[Development] Changes to Freenode's IRC

[Cristián Maureira-Fredes]

On 5/20/21 8:46 PM, Carl Schwan wrote:
> Le jeudi, mai 20, 2021 2:18 PM, Giuseppe D'Angelo via Development <development at qt-project.org> a écrit :
> 
>> [snip]
>>      Lacking some formal voting infrastructure, how do we take this vote?
>>      I'd say, KISS: please reply to this email and express your preference.
> 
> I believe the best course of action would be to wait a bit until KDE moves
> its freenode presence to libera (should happen soon). And then Qt can move
> its freenode channels to libera and add Matrix bridging to the new channels
> with the KDE-Matrix instance.
> 
> People who prefer IRC will still be able to use IRC, people who would like
> to use a more modern chat protocol can use Matrix and both will be able to
> communicate together using the Matrix bridge.
> 
> Currently, there are already some unofficial matrix channels bridged to the Qt
> IRC channels (e.g. #_freenode_#qt-labs:kde.org) but making them official,
> grouping them into a Matrix Space[1] and encouraging people to join them could
> help to make Qt a friendlier project to join.
> 
> Cheers,
> Carl
> 
> [1]: https://matrix.org/blog/2021/05/17/the-matrix-space-beta
> 

Hello,

I completely agree with this argument,
moving Libera seems to be
the first solution to the initial problem,
then we could connect those channels with Matrix
counterparts on the KDE infra.

Why Matrix?
KDE is already using it, and I trust
they also had long lasting discussions to "what do we use next".
If someone don't like it then the person can stay on the IRC channel.

After this, time will tell, if we notice an increase of users
on the matrix, or IRC side, and we can have another discussion.
but at least I feel it's a good plan to follow.

Is there any argument against this plan?
Bridges will be harmless enough to at least give us the option
to try something different, without losing discussions from IRC.

@Giuseppe regarding the consensus, should we do a thread for voting
the movement to libera only? or you think we could agree differently
of doing the move.


--
Story time: The PySide situation

As you can see here: https://wiki.qt.io/Qt_for_Python#Community
the project has many platforms, and some of them are connected,
giving me at least the feeling everyone is happy in their system.

IRC has some activity, but it's connected with a bridge
to Matrix (the default server), and also to Gitter
(if you don't know what's about, it's mainly a web-based chat
system related to github projects, it has been connected to
the old github mirror of the pyside-setup repo).

With the configuration:
     Gitter <-> IRC <-> Matrix
most people are happy enough.

We complementary had open a Telegram channel,
that became the most active platform (citation needed, it's my impression.).

We opened a PySide channel on Keybase,
but after all the crypto-stuff, it died out.

--


-- 
Dr. Cristián Maureira-Fredes
R&D Manager

The Qt Company GmbH
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