From - to Matrix
How and why the commune of young programmers, old trolls and eternally young functional programming lovers makes this transition true if the RKN is to blame for everything, the reasoning about the means of communication of communities and the spirit of open-source is under the cut.
In GoTo, Telegram has been used for a long time to coordinate within events: for example, a one or two week school usually has a channel with updates (“Today the speaker did not come and therefore we have +1 - five pairs!”), Flood with all the participants, and chat on the track from bioinformatics to the course of a young fighter. The latter are divided into links, chunks of code, smart tips and other educational materials.
And it works
But - our community exists outside of schools and hakatons: our participants go to hackathons together, work on projects, study in the same universities, rent apartments together, get married (a couple more years ...), give birth to children and also send them to GoTo.
And everything is less convenient between schools. Yes, and we are moving smoothly towards the long-awaited miracle - the Immaculate Conception of our hackspace.
On the one hand, there is no easy way to send requests from “go to hackathon” to “saw project, who are with me“ to ”aaa, the router does not route“ to ”go to walk” to “meeting Stallman reading group” to ... (the mailing list and the telegram channel) is in the hands of the orgovs, who are therefore sent to the lichku and asked to throw. But to throw everything - does not scale; In general, we need a sort of multicast interest.
On the other hand, finding something — a person or materials, or even chat referrals — over time becomes more and more difficult. That is, you need to archive in a structured way.
Even when it wants to communicate, more than ten people sitting in one room, and, probably, on different topics, it becomes important to structure communication at once (for example, with granular channels - for which you need discovery - or threads), and to have a mechanism for resolving tcl_rulezz_ and others nicknames in some more complete profile: for example, saying, have you ever crossed paths with this person at GoTo events.
Here we decided to see how people are already solving these problems.
By structure, there is a spectrum: from Twitter to IRC (Slack) to e-mail newsletter or forum. The first is sharpened by an authenticated multicast by user ("I want to read @a: example.com") and unauthenticated by the tag ("everyone can write a message with #meta"), the second is by groups (authenticated multicast groups), and the forum is forum (by topic tags can also be filtered).
Slack and his clones (Mattermost, Rocket.Chat, Gitter, etc.) are known as "a thing for communities"; more people dig in in different places from Reddit to Tumblr and Discord; and, finally, historically, open-source lives in the mailing list and IRC; Now you can also see Discource forums and Matrix feeds.
We had the feeling that not all little lovers of pee code were ready for a black console and set up a bouncer or email client so that it would not be covered with a newsletter, which imposed certain restrictions on our choice.
Slack-like solutions are a cross between Twitter and a forum: a subscription to a user can be simulated by a ro-channel, and there are threads from the forum. Therefore, and because it is closest to what we are doing now (the transition is easier), we decided to first introduce something like that, and then, seeing how people communicate, add something to the right or left of the spectrum as needed .
We faced a choice of what to specifically implement
The obvious answer is Slack. But he wants money in the form of a subscription, and artificial restrictions on the number of integrations or free messages do not make amorous. Although it is impossible not to notice that the UI / UX are good. And, this is another evil proprietary SaaS (like Telegram).
Let's look at its functional analogs: Mattermost, Rocket.Chat, Zulip, etc. Subjectively evaluating usability and presence of clients, discovery-type community features and chat features (message forwarding, threads / replies), we defeated Mattermost: it is closest to the interface and threads.
In the new comparison frame - Mattermost vs Matrix
Matrix - let us, instead of one more silo, have the protocol open, like an e-mail. An XMPP alternative with client availability and a netsplit-resistant story in general. And multi end-to-end encryption.
Historically, there were quite a few protocols on the Internet for communication: from Fido to ICQ and AIM. They were open, where anyone could write a client or start their own server, and there were Skype and WhatsApp. From about the beginning of 2000 to 2010, the open protocol XMPP was very popular: all the big providers like Gmail, Facebook, Vkontakte and others gave automatically when registering an account on their server and seamlessly integrated into their interface. So geeks communicated from their servers with ordinary people in the VC, and everything was fine. XMPP clients were written in the oldest Symbian and Java SE, so it was difficult to remain without communication, and the secret chats - OTR - were already there.
But for a number of reasons, of which I emphasize focus on specifications and design-by-comittee instead of code (which led to fragmentation: the basic XMPP can "just send messages", without pictures, editing, calls, etc., and different clients and servers can support different sets of extensions , which makes it painful), and companies realize that it is better to lock users completely inside their little world than to let them communicate freely. It is approximately as if from the Samsung one could only call on the Samsung.
Matrix is ​​an attempt to make XMPP again taking into account its errors. It is also the only protocol I know that allows you to completely free from your server and in a bright client on all large platforms, and in a black console (Weechat) to exchange end-to-end encrypted messages with a common history between devices.
Matrix is ​​an opportunity to communicate freely.
(There is also a secushare project on GNUnet, which sets similar, but more ambitious goals about decentralization (without the word “b”), but does not work in the same volume yet - because federation is simpler than p2p.)
Mattermost - let’s about clone Slack.
The functional differences are that Matrix still (!!) did not deliver editing and replies to messages, and there are no threads. But more interesting: the community (chat in the format Cap'n'Proto anyone?), The spirit of open-source and privacy, and in general the hope of modern free communication. This, thoughts about "anyway, any decision to finish," and a little Matrix Evangelism Strike Force - and here we are with him.
And we will grow the culture of making the world better and patching our problems and communicating with people on the other side of the globe. Sow young minds with freedom!
What's next?
Today we are launching a test drive of the matrix. You can go there with complex questions about GANs, CAS, Docker and genome processing. You can search for a team for hackathons, invite young programmers for internships and follow the IT-activities themselves.
On the desktop, you can open https://riot.goto.msk.ru and register (then we integrate chat with LC), and install Riot ( F-Droid , Play , App Store ) on the phone and specify https: // matrix when entering . .goto.msk.ru as a server. If you are already in the matrix - just go.
Now the general discussion with real people is distributed between #welcome: goto.msk.ru and #flood: goto.msk.ru , and the ads appear in #announcements: goto.msk.ru.
The list of rooms in the community can be viewed at + goto: goto.msk.ru , and thematic channels will appear as needed.
Further we will use and saw Matrix at our summer schools : discussion in # matrix-support: goto.msk.ru. There are already interested parties to detach it from the Internet and launch it on a gnune , so as not to block it at all and that in the village - the Moscow region, where we run schools and the Internet does not want to be loaded by loading there and unloading ten times back - it worked :)
First we want to fix low-seems-hanging fruit type replies. Then - the line of editing, and threads. In the meantime, research projects like the one described above can be fired: detach from the Internet, visualize events in the federation, patch the Haskell home server, make caching smarter, screw in object storage ... Soon we will post a list of project ideas for the summer, stay tuned.
There will be import stickers from the telegraph!
How do you telecommute your communities? Drink Matrix together? Discuss
UPD 17/04: France tests Matrix for diplomats and officials .
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Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/353580/
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