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Seeking feedback on experience with open source chat software
Currently Codidact uses Discord for chat, which is linked from the right hand panel:
Codidact runs on open source software, whereas Discord is closed source. The Codidact Foundation is a non-profit organisation, whereas Discord is a for-profit company which advertises paid-for products to its users (including users of the Codidact Discord server).
There are several discussions on Meta related to this:
The following posts about linking to Discord also mention the future possibility of a built-in chat:
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Would be nice to have a link to chat on the main sites.
I know at some point a homebuilt chat solution was in the works, but till then it would be nice to have a link to the current solutions.
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User profile now has a Discord link
Someday we would like to remove our dependence on a third-party service, but that will not be soon.
It seems that while there is some community desire for an alternative to Discord, there is unlikely to be available development time to build Codidact-specific chat software for some time. I'm interested to hear how the community would feel about using existing open source chat software as a replacement for Discord.
Do any of you have experience of using any open source chat software? What are their good and bad points? Which ones would you be happy to see as Codidact's chat long term?
1 answer
If I wanted to migrate from Discord, I'd give Revolt a try. I don't know what the administrative load looks like, but it looks a lot like Discord, with servers and rooms, and down to the until-recent non-unique usernames with numbers appended. That might have a better chance of people moving over than the usual gripes about "learning a new system."
That said, I never used any of them regularly and haven't recently, but Mattermost and Rocket Chat have been around for longer, look like the also-familiar Slack, and have fans.
I also haven't found any communities on it to test it out, but Movim has built something Slack/Discord-like on top of XMPP, which should mean that the house of cards doesn't come tumbling down if they stop development for whatever reason. Also, since you can connect with any XMPP client, that might should make it the easiest to "integrate" with the site, by embedding a web-based client like Converse.js.
Likewise, IRC presumably going anywhere anytime soon, even though I haven't used it in a long time...
I'm a personal fan of the federated Matrix, but its structure is designed for a weird (at least to me) use case, where "spaces" look kind of like Discord servers, but are an arbitrary grouping of rooms and spaces that won't join you to anything in them. I feel like that'd be right out, for this sort of community.
I realize that's more hand-waving and broad feelings than the question technically asked, but might help narrow down the priorities. If comfort of the existing chat-users is the big issue, I'd definitely look at Revolt. If embedding and stability are, then the older protocols with more implementations are a safer bet.
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