I've archived #CKC6FM9DF, #CJT25RWKE, and #CL0FBFS8H. I've created #C0133ED5811. Announcement here: https://futureofcoding.slack.com/archives/C5T9GPWFL/p1588700944049400 Sincere thanks to everyone for weighing in on this. Apologies to Duncan and the other folks for whom Slack is an intolerable garbage fire, despite the euphoric joy that is this our community here — I feel you. Over the coming year, let's continue looking for ways to move some of our activity and discussion to other platforms that won't be so antagonizing. We've had some great suggestions from folks about doing something wiki-like, possibly something similar but with a little more of a "this is the future" feel to it. Keep all the suggestions coming, and I'll continue to do... what I can!

I've been using matrix lightly for about a year, and running my own homeserver for the last month on a $5 vps. https://matrix.org/ The setup is described at https://git.sr.ht/~jamii/tower. It took me an hour or two to get everything working. The protocol seems very well thought out. It has more in common with git than irc eg it can happily recover from long network partitions. The protocol is federated, which means that you can have all the matrix communities that you join in a single UI instead of having multiple logins and multiple slacks to check. There are a fair few 3rd party clients but so far I've only tried the riot web app and the riotx android client. The riot web app running on a cheap vps is consistently faster than the slack web app that we pay for at work. Lately on our work slack I've also been experiencing frequent message reordering and more-than-once delivery but the matrix protocol is immune to both of those by design. Messages are written in markdown, which I massively prefer over slacks weird almost-markdown. Moderation is builtin to the protocol, including things like allowing moderators to give moderator privileges to other users on a room-granularity. https://matrix.org/docs/guides/moderation Threading is still pending, which makes large group chats difficult. I'm not sure when it's expected to land. https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web/issues/2349 It's been adopted by KDE, Mozilla and the French state so it seems likely to be supported for a long time.

I see this. Doesn't look like there's anything to update on the store.

Where did you arrive there from? I just installed riotx from the store, opened the app and logged in.

Oh strange! I installed riot.im from the Android app store. But apparently I have the wrong one. Ugh, this is how people get trained to install from random webpages rather than the store.

Their mobile dev is definitely questionable. riot.im is in maintenance mode but riotx is not really finished yet. eg I usually get notifications twice.

I'm still confused. Will think about it later today.

Not sure if this is well known, but we have a Matrix bridge: https://futureofcoding.org/community#matrix-bridge

It doesn't seem to bridge threads very well last time I tried it. Slack threads become matrix reply-tos and matrix reply-tos become slack unthreaded messages with a quote.

Is this just something that comes with the territory, @J. Ryan Stinnett? Anything we can do to help? (Other than bail on Slack, hah)

@Ivan Reese At the moment, the Matrix protocol doesn't have a native threading concept specified, so the best the bridge can do are these one-off replies unfortunately. 😖 There's work in progress (https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-doc/pull/2326) to specify "labelled message filtering", which should support many kinds of threading as in Slack, Zulip, etc. So for the moment, I don't believe there's anything this community can do just yet. I know people here (and in other Slack communities) highly value people taking their replies into a thread, and since that doesn't work when replying from Matrix, the bridging could become a nuisance. If it reaches that point, do let me know and I can tear down the bridging. Anyway, once there is a native Matrix concept of threads, the Slack bridge would be updated to understand them properly and this issue would go away.

I'm largely waiting on threads to recommend matrix for group stuff. It's already replaced whatsapp for me and it's very nearly ready to replace zulip/slack.

About the Riot Android apps, as @jamii mentioned above, there's both an older Riot app in the Play Store as well as a newer Riot X app, which is a complete rewrite and currently in beta. Over the next few months or so, Riot X will head toward release and replace the older Riot app. At this stage, I would recommend using Riot X, as long as you don't mind the beta status.

was reading this paper a while back (which is utterly fantastic btw, would highly recommend): https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/142750.142769 re: building communication media that work to augment both remote and in-person interactions. i'm particularly interested in the idea of "ephemeral interest groups" aka "short-lived topics" (a place where slack performs poorly) which seems to be a core tension here. is there anyone in this community working on communication tools or "tools for collective thought"? would love to chat about this sometime

Am definitely planning to build a prototype over the next few weeks with people!