Gitter is joining Matrix
It is not obvious from the title but Element is actually acquiring Gitter. Quote from the article:
> In practice, the way this is happening is that Element (the company founded by the Matrix core team to fund Matrix development) is acquiring Gitter from GitLab, with a combined Gitter and Element dev team focusing on giving Gitter a new life in Matrix!
There is also another blogpost from the elements side https://element.io/blog/gitter-is-joining-element/
Additional topics discussed in our just-released conversation[1] with GitLab and Element leads:
1. What happened to "ChatOps" and why is GitLab divesting in this space?
2. Who contacted whom? What are some details of the acquisition process and negotiations?
3. What does this mean at a practical sense for existing Gitter users?
4. What's going to happen in the next 6, 12, and 18 months?
If you granted Gitter access to Gitlab, you granted it full read access to everything in your Gitlab account. This is because Gitlab does not yet support restricted access grants [1].
Soon https://element.io will have that full access. Now is a good time to check your Gitlab access grants: https://gitlab.com/profile/applications
[1] "Support restricting OAuth tokens to specific projects and groups " https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/22115
Dissenting opinion: Element UI/Matrix UX is not good. It's as unwieldy/hostile/frustrating as IRC, maybe more.
Gitter, on the other hand, is fairly straightforward. The biggest issues with it are that they chose to go with the "has a GitLab/GitHub/Twitter account and must use it to sign in" antipattern as the barrier to entry, and that the web client's layout at half-width 1080p is unfathomably bad. Like, clearly-no-one-has-ever-tested-their-responsive-layout-rules bad.
> 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 Gitter users think about this?
I'm massively rooting for this. I really wanted to use Gitter as the official chat for my projects, but the experience was just so painful that I ended up fragmenting the community across Discord and a gated Slack. I would love to have a forever home where I can feel comfortable getting everyone on board.
I really like matrix, but there is one important feature missing : threads.
Once threads will be implemented, I am sure matrix will grow a lot more, especially inside enterprises.
I hope the merge will help with that. Best of luck both teams.
I 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?
Gitter has a much simpler onboarding experience and users don't have to be signed in or members of a room to view chat. I like the ideals of Element. In fact I have the services bridged between chat rooms. Currently editing chat posts between different clients is less than subpar. Gitter build on Element will fix that issue.
This 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.
So, how long will it take (approximate) to complete the mentioned process ?
Also, I think that matrix ecosystem will grow from this move.
GitLab hasn't been giving it any attention. All they need is a checkmark in their portfolio.
Can anyone comment on the state of UX with Element these days? I'm changing to Linux/Windows from Mac, so i'm dumping iMessage - but i'm not convinced Signal has a good enough UX to keep me and my family happy.
Sidenote, i love how i can pay Element and support Matrix/Element.
Interesting, I'd never heard of Matrix. And a very timely discovery too... I might find myself integrating this with ShipReq in a few months.
(Disclaimer: ShipReq dev here)
Congratulations to Element ! Gitter is a fantastic platform . Are we possibly going to see Gitter become a reference open source implementation of Matrix ?
This is interesting and unexpected news.
This is great news. I've used Gitter for communication in some open source projects, and have always found certain things painful. My favorite points from the article are;
- Improving iOS and Android apps. At least in the iOS case, the experience is abysmal (the web interface is similarly so)
- Replacement of the matrix-appservice-gitter bridge. I've used the Matrix <-> Gitter bridge for some time now but there's much left to be desired, such as proper edit and deletion of messages to and from the services.
Overall, it's great to see less future fragmentation in the chat systems developers use, reminds me of the XKCD comic[0] and a modification showing the matrix.org bridges[1]
Way cool! Anecdotally, of course, but a sizeable number of Matrix rooms I was in were actually bridged Gitter rooms. Looking forward to tighter integration!
I am happy and thankful to the developers that open source chat is joining forces. It’s the right thing todo!
Nice! This just inspired me to setup my own Matrix server (had been using Matrix for a couple of weeks).
I've found trying to get help from any project that uses Gitter to be a huge pain. It seems that people hardly ever check messages on there. I hope this helps the situation from a UX perspective. Maybe can provide better notification management options?
Oooh. 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!
I really hope that Gitter chat histories will be still kept search-engine indexed the way they are right now.
I thought Gitter had already been acquired by GitLab?
The problem with Matrix is their focus on Electron-based client. Official native client would have been better .
From the optimalized side we are always sorry that anything joiins the Matrix enclave. Matrix is so over-utilized and under-optimalized, I hope they will do something about it, since it's embarrassing that Mozilla co uses it as their war-room, and, wait, that it sucks so much. Mozilla is semi-corrupt so perhaps that's the CO'd answer. Matrix sucks, even Discord is danged better.
Interesting. 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?
From the Matrix side, we're ridiculously happy to have the opportunity to defragment developer chat a bit, and get folks on Gitter natively talking to folks elsewhere on Matrix (including bridged to IRC, Slack, Discord or whatever). The fragmentation of FOSS development chat into proprietary silos a few years back was incredibly depressing, and this is our attempt to put right what once went wrong :) Happy to try to answer any questions from the Matrix side!
Also, https://techcrunch.com/2020/09/30/element-acquires-gitter-to... is a pretty massive deep-dive into the migration, and The Changelog did a big podcast covering off all the details on both the GitLab/Gitter and Element/Matrix side: https://changelog.com/podcast/414