Fossunited.org matrix server

Organisation
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The FOSS United Telegram seems to have only a few active participants with other random people dropping in. I’m proposing that FOSS United move off (?) Telegram and shift to using Matrix primarily

Matrix has its drawback and quite a few pain points. But currently it seems to be the best chat platform for getting people into the FOSS community, many projects have Matrix rooms. So I propose a fossunited.org server be made.

Why a dedicated home server?

Matrix.org is slow and isn’t the best experience. I think many people have had poor experience on Matrix and most of the performance issues are traced back to using the matrix.org server.

We should promote self-hosting. I’m unsure if we would even want to give Matrix accounts to everyone, probably. But either way self-hosters will be able to participate just the same as fossunited accounts.

FOSS United should be the front door for many to join the FOSS community it is very easy to find your niche and start chatting with others working on projects. See: https://matrixrooms.info/

Why not Discord, XMPP, IRC?

Discord isn’t FOSS. It is fast and people like it, but it is a bit annoying to join 7 servers because you just want to participate in a few channels’ discussion. Federated system are better for this

IRC: is tried and true but lacking most of the features less-technical people expect. We shouldn’t make people learn to use IRC to participate

XMPP: India already has a strong XMPP community, it has most/all the same features as Matrix and is better/more mature in some ways… the primary case against it is that it doesn’t have the same FOSS network effect as Matrix, new members would be limited in other communities they could join.

Bridging. The current bridged experience kinda sucks, meaning that if you want to participate from Matrix in the current Telegram community you have to settle for a crappy experience. Matterbridge is lowest tier bridge experience there are many better bridges out there, even a promising Telegram one that is currently lacking Topic support. But we could help facilitate project bridging our community into XMPP and even back into Telegram with a better UX than the current one.

Potential problems:

Matrix has been experiencing some bad spam lately, though some mitigations have already been put in place and more are on the way, so the spam has definitely gone down in the last few weeks.

Who will pay? Especially if usage is high.

We want to embrace and promote other chat projects in our community. There aren’t that many existing Matrix projects in India, I only know of https://cinny.in

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I’d say there is a lot of churn for a community in migrating from one platform to another and this is a conversation that may bring forth lots of bikeshedding; however, if it does come out to migrating to a different platform, I’d like to propose Zulip as a potential choice. I feel it’ll check all that FOSS United may require:

  • supports self-hosting
  • has a Matrix integration, and many more here: Communication tools | Zulip integrations
  • file sharing and storage options
  • channels and subtopics on the same instance
  • works cross-platform on computers and mobile devices; even has a TUI application and key bindings
  • open-source, under the Apache 2.0 license

What stands out to me is its threading functionality, as conversations are inherently based on threads rather than sequential messages from top to bottom. It can take some time for new users to wrap their heads around it, as it resembles Slack-like threads, except that it creates a new thread for each message. However, once you get it, it feels intuitive to navigate.

Many thriving open-source communities, such as Zarr, OSSci, PyCon India, conda, conda-forge, and Project Jupyter (the largest of them all!) – have now migrated to Zulip. Here’s a longer list, by no means exhaustive: Open communities directory | Zulip

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Zulip is a better chat app/experience than Matrix in my opinion. But in my mind FOSS United should function as a gateway to other FOSS communities and not just be yet another app I need in my phone. I’m sure everyone has their version of this same problem but my current chat apps for FOSS I have:

  • Mattermost: Almalinux people
  • Slack: k8s, CNCF, Talos Linux, zasper
  • Discord: Universal Blue, Axios IIIT Lucknow, FOSS United Kanpur
  • Telegram: FOSS United, FOSS United Lucknow, other FOSS United groups
  • Matrix: CentOS, Fedora, GNOME, CalyxOS, Matrix

My participation in these projects is heavily influenced by my willingness to have these apps on my phone or tabs pinned in my browser. Like I have repeatedly dropped Slack over the years. And I’d like to drop Discord too. I personally dont want to add Zulip to this list, but I’d imagine if I was in the Data Science world I would already have it.

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To me the question is whether if FOSS United should really get into handling the pain. Letting the community members volunteer for this is another chaotic situation because its less likely to even start/become successful. The goal of the org is to promote use of Free Software and help Open source projects scale to greater heights. Do they have to do it themselves ?

I know this might sound like hypocrisy, but it hasn’t worked in the past and its less likely to work out in the coming future as well. Matrix and a good client might just sound and feel like “I found my place finally!”.

Spam protection on matrix is also painful (saying after looking after at Ente’s matrix for most of the time). You need an active admin and a bot like draupnir there too. Gladly PSF.lt can help with draupnir instance (they did to us for at Ente too)

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I’m not clear on what you are advocating for @mangesh? Staying on Telegram? That’s the path of least resistance and definitely very logical especially if people dont feel like switching to Matrix or any other platform would be a net benefit.

I feel like my main point on all this is: I wouldn’t have become a contributor if I wasn’t hanging out in these chat rooms and catching vibes and volunteering to take on issues. I’d really like to facilitate others having the same experience as me. But I’m very understanding of not fixing what isn’t broken

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Not advocating for anything particular, but just questioning the fundamental rationale on the painful switch for not just 10-12 individuals but the entire “community”.

If all the goal is to let individuals hang around in a chat then why not let them do that in Telegram ? What’s more important is letting members engage into debates, discussions, put their opinions and seek help. This case is similar to being the advocate at a hypocrite organization and forcing others to use just Linux. If there’s no activity in Telegram at this point, then its totally senseless to discuss this.

JFYI, there’s already a lot of FOSS United matrix servers/rooms for various purposes.

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I don’t think hosting matrix is sustainable in the long term. Especially with the federated nature of the software, it needs way too much resources than it can justify.

I have hosted both public and private instances of synapse in the past, and in both cases it only took a few months for the media_store to balloon in size, and the performance got so bad i had to setup workers even for a private instance.

I fully support having a matrix room for fossu, but a homeserver is just overkill.

Regarding the bridge, I dont think we have any other solution for the problem. It doesn’t seem like the mautrix bridge is implementing topics support anytime soon either, so I guess we are just out of options in that front - nor do I think the bridging to xmpp and back option would work since bifrost is even shittier than matterbridge in my experience

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Grand.

Thanks to @Arya_Kiran. I knew the pain, but he explained the experience of his pain in detail :).

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On top of the existing communities, Telegram keeps getting entrenched further with City and Volunteer groups as well, most of which aren’t bridged.

-1 for Zulip (and other similar sofware) because they aren’t meant for such open-ended communities.

I’m curious at how the FOSS United Kanpur group has picked Discord - a Free Software group running on Discord feels very ironic. (Atleast the Telegram client is FOSS)

I agree that maintaining any such solution on volunteer basis is not worth it, and if the foundation does not have resources to self-host a Matrix server, perhaps we can use an existing Hosting Service that we pay for instead?

Perhaps we should sponsor to improve topic support in Mautrix or look at not using topics in FOSS United Telegram so we can switch to Mautrix?

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Hypocrisy at its peak :grin:. Maybe, they could also shift to GitHub - Aliucord/Aliucord: A modification for the Discord Android App and be a half hypocrite like the rest of us on Telegram.

But, I think its fair to make these kind of mistakes when you’re a new chapter or community, maybe the leadership isn’t perfect in the city community.

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I have a decent amount of experience hosting Matrix servers at scale and I think we could get a sponsorship if we gain decent traction, so I’m fine running the server myself to start off. I think if we do a trial in July and feel comfortable, we can try to utilize it for IndiaFOSS.

Regarding the Telegram bridge, I’m sure we can add support, I started to a year ago but I’m not a programmer. Its a bit of a chicken and egg problem. Beeper doesn’t need the functionality so much so they have deprioritized it, but I’m sure they’d be open for contributions (I know the maintainers, I used to work there). So I’m thinking we can induce some demand for the feature.

K8s and CNCF are getting kicked off Slack and are looking to move to Discord. I’d rather have FOSS communities investing in FOSS ecosystems.

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