Re: [Tools-discuss] Trial chat services: matrix and zulip

[Dave Cridland <[e-mail]>]

On Sat, 3 Oct 2020 at 20:51, Matthew Hodgson <[e-mail]> wrote:

>   * By deriding the bridge, you're just harming both sides of it. IETF
> is less likely to use Matrix if they believe its XMPP bridge is as
> irredeemably bad as you say; and meanwhile it sounds like pure XMPP is
> off the cards anyway.


I certainly agree that the best course of action is to have a IM solution
that is as compatible with XMPP as possible. XMPP has, I think, served the
IETF community well over the past decade or so, and existing deployed
solutions - like Meetecho and the IETF Jabber server itself - have worked
with reasonable effectiveness. The XMPP community, vendors and independent
developers, have offered help with improving this too (and many from the
XMPP community have gone on to do wider work within the IETF world).

I, too, am unclear why we declare anything built privately on web
technologies to be the moral equivalent of an open standard technology with
specifications published through a recognised standards group and multiple
interoperable implementations. One might as well use the criteria of "It's
programmed in ANSI C".

But I'm also, I confess, bewildered that the stated aim of using the likes
of Zulip (which I've never heard of before, sorry) and Slack is that public
XMPP services are not easily found, and yet simultaneously "XMPP is off the
cards", and no public accounts will be offered.

What's the blocker to offering accounts on the IETF XMPP server and hosting
a web client?

Dave.