What does HackerNews think of matterbridge?
bridge between mattermost, IRC, gitter, xmpp, slack, discord, telegram, rocketchat, twitch, ssh-chat, zulip, whatsapp, keybase, matrix, microsoft teams, nextcloud, mumble, vk and more with REST API (mattermost not required!)
I do this for one of my projects as I find that Discord is where a lot of people are, and people find it accessible. But for those of us who do not love the closed ecosystem, it's nice to have alternatives.
Do you maybe have a gateway/bridge to a libre network such as IRC/XMPP/Matrix? I find HTMX pretty interesting but i wouldn't touch discord with a 10-foot pole, if only because my limited computing resources won't allow for such a resource-hungry app to run in the background.
It seems like matterbridge supports discord backend but i don't have a discord account to try it with. If you're not willing to host matterbridge, i'm already hosting one and i would just need credentials to try and connect it to Discord. If you're willing to give that a try, feel free to mail me at my username @ thunix.net.
The use case is simple: instead of using plethora of IM apps, have all your conversations in one place.
These integrations are a bit ugly and certainly not the ideal design, but they work and help a lot of communities that are 90% on Zulip but still want an IRC presence for whatever reason. (A fun historical note: Zulip's had a really nice puppet-powered bridge with Zephyr since 2012, because that was how we got enough usage during its early development to design the product and its data model with real users).
Longer term, we're planning to build a native Zulip federation feature. For us the technical strategy has been to first make a Zulip world-class user experience, and do native federation later.
Our strategy is motivated by XMPP, which like Matrix is extremely general (E.g. I talked to people who used XMPP as message bus for their backend infrastructure 10 years ago). XMPP is dying as a chat protocol because nobody can build a modern world-class chat application using it as the client/server protocol.
E.g. multiple people who'd worked as engineers on now-dead chat products complained that because their mobile apps talked XMPP to their server, it was impossible for them to make the apps start quickly in medium-size organizations, because of all the round-trips required.
In contrast, Zulip's client/server protocol both on web and mobile returns all metadata in a single HTTP request: https://zulip.com/api/register-queue, and then after that, another to fetch whatever messages you're going to look at.
Moxie made it stupidly hard to connect to Signal with anything that's not the official app, which is definitely a hostile act towards anyone who doesn't want to have the Signal app on their phone - the Signal desktop software needs the mobile app to work:
"To use the Signal desktop app, Signal must first be installed on your phone."
I definitely have my issues with Signal. That said, it's simple, and works reasonably well, it's just not a nice system at all from the dev/libre perspective.
* https://zulipchat.com/integrations/communication * https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge
We'll eventually add a more native way of connecting a stream between two Zulip servers; we just want to be sure we do that right; federation done sloppily is asking for a lot of spam/abuse problems down the line.
(I'm the Zulip lead developer)
It only support public channels at the moment, but we're planning to add user/user communication too.
Matterbridge seems interesting as well but I haven't had time to play with it yet. https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge
In view of those more-complete, non-proprietary solutions, you have to be a chump to pay for a Slack IRC bridge.
Works for: Slack, Zulip, Mattermost, IRC, Telegram, Gitter, Rocketchat, XMPP, Steam, Twitch, Riot, and some others.
Some of the nifty things it supports (to various degrees): - rethreading of Slack messages between instances. (future) interop with Mattermost possible. - edits and deletions going through most platforms. - relaying of "user is typing" messages on Slack. (future) interop with Mattermost possible. - (future) hack to relay emoji reactions via editting a "prosthetic attachment" in Slack. - sync'ing channel topics. - (future) still not generalized, but on a local branch, I've been using an option to set a channel with a language, and have all incoming messages translate via Google Translate.
This last feature I'm pretty excited about. The goal is to allow anyone who finds themselves interested in #un-projet (that's french) to simply create #un-projet-en, and have everything auto-translated to Ye Olde English. If people in #un-projet don't understand your english replies to their french nonsense (ha!), they can create #un-projet-fr and have all your english belligerence translated into their One True Glorious Language.
As stated, this allows bridging between many different services. It's config is via toml file, and not a UI, but I am excited to later build that out. I'm particularly excited to explore how public chat gateways could be offered as a community service, kinda like TravisCI.
Like imagine if someone could send you a link, as a member of a Slack or Mattermost team, and logging in would allow you to join a giant multi-team/multi-platform gateway that others were already using. I feel that this could help un-silo us until we all figure out the one true protocol ;)
Basically, it is hosted mattermost. We've written our story of how we created Relay by escaping slack: https://medium.com/@deobald/we-created-relay-by-escaping-sla....
There are bux fixes, and feature improvements pouring into mattermost from around the world, and we get them in. We're building integrations, bridging services and other slack features (which will also be open source) into it on high priority.
There's https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge, which provides bridges from mattermost/relay to practically all other messaging platforms out there including IRC, Telegram, Gitter, etc. We're building a SaSS for this too.
Disclaimer: I'm a part of the Relay team.
[1]: https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge [2]: https://matrix.org/
I run three Discord servers:
- A tiny one for my company, which we use much like one would use Slack within a company, including voice and video chats.
- A medium-size one for the open source community around the company. It includes project-specific channels (three-way mirrored between Gitter and IRC thanks to the wonderful Matterbridge: https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge/), general channels, voice channels etc.
- A large (20k users) one for our company's (gaming-centric) userbase.
Discord is a fantastic tool that adapts to all three situations very well, scales really well from 4 people to 100k people. Its DM/friendslist system scales a lot less well, but is still very usable with 100+ DM channels. I have even created a personal (private) Discord server where I'm keeping a journal of what I work on, inspired by a HN post the other day (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15823599).
Discord is scalable messaging UX done right. I'm a huge believer in what they do. (Yeah, if only it were open source etc, I get it; different problem, different story)
I much prefer it over Gitter for open source chat (Gitter's only real advantage is how well it integrates with Github). And IRC is... well, not in a good state today. IRCCloud.com does wondeful work but they're small and it's just not enough.
I just wish Discord would get phonecall support, but that part is probably not going to happen. It's doable with a bot though. PhoneCord (https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/6hlesz/anyone_e...) used to do it, they were shut down because of the obvious abuse implications but I'd really like to hook up Twilio with Discord in a bot for my company, internally, so we can do phone conferencing from it.
It feels like it would be really beneficial for it to work with matterbridge (https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge), then people could pipe it into whichever tool they prefer.
Any plans to have it speak an established protocol, like xmpp?
Yup, definitely look into it. We just killed our last Jenkins instance last week after we found out that everyone eventually moved to the GitLab CI.
> - sentry is a tough one. We rolling a custom mqttwarn/zabbix solution
Why a tough one? I found Sentry easy to self-host. They have pretty good docs: https://docs.sentry.io/server/installation/
> - irc(fine I will take your slack and use the irc-bridge pfftt)
We ditched Slack for Mattermost. It's not entirely up to par (yet), but works for most use-cases. And there's an IRC bridge for it, too (https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge). Oh, and Mattermost comes bundled with GitLab in their omnibus.
Today, I'm in 10 and active in none. All the channels I left, even some of the ones I'm still in now, have switched to Discord, Slack or Matrix. The two only channels I care about are actually both mirrored on Discord using the excellent Matterbridge (https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge/).
I was a heavy IRC user. The audience is gone.
Yes, we do have people wanting connectivity via XMPP, IRC, Discord, Slack, etc. There's "matterbridge" that offers those options for Mattermost: https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge
There's connectors to Mattermost from IRC, XMPP, Slack, Discord and many other services: https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge
There's a wonderful Pidgin plug-in (https://github.com/EionRobb/purple-mattermost) that even has its own installer to bundle Pidgin itself (https://github.com/Brightscout/mattermost-pidgin-client)
Here's a Terminal client for Mattermost written in Haskell (https://about.mattermost.com/galois-releases-matterhorn/).
Also, we've upgrade the polish on Mattermost UI for our 4.0 release this month: https://about.mattermost.com/mattermost-4-0/
Agree good UI/UX in open source is hard, I think there are two challenges: a) Attracting top UI/UX talent, b) Having a project that prioritizes UI/UX.
That said, I would also propose that what has already happened is not impossible.
Async shines when you have a lot of users, but only if it's very accessible (searchable). Otherwise it's just people repeating themselves constantly.
Also, longer rant on the IRC thing. For the past decade I've been using IRC as my central mode of group communication for all open source work. Last year and as part of my (open source) company, I've completed the switch to Discord.
I'm an open source die-hard and it bugs me that Discord isn't open source yet, but I believe this has a fairly high chance of changing (MUCH higher than Slack has at any rate). I would heartily recommend Discord for open-minded open source communities.
I'm now using Discord for everything. It has given me a unified interface for all my personal and group communications, easily searchable, with voice chat too (and video chat very soon, I cannot wait to never open Hangouts again). Needless to say, I'm a huge, huge fan.
Slack has none of that. The #1 thing that bugs me with Slack is the forced separate accounts for every single Slack instance. And you can't delete any of those accounts, you can only "deactivate" them.
Our open source community uses it. It works really well for us because we're a gamer-oriented open source community, so Discord is already pretty well known in that circle. On an ideological level, its API gives enough control over everything that goes in in it that I'm satisfied I could move to another service, should I need to. If anything, it's harder to move off IRC because there's no public logs, easy point of contact for the regular users, etc.
Also, I'm using Matterbridge to mirror our public channel to IRC: https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge/ (highly recommend everybody here checks it out; it supports a lot of protocols)
IRC has really disappointed me the past few years. I had a lot of hope that irccloud.com would offer a solution to IRC becoming irrelevant in the face of Slack and Discord, but it just hasn't happened. They're understaffed and don't have enough money coming in.
There's also a lot of ideological purity in recommending against SaaS "centralization" for comms but the truth is, it's not better. Last year my HDD crashed and I lost the logs for my organization's original channel going back to its creation... I'm very, very sad about that. Had I been using IRCCloud (or Discord) at the time, I wouldn't have lost all that. Granted, those companies could have, but the chances are lower than me fucking up.
This is the same reasoning why email is usually better off handled by companies whose livelihood depends on offering you the service, than by yourself.
Also like I said elsewhere in this thread, for a project using a Freenode channel and another using a Discord/Slack server, there is no difference between Freenode disappearing and Discord/Slack disappearing. Your host disappears, you have to find a new one, update tons of references and contact lots of users to let them know. On IRC, that's even harder. You can run your own IRC server, but very few do that, and those that do get less mindshare because connecting to yet another server is very annoying on IRC. It also costs you more, both in money and maintenance.
Thanks for your feedback on Mattermost. Could you share more on what you'd like to see changed?
For folks who haven't seen Mattermost, here's a demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKqHWqrAgpk&t=1s
Also, I noticed from your HN profile links you're a UX designer.
We're actually working on our new generation of mobile apps in React Native (https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-mobile).
If you're open to critiquing some of the screenshots from early builds, or even participating in the design discussion, we'd welcome your involvement.
Also, we'd welcome you to join our community server at https://pre-release.mattermost.com/
I'm on there as it33 if you want to DM me to share more of your thoughts?
PS: Regarding IRC, Mattermost connects to IRC, XMPP, Slack, HipChat, Matrix and other systems via Matterbridge: https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge
Short of video calls though, Discord is essentially a drop-in replacement to Slack. We've been using it at my company, it works so damn well. I moved to it for our open source community as well. I use Matterbridge for a three-way mirror between IRC and Gitter as well: https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge/
While there's not yet C64 support, Mattermost connects to IRC, Slack, Gitter, Discord, Telegram and HipChat using Matterbridge (https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge).
In terms of features, the Mattermost community has added quite a few that aren't available in Slack--markdown support, multi-team accounts, threaded messaging, etc.: https://www.mattermost.org/what-slack-might-learn-from-its-o...
Mattermost deploys as a single Linux binary with MySQL or Postgres and you control everything.
Matterbridge connects Mattermost with IRC, XMPP, Slack, Discord, and Gitter: https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge
You can also talk to Mattermost team on #matterbridge on Freenode.