POLL: Which chat system would you like FGD to have?

[Julius]

Mattermost is more designed for enterprise use... but less "flashing lights" then

For gaming chat Discord is actually a lot bigger than Steam. Only with the recent improvement of Steam's chat service, they tried to get a few users back from Discord. But I don't think that has been very successful yet.
In theory the Matterbridge also supports bridging Steam chat though... but I think the library they are using for that recently broke so as of now it isn't working anymore.

[fluffrabbit]

Mattermost is more designed for enterprise use... but less "flashing lights" then

I don't like enterprise stuff or flashing lights unless I'm consuming an entertainment experience and/or drunk. In any case, if Mattermost is a low-resource alternative to Matrix then by all means try it out.

For gaming chat Discord is actually a lot bigger than Steam. Only with the recent improvement of Steam's chat service, they tried to get a few users back from Discord. But I don't think that has been very successful yet.

I didn't know that. If Mattermost both interfaces with Discord and offers an improved user experience (more like the Mumble web client) then I have no objections.

In theory the Matterbridge also supports bridging Steam chat though... but I think the library they are using for that recently broke so as of now it isn't working anymore.

I see. People really need to write better bug reports.

[Julius]

Got a basic Mattermost Team Edition to work (lots of minor configurations left though, and I have not yet installed all the bridging stuff).

It is available on https://chat.freegamedev.net

Performance so far seems good (as expected from a lightweight Go app). Docker image with a single active user is at around 50mb RAM only! Will likely not scale as well as ejabberd (XMPP), but we don't have thousands of concurrent users anyways

You can create teams and (public and private) channels within them. Overall it looks and works quite similar to Discord (or the other way around, or both are Slack clones... what ever ).

You can @ mention users and there is a function for reply treads and post flagging for follow up. It's also really easy to setup up various integrations with webhooks and plugins.

Here is a quick screenshot from my testing with a dark theme (there are two light and two dark themes available):
https://imgur.com/SOcLTjZ

[Julius]

Public registrations are still disabled, but you should be able to set up an account with this invitation link:
https://chat.freegamedev.net/signup_user_complete/?id=g94shbsm3fnqpgrk5eni7pbk4r

I will be a bit busy the coming days, so setting up the IRC gateway and the Discord etc. bridge will probably have to wait a bit.

You can use Mattermost with the web interface, but there are also nice mobile clients available.

Edit: enabled registrations

[fluffrabbit]

get in here ppl

[Julius]

fluffrabbit reminded me that the most recent mobile app for Mattermost is not available on Fdroid (yet). The issue seems to be only about using Google's servers for push notifications. Otherwise the app should be fully compliant with the strict Fdroid rules. So I guess you can judge yourself if your use of Android makes this a relevant issue or not.
For those using an Android version without the Playstore, there are .apk versions for manual installation here:
https://github.com/mattermost/mattermos ... e/releases

P.s. the Mattermost Classic app also works, but isn't really recommended anymore.

[Julius]

Got basic bridging to work. For now the FreeGameDev/General channel on our Mattermost team chat is linked with our #freegamer IRC channel on freenode. Feedback welcome

Next it should be easy to link it to the open-source games Discord channel, but I first need to figure out how bot accounts on Discord work.

Anyone got a suggestion for other places to link? Sadly Steam chat is currently broken with Matterbridge, but I think a Matrix.org channel would work.

I am also still contemplating how to best link with XMPP. Matterbridge also supports it, but these Bot bridges are a bit of a band-aid and I would rather have a proper gateway. The easiest might be to enabled matterircd and joint this pseudo IRC channel via the Biboumi XMPP to IRC gameway that we have already running.

Edit: #opengameart on freenode IRC is now bridged to the opengameart channel on the team chat.

[Julius]

Basic bridging to the OpenSourceGames Discord server (https://discord.gg/efrDNG ) is now also working.
It bridges the Mattermost #General channel to the IRC #Freegamer one and the #Games channel on Discord
#off-topic and #development are also bridged between Mattermost and Discord

I also added an OpenGameArt channel to Discord and bridged that to Mattermost and IRC.

Edit: the #development channel also bridges to ##gamedev on freenode IRC now (requested by an admin from there).

[fluffrabbit]

So it's Mattermost <-> IRC <-> Discord. Sounds like a big ball of string, but I'm glad you got it working.

[Julius]

Naa, all managed by Matterbridge, so it is rather a star shaped mess

I updated to Mattermost 5.11 and added some nice plugins, such as a draw and image annotation one & a really easy to use reminder bot.

[Julius]

Anyone else having issue logging into the Mattermost web client with a "unable to save session" error?
Might be my network here, or a but in the version 5.11 I updated to two days ago. A bit strange... mobile client continues to work fine.
Seems to be resolved. Not sure what was causing it.

[Julius]

Reasons to not use Discord https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/discord.html

So if you use our Mattermost chat and allow us to bridge to Discord all but the (commercially uninteresting) contents of your messages will never reach Discord, while you can still keep in touch with people not having made the jump.

All it requires is that you set up a bot account for our Matterbridge (or convince a Discord channel Mod of it). Also if you want to bridge any other systems IRC, XMPP etc. just let me know.

[GunChleoc]

Thanks for the article

[Julius]

XMPP accounts work again, but are now linked to the accounts on mattermost (chat.freegamedev.net) not Hubzilla anymore. Maybe I will link the Mattermost teams to the shared rooster feature of XMPP if I find an easy workaround in the database.

When the new Movim release drops (v14.2) I will likely give it a spin. Pretty nice xmpp webclient overall.

If I find the time on the weekend I will also try to enable matterircd so that you can use any IRC client with Mattermost (or even XMPP clients through the xmpp to irc bridge?)

[Julius]

There are currently some SSL issues with the XMPP server that need some larger intervention to fix... something I have been meaning to do anyways, but since it only effects a few clients (Conversations sadly), I keep postponing it.

Also the new release of Movim is finally there: https://nl.movim.eu/?node/pubsub.movim. ... b25e4cccc5

So I will probably try to get our Mattermost chat system to better interact with both IRC clients as well as the XMPP server either through the Matterbridge or a clever combination or matterircd & biboumi. The latter sounds like a fun challenge

P.s.: I am still looking for suggestions of Matrix (or Discord / Slack?) channels to bridge to. The current bridging to our own IRC and Discord works great, but I am open to extend this to other communities as well.

[Julius]

Came across this if people used a libpurple based client: https://github.com/EionRobb/purple-mattermost

Also we are still looking for teams interested in setting up a "team" (similar to server in Discord) with us. It is really easy on Mattermost and I can also bridge it to other existing chat services like IRC, Discord, Matrix, XMPP etc. There is also really nice developer features like Github/Gitlab integration etc (anything with a Slack webhook integration also pretty much works).

[fluffrabbit]

Pidgin on desktop is pretty terrible, but maybe there is an app you can recommend to replace the official Mattermost client(s).

[Julius]

Using it in the browser works great (with JS)
Edit: And there is the Electron desktop app of course: https://github.com/mattermost/desktop

But other than that there isn't really. But as soon as I find the time I'll try to set up Matterircd with allows you to user Mattermost with any IRC client.

P.S.: Link to gitlab integration plugin that explains the features: https://github.com/manland/mattermost-plugin-gitlab
Same is available for Github.

[fluffrabbit]

IRC doesn't have scrollback. Anyhow the purple-mattermost project would be useful if there were a really good libpurple-based cross-platform client. But I don't see why we can't all just use XMPP and SIP protocols and forget all about the Mattermost-specific nonsense.

[Julius]

With a bouncer IRC has scrollback, and if I understood correctly Matterircd ( https://github.com/42wim/matterircd ) is working like an IRC bouncer but with Mattermost as the backend instead of a normal IRC server.

The librem people seem to be working on a new multimessenger chat app though that uses libpurple: https://puri.sm/posts/librem5-progress-report-19/

I agree that XMPP is nice, and I will try to push our running server more once I have upgraded it and got Movim to work (the official Docker image is not working well with my setup). But especially the XMPP multi user chat is no where near what Mattermost offers right now.

[fluffrabbit]

Protocol > implementation.

[Julius]

Protocol > implementation.

Very much debatable... but lets not do this please

Found this as a (also Electron based) app: https://github.com/yafp/ttth
But I don't see much difference in using the browser then

[Julius]

*Face palm* forgot about the Matterhorn client: https://github.com/matterhorn-chat/matterhorn

That should really solve any requests for a nice desktop client

[fluffrabbit]

It would be nice to chat with cool people who just drop by anonymously from other nodes to say "sup". The tendency seems to be that standalone software stacks with no published standard protocol attract closed systems like the chat here. I know it's connected to other servers through various protocols, but to get the full experience it seems folks still have to register on the Mattermost, which is totally different from other socializing environments.

[Lyberta]

Deleted.