[Arathorn]

From the Matrix side, we're ridiculously happy to have the opportunity to defragment developer chat a bit, and get folks on Gitter natively talking to folks elsewhere on Matrix (including bridged to IRC, Slack, Discord or whatever). The fragmentation of FOSS development chat into proprietary silos a few years back was incredibly depressing, and this is our attempt to put right what once went wrong :) Happy to try to answer any questions from the Matrix side!

Also, https://techcrunch.com/2020/09/30/element-acquires-gitter-to... is a pretty massive deep-dive into the migration, and The Changelog did a big podcast covering off all the details on both the GitLab/Gitter and Element/Matrix side: https://changelog.com/podcast/414

[sytse]

From the GitLab side we're very happy with the new home for Gitter. Chat is very useful but using multiple incompatible technologies has lead to fragmentation and silos. For example external developers being on Gitter when the organization behind the project is on Slack. Matrix is a great way to solve that and we hope Gitter will contribute to the success of it.

[storrgie]

can you comment on the vision that gitlab as a product would have in the future for integration with gitter/matrix?

We're running a decent sized gitlab+mattermost instance now, we're using mattermost guests to pull in collaborators from upstream. It would be overall a lot easier if we were using something like matrix where it's federated and we can bring people in to our homeserver without having to make accounts for them.

[sytse]

That sounds like a great use case and we would welcome Matrix support in GitLab. Adding this isn't on our company roadmap so it would have to be a contribution. See https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/22996 for a related but not quite the same suggestion.

[ptman]

Oh, right, please get rid of mattermost and replace it with matrix/gitter

[mathnmusic]

One of the best features of Gitter is that it can be embedded on webpages which reduces a lot of friction for public communities. Please keep that feature and perhaps, even replicate it in Matrix. This can be a unique value prop for both over the proprietary ones. Plus, it enriches the Web as opposed to moving all things into app silos.

[Arathorn]

For sure. Matrix is sprouting this too (there was a GSoC project this summer for it, and the Hydrogen Matrix client is also properly embeddable, unlike Element) - but with Gitter becoming a Matrix client we could do so from that side too!

[pabs3]

The Matrix to IRC bridge (for at least freenode and OFTC) has a number of suboptimal behaviours on the IRC side, it would be great if you could improve the experience for folks not using Matrix.

[Arathorn]

We’re aware of folks objecting that messages longer than 3 lines get autopastebinned, and that replies are a bit jarring on IRC. Or do you have something else in mind?

Impedance mismatches are inevitable, but we obviously don’t want Matrix to crap over native experiences on IRC or elsewhere. So: give us specifics and we’ll fix as best we can.

[pabs3]

The reply issue is pretty hard to solve, since sometimes the extra text is useful, sometimes it isn't. Perhaps if there has been N minutes or X lines of chat since the message being replied to, then include the extra text, otherwise don't. The template should be changed to something like this though:

    <foo[m]> bar: re "hello about something longis...", hello!
    <foo[m]> bar: re "short hello", hello!

Those are the main ones, a few more:

Image uploads could probably just post a link to the image instead using /me uploaded an image: foo.png (123KiB) < https://matrix.org/_matrix/media/r0/download/matrix.org/....... >

Directing a message at a specific person on the channel sometimes posts their full Matrix URL on the IRC side, rather than just using their IRC nick:

    <foo[m]> [bar](https://matrix.to/#/@bar:matrix.org): hello

Directing a message at a specific person on the channel sometimes posts their full name on the IRC side, rather than using their IRC nick:

    <foo[m]> Bar Baz: hello

Matrix <> IRC splits seem to occur more often than IRC netsplits.

[auscompgeek]

> Directing a message at a specific person on the channel sometimes posts their full Matrix URL on the IRC side, rather than just using their IRC nick:

    <foo[m]> [bar](https://matrix.to/#/@bar:matrix.org): hello

This one is a client-side bug, not a bridge bug.

> Directing a message at a specific person on the channel sometimes posts their full name on the IRC side, rather than using their IRC nick:

    <foo[m]> Bar Baz: hello

This should only be a thing when mentioning non-IRC users. Is this actually a problem?

[pabs3]

> This one is a client-side bug, not a bridge bug.

Hmm, in IRC clients or Matrix ones? Which clients?

> This should only be a thing when mentioning non-IRC users. Is this actually a problem?

Yes, because it makes it harder to follow the conversation from the IRC side because the full name from the Matrix side isn't available on the IRC side and even if it were present in the IRC "real name" field, it would still be hard to map from real names to IRC nicks, which is why IRC users never address each other using their real names, only their nicks.

[samschooler]

Don't know if you have access to the Gitter side but as of now, the blog post is 404ing https://blog.gitter.im/gitter-element-acquisition/

[wut42]

The correct URL is https://blog.gitter.im/2020/09/30/gitter-element-acquisition...

[Arathorn]

oops, Ghost fail; fixed now :)