytse 8y ago
  Gitter is open source. Do you maybe have a link to an issue about the IRC bridge?
- StavrosK 8y ago
  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.
  - MadLittleMods 8y ago
    Heya, Gitter developer here, If you want to stop email notifications, https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitter/webapp/blob/develop/docs/notifications.md#emails 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/docs/notifications.md#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 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.
- 8y ago
rst 8y ago
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)
- pritambaral 8y ago
  > Zulip (open core) Isn't Zulip fully open source? That's what they say on their site: https://zulipchat.com/ https://zulipchat.com/
  - rishig 8y ago
    yup, Zulip is fully open source. I believe Mattermost is actually open core.
  - rst 8y ago
    Apparently so. I misread the website; their "Enterprise" support package offers better support, but no extra features.
ensignavenger 8y ago
Zulip has a matrix bridge (https://zulip.com/integrations/doc/matrix 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.
- ptman 8y ago
  The matrix bridge is _quite_ limited
  - ensignavenger 8y ago
    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?
Jedd 8y ago
> 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.
edhelas 8y ago
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/ https://movim.eu/ (P.S. I'm the author).
- hasperdi 8y ago
  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.
- O_H_E 8y ago
  Well I think the new "hot" community standard is turning to be ActivityPub
amelius 8y ago
The problem is: lock-in is a feature, not a bug.
- kakaorka 8y ago
  It’s a feature for the company creating the lock-in, and a bug for the users.
XorNot 8y ago
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?"
tomc1985 8y ago
They need to develop a standard protocol, like with IRC
- Arkanosis 8y ago
  That's basically what Matrix aims to be (and XMPP almost managed to be, a few years ago).
Pica_soO 8y ago
Usually the company intern defenders of custom protocols have a easy time swinging those to defend against compatibility to another protocol. "You do not want to implement XYZ- Standard, or the hostage, aka the USP-Feature, doesn't get it. In addition we would have to do work to re-implement basic feature ABC- so we do not just look like a broken client. Lots of work, to arrive at same point, so lets have a locked in garden until all the users walk away." Instant project death. Also: Glory to the m$pire.
patcon 8y ago
It's not quite federation, but I've been contributing to an amaaaaazing bridge tool called Matterbridge: https://github.com/42wim/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 ;)

jeremyjh 8y ago

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

em-bee 8y ago
they even removed their irc support. i lost any interest i had left in slack at that point
- patcon 8y ago
  Just because I'm a big fan and new contributor :) https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge

sandGorgon 8y ago

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)

djsumdog 8y ago
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.
- petejodo 8y ago
  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
  - Leace 8y ago
    That seems to be confirmed by admins running bigger servers such as disroot [0]. [0]: https://disroot.org/en/blog/matrix-closure https://disroot.org/en/blog/matrix-closure
    - xf86alsa 8y ago
      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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ad3oqEo5leM
  - patcon 8y ago
    fwiw, i have another bridge Matterbridge, running on a free heroku instance: https://github.com/patcon/matterbridge-heroku https://github.com/patcon/matterbridge-heroku It's pretty great. (Not just for mattermost, but most major chat plaforms)
torarnv 8y ago
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.

paxys 8y ago

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

l9k 8y ago
And Microsoft already has Teams
- Nullabillity 8y ago
  And Skype. And Lync.
  - Leace 8y ago
    Lync is now Skype for Business... I mean in the splash and window title because the executable is still "lync.exe".
    - legostormtroopr 8y ago
      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".
      - mixmastamyk 8y ago
        Reminds me of the joke about the "Holy Roman Empire."
      - Spivak 8y ago
        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.
    - vitorgrs 8y ago
      They are moving Skype4business to Teams anyway.

bad_user 8y ago

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 https://irccloud.com for always-on presence on IRC and it has better clients than Gitter.

jonahx 8y ago
+1 to irccloud. that said, gitter has many useful features that aren't available on irc: inline code with syntax highlighting, inline images, etc.
sytse 8y ago
Gitter is open source. Do you maybe have a link to an issue about the IRC bridge?
StavrosK 8y ago
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.
- MadLittleMods 8y ago
  Heya, Gitter developer here, If you want to stop email notifications, https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitter/webapp/blob/develop/docs/notifications.md#emails 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/docs/notifications.md#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 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.
8y ago

rst 8y ago

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)

pritambaral 8y ago
> Zulip (open core) Isn't Zulip fully open source? That's what they say on their site: https://zulipchat.com/ https://zulipchat.com/
- rishig 8y ago
  yup, Zulip is fully open source. I believe Mattermost is actually open core.
- rst 8y ago
  Apparently so. I misread the website; their "Enterprise" support package offers better support, but no extra features.

ensignavenger 8y ago

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

ptman 8y ago
The matrix bridge is _quite_ limited
- ensignavenger 8y ago
  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?

Jedd 8y ago

> 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.

edhelas 8y ago

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/ https://movim.eu/ (P.S. I'm the author).

hasperdi 8y ago
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.
O_H_E 8y ago
Well I think the new "hot" community standard is turning to be ActivityPub

amelius 8y ago

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

kakaorka 8y ago
It’s a feature for the company creating the lock-in, and a bug for the users.

XorNot 8y ago

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?"

tomc1985 8y ago

They need to develop a standard protocol, like with IRC

Arkanosis 8y ago
That's basically what Matrix aims to be (and XMPP almost managed to be, a few years ago).

Pica_soO 8y ago

Usually the company intern defenders of custom protocols have a easy time swinging those to defend against compatibility to another protocol. "You do not want to implement XYZ- Standard, or the hostage, aka the USP-Feature, doesn't get it. In addition we would have to do work to re-implement basic feature ABC- so we do not just look like a broken client. Lots of work, to arrive at same point, so lets have a locked in garden until all the users walk away." Instant project death. Also: Glory to the m$pire.

patcon 8y ago

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