On 19-03-25 12 h 54, Ansgar wrote: > a lot of communication in Debian happens over IRC. However IRC is not > as nice to use as newer alternatives, creating a barrier for newer > contributors. The way I see it, IRC is a barrier for new contributors, but there are ways to make IRC more accessible: 1. Someone could host a ZNC bouncer on a .debian.net address and offer accounts. This seems like the easier solution, but the experience would still not be up to par with something like Matrix. 2. Someone could host a weechat server on a .debian.net address and have them be accessible through a Glowing Bear instance [1] I've been using Glowing Bear for a while now and it's a really modern experience. You can log in your IRC session directly in any browser, notifications use the Notification Web API [2], there is sound of out of the box, links to 'popular' websites can be rendered directly in the chat window, etc. A quick look in the Debian archive tells me most (if not all) of the Glowing Bear deps are already packaged. I'm sure it wouldn't be that hard to package it. (now that I'm talking about it, maybe I should... 🤔) Running weechat as a relay also means you can use Android apps like weechat-android [3] to connect on mobile devices. The main problem would be to host weechat sessions securely. One would need to ensure good user isolation and look at securing weechat [4] Anyway, my point is: IRC is working well for tons of people already. Instead of trying to replace it, efforts could be made to make it easier to use for all. [1] https://github.com/glowing-bear/glowing-bear [2] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/notification [3] https://github.com/ubergeek42/weechat-android [4] https://github.com/weechat/weechat/issues/928 -- ⢀⣴⠾⠻⢶⣦⠀ ⣾⠁⢠⠒⠀⣿⡁ Louis-Philippe Véronneau ⢿⡄⠘⠷⠚⠋ pollo@debian.org / veronneau.org ⠈⠳⣄
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