> the not-so-pleasant bridge to Libera Chat. That's gotta be one of the understatements of the year. Very complex set up, almost no useful "how to use" docume

> the not-so-pleasant bridge to Libera Chat. That's gotta be one of the understatements of the year. Very complex set up, almost no useful "how to use" documentation, and numerous outages made me give up on it. As for why there is no good open source ones, it seems simple but is complex. What is often summarised as "text chat" becomes a long list of requirements when you probe deeper. People want history, power efficient notifications, be able share stuff like pictures and PDF's and when you press they always want to talk, video chat (with a funky background please), and broadcast their desktops and cameras too. And stickers. Who can function without a personalised sticker pack? They want e2e encryption, no unencrypted messages stored on servers, rooms lots of people that implement all those features, and hey don't forget infinite chat history. Oh and public rooms, with no central server, and provision for bot automation (with an AI plugin to reduce support questions of course) but no spam please. They want hierarchies of users in those public rooms - admins, mods and regulars and newbies. They want to be able fork threads and subgroups. They want a web interface, and a app, and gateways to all the protocols they prefer using despite all the effort you put into this one. And being open source it must be a lightweight and easy to understand protocol, with trivial setup. We've had three attempts - IRC, jabber and matrix. None are there, IRC least of all. But IRC is simple and mostly just works.