Rocket.ubuntu.com usage

#1

Hey guys,

I used to hang out a good bit on your Rocket.Chat server to collaborate with and talk to the snapcraft team. Looks like it isn’t being used any longer?

Was curious why it isn’t being used as much any more? It looks like maybe everyone has gone back to irc?

Would an irc bridge help? I know Rocket.Chat has one, but it needs improved a lot. Rocket.Chat also has a PR in progress by a community member working on actually allow Rocket.Chat to federate with an ircd. Making for a pretty seamless joining of IRC and Rocket.Chat.

As some know i’m a member of the Rocket.Chat team, but have been an Ubuntu fanboy and proponent for years. Also big fan of the snapd/snapcraft work.

Would love to have you guys using Rocket.Chat more. The barrier to communicating with the team increases a good bit when to do so I have to dust off the old irc hat and download and configure weechat/glowingbear. :grin:

Hope this finds everyone well. Would love any feedback you could give on what it would take to increase usage.

Thanks,

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POLL Slack Community
#2

Hello!

I believe i’m not the most rightful person to speak about this issue in particular as I am not too active in this community now but I intend to soon. Lots of stuff to resolve around my LoCo.

One issue with most open source projects is the number of associated links to them. Rocket chat may shelter other projects as well but when you have so many forums, IRC and other platforms to communicate, I think people tend to disperse too much and then some of those platforms tend to be left unused. Moreover, it is overwhelming for new people.

That said, I think it is vital to narrow the number of options we have to communicate with each other. Personally, I find this platform incredibly useful and often misused and thus I think it should be the main form of communications across projects. It would help staying consistent too.

Rocket Chat is amazing but potentially incomplete as it needs more things to be like Slack and then it would have more use than IRC or even these forums. The PRs bridge is a feature I will miss though.

Just my two cents :slight_smile:

Regards,
Gustavo

#3

We, the snapcraft team, were self isolating ourselves on rocket from the rest of the community, so decided to go to where the center of gravity is, which is IRC.

I really miss being on Rocket.Chat when compared to irc, and indeed a bridge would really help so people joining #snappy on freenode could be transparently communicating with us on rocket.

#4

This makes sense. Having team fragmented across various platforms would lead to community being fragmented. Can definitely understand the attempt to consolidate.

This would definitely need unpacked a bit more. I think you can understand that we’ll never be a complete clone. Our aim is being as close to feature set as we can, while going much beyond. Something that us being open source really helps us stand out with. As far as I know any major features slack has we have or are in the process of adding(threads being a big one). With our redesign definitely going to look a lot better :slight_smile:

This is great to know. Talking with the team to try and get this in the next sprint. We have a pretty solid slack bridge, it only makes sense for us to make the irc bridge equally as solid.

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#5

For me, it was yet another thing to have open, and nobody seemed to use it. I already have my irc client open for the many other projects I’m working on, so having a unique app for snapcraft chatting is the anomaly. Once the snapcraft guys moved off it, there’s no reason for me to even open the app.

I also found the mobile client to be really slow to use.

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#6

We definitely understand this! My number one frustration.

We’ve built out a mobile dev team and they are hard at work on our new native apps. They should reach feature parity before too long.

–

So really the only way it’d be able to be fully useful is if multiple channels could be bridged over allowing you to use Rocket.Chat while still communicating with the rest of the team.

I think this is a problem for any team that has ever started off on IRC. Will always have holdouts that even if 80% of the company moves over they won’t stop using irc. :grin:

Thanks for the feedback guys! I’m going to push for irc bridge to be improved.

#7

I am testing with a slack community to see if it grows here: https://join.slack.com/t/unityos/shared_invite/enQtNTUxNTIyNTI2OTMwLWMxMzc0ZjMzNTVjZmI2YzYzMTJkMjMwMWRjMTNkNGU5NTg3OTgyMDkwYzc1N2E3MDdhZTU3MTFjZjU5NzRmZDE

#8

@geekgonecrazy It has Irc brige too I think

#9

Unsure which you are talking about. But seeing as posting slack link I’ll assume talking about slack.

I’m a core contributor to the open source project and also employee of Rocket.Chat. :slight_smile:

Rocket.Chat has support for irc federation. Which is something slack removed recently. We actually are just in need of a community to use the irc federation to help move it from alpha to beta quality.

Our mobile apps are completely different ball game now too.

But to be honest I don’t think the majority of Ubuntu community is too interested in a non irc platform. :). But if so I would have to imagine they would want integration beyond a bridge which always tends to be a bit ugly no matter how good the bridge is.

2 Likes
#10

But to be honest I don’t think the majority of Ubuntu community is too interested in a non irc platform. :). But if so I would have to imagine they would want integration beyond a bridge which always tends to be a bit ugly no matter how good the bridge is.

It’s funny, the Ubuntu community is pretty huge and they lurk all over the place. We did once have an actual Ubuntu slack, but nobody really had a use for it, so it never got used or promoted. There’s a discord, which appears to have more users, but I imagine it’s not the primary discord for anyone, just one where they lurk in addition to other discord servers.

#11

That’s a promoting problem imho :slight_smile:

#12

I could buy a server and start a rocketchat

#13

Yea, and I am not a big Irc guy @geekgonecrazy

#14

@popey The elementary os slack did pretty well…

#15

The elementary OS slack works because the developers actually sit there and use it all day. Ubuntu has always used IRC, and the developers use it all day so getting them to move to a non free platform like Slack to do the same thing they can do in IRC is very hard. If the developers don’t move, neither will the users. So you end up with silo’s all over the internet.

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#16

If only for persistent messaging etc (like Discord, Slack, rather than IRC) I really like Rocket Chat. It seems to me to be to IRC as Discourse is to other forum software… If it can get threads and an IRC bridge then I’d like to see Ubuntu trial shifting to Rocket Chat from IRC with the help of the bridge (or, at the very least, snapcraft moving back to it), for my two cents… :slight_smile:

I think it’s OBS which has Discord and a bridge to IRC which seems to work rather well, Rocket Chat with a bridge to IRC would be the open-source equivalent of that… except it would be even better if it had threads!

#17

It’s very difficult to get people to move. Especially when some people refuse to. You end up fragmenting the community. So people ask questions in one place and don’t get answers because the skilled people are elsewhere.

2 Likes
#18

I personally find IRC hard to follow as it lacks @mention functionality without the recepient stays online. IMHO a Telegram group might be a good alternative if most people are already using it.

#19

@geekgonecrazy What about this? https://rocket.ubuntu.com/ I am having trouble logging in though

#20

@geekgonecrazy I am trying to login, and this seems to be what you want