Candidates for Mozilla's IRC Successor

If you leave a room then you are no longer inside and you can't know what people inside were talking about while you weren't inside. As it should be.

I'm sad to see Zulip excluded from the list. It solves the #1 issue with large group chats - proper threading.

Nothing worse than waking up to a 1000 message backlog you have to sort through to filter out the information relevant to you. Except for Slack, all of their other choices have very poor threading.

They said they had trouble to get it working behind IAM, but Zulip is just a Django application. Surely there's a Django authenticator for Mozilla IAM? I would be very happy to help set it up.

Ooooh... sounds like a fun challenge :D I've typed this out straight into the HN input box so it almost certainly doesn't work and will be full of typos and escaping bugs, but for illustrative purposes: here's what a ~8 line Matrix client for basic bi-directional chat in a given room could look like (complete with login) in almost-bash, with deps only on curl and jq:

    USERNAME='@whoever:matrix.org'; SERVER='https://matrix.org'; ROOM='#test:matrix.org'
    read -s -p "Password for $USERNAME:" PASSWORD
    TOKEN=`curl -X POST $SERVER/_matrix/client/r0/login --data "{ 'type': 'm.login.password', 'login': '$USERNAME', 'password': '$PASSWORD' }" | jq .access_token`
    ROOM_ID=`curl $SERVER/_matrix/client/r0/directory/room/$ROOM | jq .room_id`; curl "$SERVER/_matrix/client/r0/join/$ROOM_ID?access_token=$TOKEN"
    (while true; do SYNC=`curl -s $SERVER/_matrix/client/r0/sync?access_token=$TOKEN&timeout=30000&since=$SINCE`
     echo $SYNC | jq ".rooms.join.$ROOM_ID.timeline"
     SINCE=`echo $SYNC | jq .next_batch`; done) &
    while true; do read -p " " INPUT; `curl -s -X POST $SERVER/_matrix/client/r0/rooms/$ROOM_ID/m.room.message?access_token=$TOKEN --data "{ 'body': '$INPUT', 'msgtype': 'm.text'}"`; done

Spread out a bit more with comments:

    # set your matrix ID & server URL, and the room you want to chat in:
    USERNAME='@whoever:matrix.org'
    SERVER='https://matrix.org'
    ROOM='#test:matrix.org'

    # prompt for a password; log in and grab an access_token
    read -s -p "Password for $USERNAME:" PASSWORD
    TOKEN=`curl -X POST $SERVER/_matrix/client/r0/login --data "{ 'type': 'm.login.password', 'login': '$USERNAME', 'password': '$PASSWORD' }" | jq .access_token`

    # resolve the room alias (#test:matrix.org) to a room ID (!vfFxDRtZSSdspfTSEr:matrix.org)
    ROOM_ID=`curl $SERVER/_matrix/client/r0/directory/room/$ROOM | jq .room_id`

    # check that you're joined to the room (redundant if you know you're already there)
    curl "$SERVER/_matrix/client/r0/join/$ROOM_ID?access_token=$TOKEN"

    # set a background loop running to receive messages, and use jq to filter out the
    # messages for the room you care about from the sync response.  For now we print them
    # as JSON pretty-printed by jq, but that's not too bad.
    (while true;
        do SYNC=`curl -s $SERVER/_matrix/client/r0/sync?access_token=$TOKEN&timeout=30000&since=$SINCE`
        echo $SYNC | jq ".rooms.join.$ROOM_ID.timeline"
        SINCE=`echo $SYNC | jq .next_batch`
    done) &

    # set a foreground loop running to prompt for your own messages and send them
    # into the room as plaintext.
    while true;
        do read -p " " INPUT;
        `curl -s -X POST $SERVER/_matrix/client/r0/rooms/$ROOM_ID/m.room.message?access_token=$TOKEN --data "{ 'body': '$INPUT', 'msgtype': 'm.text'}"`
    done

If I have time I'll actually try running & debugging this to be usable and edit the post (but got to run into a meeting now :( ).

Needless to say, this'd be much prettier on Python - and you'd prolly want to use a nice SDK like https://github.com/poljar/matrix-nio (see https://matrix.org/blog/2019/07/03/usage-of-matrix-nio/) so you get things like E2E Encryption for free. But doing it in plain bash hopefully gives more of an idea.

Slack, really?

There should be a petition to get them to use ( and thus improve) an open source one, maybe matrix or even rocketchat.

Yeah that sucks. I wanted to integrate matrix to our community but no, it would be a bad decision at this time