[Bf-committers] Potentially moving from IRC to Blender.Chat

[Pablo Vazquez]

>
> - is wasting space when not logged in (It can be changed to "condensed
> mode" but only when logged in it apears)
>

Compact view can be set to default if enough people agree.


> - is slow: [1]
>

The version live in production now was right before an improvement that
speeds up the load/opening of rooms quite substantially, we just need to
update the docker image.
https://github.com/RocketChat/Rocket.Chat/pull/13417#issue-251549810


> - is big: 4.3 MB for a simple chat app [2]
>

I'd trade a couple of MBs for built-in attachments, screen-sharing, video
conferencing, audio message, email notifications, etc.


> - is increasing the barrier to entry. Previously you could just use the
> freenode web service to chat. Now you need to register for an account
>

You still need to create an account on freenode to chat in blendercoders.
All you need in blender.chat is a Blender ID account which most Blender
users have made for sites like devtalk, cloud, fund or network.


> - has no mobile app for my phone version
>

It's available on Android and iOS.


> - rocket.chat has 1.9k open issues on github, while IRC is battle-tested
>

Maybe you don't know how GitHub issues work? It's a bunch of tasks with
labels. 355 of those are marked as bugs, some as design, some as feature
proposals from 2015.


> Also consider that there are people with slow phones/slow connections.
> People who want better UI can always use riot.im, irccloud or any similar
> service.
>

We looked into matrix when we started blender.chat over a year ago and it
just didn't feel mature enough. Riot looks a lot better now than it did a
year ago, I wouldn't mind giving it a try if there is people willing to
help setting it up (rocket chat is literally just pulling a docker image).
I personally don't mind if it's rocket chat or riot or whatever, I just
like how much more accessible these apps make it to more people (there's a
reason why people use Slack, Discord, etc.).

Blender forums used phpBB, but we moved to Discourse.
blender.org with Typo3 was fine, we moved to Wordpress.
Remember projects.blender.org? we moved to Phabricator.
We went from CVS to SVN to git.

Moving *some* communication channels from IRC to something more media
friendly for a 3D software shouldn't be so shocking.