Re: Thoughs about communication



Hello all,

On Fri, 13 Jan 2017 09:40:43 -0600, Michael Catanzaro <mcatanzaro gnome org> wrote:
On Fri, 2017-01-13 at 23:45 +1100, George Barrett wrote:
On Fri, Jan 13, 2017 at 08:37:30AM +0000, Alberto Fanjul Alonso
wrote:
Hi, hackers

Do anybody though about trying new services for communication?

- signal https://whispersystems.org/
- telegram https://telegram.org/
- matrix.org http://matrix.org/
- gitter https://gitter.im/

None of these platforms have an official Telepathy protocol implementation.
That people will have a lessened ability to access chat already seems like a
non-starter.

I've been assured that Matrix works well enough via telepathy-haze,
although I've never tried it myself and wouldn't want to recommend it.
Anyway, telepathy has been unmaintained for years and is frankly
totally dead, so the real problem here is that GNOME Shell still uses
Telepathy at all.

There's telepathy-cauchy [1] (a connection manager) and matrix-glib-sdk [2].
Unfortunately the repositories have not had any activity in the last month —
though if integration with Telepathy is a must, they do look like a great
starting point to give them some love and ensure they work with the current
Matrix HTTP API.

(This is a real shame, by the way. If only somebody cared enough to
maintain it....)

:-(

pros/cons irc:

pros:
<snip>
- is widespread
- integrated in gnome environment (bots, bugzilla)

I would argue these two features are critical to any prospective chat
platform. If people can't access chat in a way that suits their workflow,
they probably won't. And it'd be a step backwards if automation suddenly
became a stumbling block.

In terms of universality, the only chat platform rivalling IRC (that I can
think of, at least) is XMPP. I don't know enough about it to seriously
recommend it, though; does it support the requested features?

Matrix solves this by bridging to both IRC and XMPP, so you can
continue using your existing client.

...or use a Matrix client like Riot to connect via bridges to IRC, XMPP, and
so on. Right now I am using Riot (in Revolt) to be available at the same time
in IRC (Freenode, OFTC, Mozilla), some Gitter rooms, and of course few Matrix
rooms as well. It just feels right :-)

As far as GNOME integration, our Telepathy integration in GNOME Shell
has been very lacking since GNOME 3.8 and probably worse than no
integration since GNOME 3.16. I would really, really like to see a
decent GNOME Chat app, or just improved Empathy, but in the meantime
we're already in a very bad position with Telepathy.

(And don't say "Polari"... unfortunately, as Polari can only handle
IRC, it's not an option for those of us who need to use any other
protocol.)

I always thought that it's a bit of a pity that Polari does not handle
Telepathy CMs other than the IRC one. It would be *so* fitting to have it
handle e.g. XMPP MUC and Matrix rooms...

- signal is aware of privacy

What does this mean? If the plan is that public chats are logged, is there any
room for privacy considerations? I'm probably misunderstanding, but being
privacy-aware seems moot in this instance.

Signal offers end-to-end encryption. So does Matrix. I don't know how
this feature interacts with chat room logging (though I'd presume that
the developers are not stupid).

It does: E2E crypto means that the server cannot “see” the contents of the
messages, so of course server-side history search and a couple of things more
do not work when using E2E. This is by design.

—
🎩 Adrián

---
[1] https://github.com/gergelypolonkai/telepathy-cauchy
[2] https://github.com/gergelypolonkai/matrix-glib-sdk

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