I think IRC would've been a great choice about a decade ago, but it seems to have fallen out of favor as newer chat services have been added. It's less that IRC is old per se, rather virtually nothing has been done to improve the UX. IRC has some very unique problems where you have to actively configure something as simple as the port number to connect with and whether to enable TLS while other services have standardized on this long ago so users don't have to think about that. I remember when IRC was very popular among the communities I frequented years ago, but outside of FOSS projects many of these channels are now dead because people have moved onto Discord, Matrix, Telegram, etc. I think part of this can also be attributed to the advent of mobile, as IRC clients are usually painful on a phone where you have to type commands on a touchscreen. I also have found IRC to be blocked on some networks, while Matrix served over HTTPS is very firewall-friendly. As of 2020, there are still many features that're missing because IRC essentially pushes implementation onto the client and/or need a bouncer to get features you'd get for free in other services. You practically need a personal cloud if you want to be able to have persistent chat history and/or avoid flooding a channel with disconnect messages especially if you're on a mobile device that can't maintain an active connection at all times. You also need a bot if you want any kind of features like link previews. -Josh On Fri, 2020-01-10 at 21:07 +0000, Anderson, Charles R via WLUG wrote:
We also have an IRC channel:
http://www.wlug.org/participate.html
Internet Relay Chat
Join the realtime chat on our IRC channel.
Connect your IRC client to irc.freenode.net Join the #wlug-ma channel or join directly from this link: irc://irc.freenode.net/#wlug-ma. See more information about Freenode and join the chat from your web browser
but maybe IRC is too old school--no one chats on it anymore.
On Fri, Jan 10, 2020 at 04:03:14PM -0500, Joshua Stone via WLUG wrote:
Hey all,
Last night's meeting was excellent, and I'd like say thanks again to Tim for giving me a ride home!
Last night's discussion gave me ideas of ways we could improve general activity, increase attendence, and improve outreach efforts. Hosting a meetup.com group would be certainly improve discoverability, and getting in touch with WPI's computer science group would be great too.
I think what a lot communities are doing nowadays is having a text chat format for users who want to communicate more easily over the internet, especially with mobile devices. As an example, there are Discord servers for Fedora, Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, etc, and they have room sizes generally in the hundreds or even well over a thousand. Even before Discord they'd use IRC for providing support, posting updates, etc.
Having a text chat of our own would certainly help improve participation -- I think Matrix would be a good option here because it has many nice features and has a fairly polished user experience:
- Numerous clients available on desktop, mobile, and web ( https://matrix.org/clients/ - Persistent chat history - Link previews - Various bots to choose from for adding functionality ( https://matrix.org/docs/projects/bots/ - User moderation - Server federation - Self-hosting available, both client and server are completely FOSS - File sharing - Voice/video calls
I have a screenshot if anyone wants to see what a Matrix chat room would look like:
https://i.imgur.com/aVILcWB.png
Or you can join the room I made:
https://matrix.to/#/!EiTljkvagZDFKfQfFu:matrix.org?via=matrix.org
Alteratively, if you have a Matrix client already:
#wlug:matrix.org
Any thoughts?
-Josh
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