I thought Gitter had already been acquired by GitLab?
GitLab team member here.
That is correct - in 2017 https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2017/03/15/gitter-acquisition/. But as announced today, Gitter will be going to Matrix going forward.
Gitter is joining Matrix
51–60 of 124 posts
Re: Gitter is joining Matrix
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hopefully they'll be happy that Gitter will sprout all Matrix's funky features like E2EE, VoIP, Widgets, Read receipts, Reactions, a bajillion clients/bots/bridges, the open standard API itself... and as long as Element-branded-as-Gitter looks and performs and smells enough like Gitter, and the community & rooms are still there, all will be well. And if they don't like it, they can always go spin up their own Gitter…
This is the "slippers and sex toy" deflection. If the user's don't like the slippers (new features) they can use the sex toy to fornicate themselves.
and this is a bad thing? O:-)
Re: Gitter is joining Matrix
#53> Our plan is instead to merge Gitter’s features into Element (or next generations of Element) itself and then - if and only if Element has achieved parity with Gitter based on the above list - we expect to upgrade the deployment on gitter.im to a Gitter-customised version of Element. The inevitable side-effect is that we’ll be adding new features to Element rather than Gitter going forwards. Wonder what existing Git…
Using it mostly out of necessity (a project I'm involved in uses it for communication), but I'm mostly enthusiastic about no longer having that annoying Matrixbot - there were always a number of Matrix users, and the implementation was incredibly confusing. It's a nice bonus that I'll no longer be dependent on Gitter's somewhat buggy Web UI. (That said, I am somewhat sceptical about whether we'll see any reasonable r…
> That said, I am somewhat sceptical about whether we'll see any reasonable results in a reasonable amount of time
As Element we are if nothing else highly financially motivated to get Gitter bridged into Matrix, so we can run it via our normal Matrix server backend farm rather than keep an entirely parallel deployment running of Gitter infrastructure. We also want to stick to our word :)
Re: Gitter is joining Matrix
#54This is awesome. I found Gitter super handy because of it's close tie to repos, but being able to reach it from Element would be really nice.
You already could, before this announcement. For example, want to join https://gitter.im/hashicorp-consul/Lobby ? Then join #gitter_hashicorp-consul=2FLobby:matrix.org from Element.
yup, but the experience is pretty dire, particularly on the Gitter side of the bridge. The intention instead is to be able to join #hashicorp-consul_lobby:gitter.im in Matrix, and have all the Gitter users natively there in Matrix... but also all the Matrix users there natively in Gitter :)
Re: Gitter is joining Matrix
#55I really like to use IRC on the terminal via Irssi. Can Irssi be used to access this matrix thing? If not, is there some nice matrix command line client in the Debian repos? Or maybe someone could just make an IRC server which is a bridge to matrix?
I'm not sure anyone has written an irssi plugin specifically, but there's an excellent weechat plugin (https://github.com/poljar/weechat-matrix). As others have said, there's also matrix-ircd which exposes all of Matrix as an IRC server you can connect to from whatever IRC client floats your boat, but you end up speaking the subset of Matrix which can be represented as IRC, which is a bit of a shame.
Re: Gitter is joining Matrix
#56Oooh. How nice.
Just a few days ago I considered setting up a Gitter-bridge for my Marrix-instance, but decided that it was both too involved and not well-enough integrated to be worth it.
This is really good news!
Re: Gitter is joining Matrix
#57Interesting. Is there already a Gitter->Matrix bridge, and that would essentially be going away once Gitter fully supports Matrix? It seems like they're not changing Gitter to talk Matrix, but actually switching the backend to be Matrix? Is that right?
The short term plan is to replace the existing (rather rubbish) GitterMatrix bridge with a fully featured bridge that seamlessly bridges between Gitter and Matrix.
The long term plan folding gitter.im features into Element and Gitter users will migrate to using Element and Matrix.
Re: Gitter is joining Matrix
#58I really like to use IRC on the terminal via Irssi. Can Irssi be used to access this matrix thing? If not, is there some nice matrix command line client in the Debian repos? Or maybe someone could just make an IRC server which is a bridge to matrix?
Be aware that the bridges between matrix.org and IRC are often unreliable.
Re: Gitter is joining Matrix
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm really excited about this too, but I'm afraid it does matter. Gitter of it's own accord federating with matrix would be a watershed moment of a competitor laying down it's arms for the greater good, a détente in capitalism, and a really good sign for the future of all things Federated. Element acquiring Gitter is normal M&A, normal business. It's still good for Matrix and good for Gitter users, and we're still ch…
I love this move, since I'm trying to move to Matrix as my primary chat where possible. Even more so since some of the mentioned features are sorely needed in Element, like threads. But Gitlab is a for-profit company. I don't see this as Gitter laying down arms, but rather as Gitlab not being able to monetize Gitter enough to justify keeping it in the company. They probably sold it for a very reasonable amount.
Right. The point is, if a competitor who was a for-profit company was willing to federate with Element, as a first-party contributor not just reluctantly "I guess you can use our integration API's for that and we won't stop you... yet" -- that would be watershed moment in hopes of federation/integration instead of silos being a thing.
That is indeed not what happened. It's just an acquisition. It does not actually give us hope that there's more momentum towards competitors being willing to play together in federation, that's not what happened.
Not sure why the one who made that point is getting downvoted, I think it's an interesting observation. That the press release arguably kind of intentionally tries to hand wave over a bit.
Re: Gitter is joining Matrix
#60GitLab hasn't been giving it any attention. All they need is a checkmark in their portfolio.
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