[Geany-Users] Future of the IRC ...

[Lex Trotman]

On Wed, 16 Jun 2021 at 20:15, Thomas Martitz <kugel at rockbox.org> wrote:
>
> Am 16.06.21 um 11:30 schrieb Lex Trotman:
> >
> > Thanks Thomas but unfortunately you have given me even more questions
> > that the Matrix site doesn't answer (that I could find) :-S
> >
> >> There seems to be some misconception. Matrix is a federated protocol.
> >> That means that there is no single instance that is the "host" of a
> >> #geany matrix channel.
> >>
> >> Anyone can open such a channel, and it will propagate to any Matrix
> >> server that "owns" clients that participate in the chat, and all of
> >> those servers have the entire history.
> > So how does a server get clients? Or perhaps its more how does a
> > client find a server?  If I want to join a channel what do I do?  Who
> > runs the servers?
>
>
> You register your Matrix account on a server of your choice.

Yes, but how do I find a server or servers and how do I choose?  With
IRC at least all that happened in the background.

>
> matrix.org hosts the reference server but anyone is free to host
> commercial or personal ones like I do (then called homeserver).

Expecting users to run a server to get support is unreasonable, and I
won't run one, so lets keep to what clients can do.

>
> (There is a reference server side that is FOSS and there are a number of
> competing implementations as well, for example in Rust).
>
> You can register within the clients, for example on
> https://app.element.io/, and then you can readily join all channels over
> the world.
>

And if that server goes away I'm stuffed?

>
> >
> > So its like IRC in that all conversations on the #geany channel are
> > mixed together.  But unlike IRC the servers maintain the history?
>
> Yes, it's a flat chat. From my past experience with #geany on irc (which
> is very low traffic) that's good enough.

It is the only reason it might work, but it would still make replying
to questions messy and conversations all mixed up.

>
> I only know Rocket.Chat (https://rocket.chat/) that allows for
> sub-threads in channels. We use that at work, and that feature is
> sometimes nice, but the UI is not great (sub-threads are in a tiny
> window on the right) so I often want to avoid sub-threads.
>

Sigh, how often is a useful feature killed by a bad UI :-S

>
> >
> >> So there is no action required to keep the channel alive, as long as
> >> there are participating (even if idle) users.
> >>
> > How does the "federation" handle loss of servers? Are there IRC like
> > net splits? Or does it handle it all better?
>
>
> When a server goes down then users that have their accounts on that
> server cannot participate anymore. Other users are not affected. When
> the server comes back online it fetches the missing history of what
> happend during the downtime.

Which comes back to the question of how to find/choose a server.

>
> Federation is not for load-balancing or redundancy, at least not
> primarily. It's so that there can multiple servers in the ecosystem to
> chose from. You might trust server A more than B, or server C could
> offer better services for a fee.

Essentially it looks to me like its better than IRC in some places and
worse in others, but its still chat, and I'm over it for support
purposes.

Obviously its ok if people want to run a channel/room/whatever its
called as an unofficial support mechanism and probably the Geany
website should acknowledge it, but it should be referred to as
unofficial by the Geany website.

I'm not at all stuck on Github discussions, except its there, now
(admittedly as beta), there are already two entries, we don't have to
do anything, and it keeps conversations together.  I understand the
point of users having to make an account on a techie type site like
github, but as I said before, they will have to make one somewhere
unless it happens to be something they use already.  Same for zulip,
same for discourse, same for IRC, same for matrix.

Seems we havn't found a good, free for projects like Geany, simple
solution yet, what else is there?

Cheers
Lex

>
>
> Best regards
>
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