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> The good news is there are tons of options for people to choose what fits best for them! That's super exciting! Personally I'm finding it a bit of a nightmar

> The good news is there are tons of options for people to choose what fits best for them! That's super exciting! Personally I'm finding it a bit of a nightmare, as just about every community I'm interested in seems to require a different tool to be installed. Same for work clients. Worse than that, some communities are fragmented into different IM tool groups. The plethora of IM and other tools needed to stay vaguely involved in the leading edge conversation in multiple communities is a right pain for usability. What I really want is some way to see an overview of conversations in multiple communities I'm interested in and interact with them through that. A single tool would be nice, but some way of visually integrating similar tools would be ok as well. I was pretty happy with Pidgin for this many years ago, as it worked with almost everything. But even then I needed Skype separately. I don't think libpurple is quite as universal now. Matrix is an attempt, but by no means a solution.

isbjorn16 6y ago
I tend to use the web clients for everything for just this reason. Turning notifications on gives me the same toast behavior I'd have in a thick client and I'm not running 14 instances of electron at a time. I can see this being frustrating for you, though (just because I found something that works for me doesn't mean it'll work for everyone!)
- jlokier 6y ago
  That's a good suggestion, and as it happens I use web clients when possible as well. That sucks in a different way, as the experience tends to be sub par, but at least it works (when on desktop - it's high friction when I've only got my phone to hand). It's still much like having a different application for every community or work client though - only it's become a different tab for each of them, with the tabs organised by application rather than by usefulness (or there are too many tabs), which is a poor way to organise. It also makes it difficult to organise information beyond the crude tools provided. Desktop notifications exist, yes, but I would find it so much more useful to be able to filter content and notify me of only relevant things, sort, pin, annotate, link and so on. And for this prioritisation and context management to mediate between different information sources globally, rather than having to use my own brain to do it manually, which I find to be a significant cognitive load.
Legogris 6y ago
> Matrix is an attempt, but by no means a solution. Care to elaborate why you think so? (Obviously it's not there yet, but does anything make you think it won't?)
- jlokier 6y ago
  As it's not there yet, it's not a solution for my requirement. Eventually, maybe. For now, I think using Matrix to bridge to every other service is quite daunting. Consider these instructions which seem to be needed to connect to a Telegram group: https://wiki.calculate-linux.org/matrix_telegram_bridge https://wiki.calculate-linux.org/matrix_telegram_bridge I'm lucky that I can easily follow those instructions if I want. But to do all that just for 1 group? The next one uses Slack. Then Mattermost. Then Discord. Then IRC/Freenode. My client uses MSN. My other client uses Yahoo. My other other client uses Skype. A recruiter contacts me through WhatsApp, when I didn't have installed. Another contacts me through LinkedIn. Another through Telegram. A friend sent me a message over Facebook Messenger. Of course I didn't get the Facebook message for 6 months due to not logging in :-) (A friend of mine received a message over WhatsApp and didn't know for 12 months because of not having it installed at all, only to find someone they thought had stopped talking to them was actually sending WhatsApp messages, assuming of course everyone uses it.) And then there are those group chats on Zoom sometimes. I haven't listed them all... Matrix has a long way to go before it's reasonably low effort to use seamless integration with all contact points that are coming up in practice. I looked at Matrix recently, and it's very impressive how much has been implemented! I'm almost certainly going to start using Matrix soon, if only because some communities I want to follow are on matrix.org itself. But seamless, easy, and confident integration with many third party channels seems like it may be a long way off. (I'd also worry about messages getting lost or something due to services not integrating well with third party clients, especially given the adversarial relationship some services have.) The problem is that everything and its pets seem to be using different services, and some of those want to live in walled gardens. Amidst this, to be honest, I don't even use IM much! I'm not the chatting type. But for key people or teams I need to use whatever they use, and for community awareness on the internet I want to see conversation where other people are discussing what I'm interested in, and pick up on key items sufficiently close to real-time to participate if I want.

isbjorn16 6y ago

I tend to use the web clients for everything for just this reason. Turning notifications on gives me the same toast behavior I'd have in a thick client and I'm not running 14 instances of electron at a time. I can see this being frustrating for you, though (just because I found something that works for me doesn't mean it'll work for everyone!)

jlokier 6y ago
That's a good suggestion, and as it happens I use web clients when possible as well. That sucks in a different way, as the experience tends to be sub par, but at least it works (when on desktop - it's high friction when I've only got my phone to hand). It's still much like having a different application for every community or work client though - only it's become a different tab for each of them, with the tabs organised by application rather than by usefulness (or there are too many tabs), which is a poor way to organise. It also makes it difficult to organise information beyond the crude tools provided. Desktop notifications exist, yes, but I would find it so much more useful to be able to filter content and notify me of only relevant things, sort, pin, annotate, link and so on. And for this prioritisation and context management to mediate between different information sources globally, rather than having to use my own brain to do it manually, which I find to be a significant cognitive load.

Legogris 6y ago

> Matrix is an attempt, but by no means a solution. Care to elaborate why you think so? (Obviously it's not there yet, but does anything make you think it won't?)

jlokier 6y ago
As it's not there yet, it's not a solution for my requirement. Eventually, maybe. For now, I think using Matrix to bridge to every other service is quite daunting. Consider these instructions which seem to be needed to connect to a Telegram group: https://wiki.calculate-linux.org/matrix_telegram_bridge https://wiki.calculate-linux.org/matrix_telegram_bridge I'm lucky that I can easily follow those instructions if I want. But to do all that just for 1 group? The next one uses Slack. Then Mattermost. Then Discord. Then IRC/Freenode. My client uses MSN. My other client uses Yahoo. My other other client uses Skype. A recruiter contacts me through WhatsApp, when I didn't have installed. Another contacts me through LinkedIn. Another through Telegram. A friend sent me a message over Facebook Messenger. Of course I didn't get the Facebook message for 6 months due to not logging in :-) (A friend of mine received a message over WhatsApp and didn't know for 12 months because of not having it installed at all, only to find someone they thought had stopped talking to them was actually sending WhatsApp messages, assuming of course everyone uses it.) And then there are those group chats on Zoom sometimes. I haven't listed them all... Matrix has a long way to go before it's reasonably low effort to use seamless integration with all contact points that are coming up in practice. I looked at Matrix recently, and it's very impressive how much has been implemented! I'm almost certainly going to start using Matrix soon, if only because some communities I want to follow are on matrix.org itself. But seamless, easy, and confident integration with many third party channels seems like it may be a long way off. (I'd also worry about messages getting lost or something due to services not integrating well with third party clients, especially given the adversarial relationship some services have.) The problem is that everything and its pets seem to be using different services, and some of those want to live in walled gardens. Amidst this, to be honest, I don't even use IM much! I'm not the chatting type. But for key people or teams I need to use whatever they use, and for community awareness on the internet I want to see conversation where other people are discussing what I'm interested in, and pick up on key items sufficiently close to real-time to participate if I want.