Before I have brought up my dislike of finding FOSS projects using Slack as a primary communication channel. I also want to express disdain for projects using Discord as well. But I would like to go one step further.
No FOSS project should make a proprietary service a primary communication channel, ever. It excludes those who do not want to risk their privacy being exposed, excludes those to do not user proprietary software, and does not fit with the principles of something like Mastodon.
@saba Matrix is one I regularly use, though I have come to like XMPP recently.
@brainblasted I like XMPP. I was running prosody on a raspberry pi, but had some problems with sd card. I got an account on xmpp.fi, but noticed that if i lost connection that some messages were not received. I'm not sure what server they run, but in prosody, i believe there was a setting which would deliver the messages when the recipient came back online. So, maybe I'll try running prosody again.
I have a matrix account, but haven't used it yet.
@brainblasted movim looks really interesting to me, but i don't see it mentioned much. It's a social network built on top of xmpp.(your username/login is also an xmpp address). You can use the chat on the website, or any xmpp client.
@saba Movim is fun! Thats how I was introduced to XMPP
@brainblasted Completely agree. Especially considering how many other options there are.
@brainblasted what about github?
@pierreozoux I dislike GitHub for being proprietary, and seek to eventually move to other platforms. That said, I acknowledge that it is a large hub for open source projects and at the moment it works better than both notabug.org and GitLab on a LibreJS setup, meaning it requires very little proprietary JS to function.
@brainblasted yeah, I'm always wondering for my projects.
If they are not GitHub first, it will be pain for many contributors to contribute.
And it is pain for me to setup proper sync between whatever and GitHub...
@brainblasted Agreed. I have brought up Discord too since such many communities within Linux are using it, to get newcomers to get in touch at least first etc.
Maybe Riot will be it later on? What about Ring or Signal? The direction appears to be away from those olden very dreadful players such as S*ype at least.
@linux Hopefully Matrix catches on.
@linux never heard of Ring. Is it decentralized?
@upshotknothole It's GNU Ring actually, and yes.
Stallman approved 
@linux ooh! shiny!
@upshotknothole @linux Yes. It can either be fully decentralized (P2P) or used as SIP client (while not centralized, it still requires servers for SIP mode)
@brainblasted How about keybase? #keybase
@brainblasted full ack.
@brainblasted
I am not really buying into your privacy argument.
Why is Slack a higher risk for privacy than Freenode?
@peter First, Slack is proprietary, and hosted on Slack servers. Something like Mattermost is practically equivalent to Slack, with an open server and client one could host on their own.
Because Slack is proprietary and centralized, you are forced to trust a single entity with your chat data, and that entity or someone within (or outside in the case of government) can abuse your data.
And if it turns out that Freenode is bad, you can always find another IRC server or make one yourself on basically any platform. 🤷
You can also choose among more client applications, which is imho always good.
@peter Slack is also run by a corporation seeking profit as opposed to volunteers like freenode.
@h @brainblasted @peter @bob Mattermost seems nice for internal use in organizations, but doesn't seem to be federated?
@deadsuperhero @h @peter @bob not federated, but self-hostable. Seeing as it targets the businesses sector like slack I think that is fine
@deadsuperhero @bob @peter @brainblasted
You can probably search Matrix connectors and such. It was just a pointer and I'm busy, sorry
@brainblasted @peter @bob @deadsuperhero
I felt a litte guilty so I used a search engine
https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge
@h @brainblasted @peter @bob I think Martix/Riot has the potential letting people have all of theircommunication in one place.
@bob @brainblasted @peter also Rocket.Chat and the best of them all Zulip
@bob @brainblasted @peter my friend and I have been working on a Slack <-> IRC gateway. It's already on Github and we're already using it day-to-day
@peter The prime issue I have with Slack and Discord are that they are privatized, centralized, and proprietary. With all three you have a large risk to your data being abused.
Because Freenode works without a sign up and email address. All you really need is a TCP socket and know how to properly speak IRC.
No sign up, no persistent profile.
From this perspective Freenode is more privacy focused.
@peter @brainblasted Because slack uses spywares as a marketing argument maybe?
@devnull @brainblasted @peter Yet if a company *doesn't* "spy" on its employees, they get slapped with probably frivelous lawsuits that they didn't "do enough" to stop whatever BS du jour everyone is getting sued about this week.
@brainblasted I get this, but from past experience, non-technical people are *really* reluctant to adopt communication channels they're not "already using" and comfortable with. Slack's business model is quite nefarious, but effective.
@cidney unfortunate, but true. I feel more effort should go into making clients for alternative platforms feel like what the average person is used to
@brainblasted I don't think any FOSS alternative offers what Discord does, so I'd advice the community to work on that first.
@ninmi I disagree entirely, as Matrix can work as a Discord replacement now that communities are a thing!
@brainblasted I heard there was a community feature being in the works, but didn't know it was done! I'll need to investigate immediately.
Please post updates if you can! I'm very curious about this also...
@seasharp @brainblasted My rudimentary (mis?)understanding of the current situation:
Matrix and XMPP apparently both have their problems, and neither has a client right now that stands against Discord. @f0x seems to be building something on Matrix, and @lain something different, so I'm placing some of my hope on these baskets.
repo owners: try pushing to multiple git servers, it's pretty easy
@ninmi working on it :P
@brainblasted This, 100%
@brainblasted Slack is also notoriously resource-heavy on desktop, way more than something like IRC. And expensive to upgrade, e. g., storage space! Like…its ubiquity is all it has going for it
@brainblasted sorry you feel that way ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
@brainblasted #Riot is a great alternative to #Slack IMO.
@hypolite @starbreaker I dislike that it is proprietary, but code isn't quite communication. For now I accept it as a large hub for hosting open source projects, but I encourage seeking out alternatives.
Right now I am considering moving the canonical repo for Trumpet (my W.I.P. Mastodon client) to the GNOME GitLab.
@brainblasted (remade, sorry) What we really need is some kind of open source Discord. IRC has so many privacy, security, and culture problems. I Have Seen Some Shit and honestly feel a lot safer on Discord. But it's too centralized. An alternative like Mastodon is to Twitter would be ideal.
@HihiDanni Check out matrix.org!
@brainblasted I would extend that to using GitHub.
@brainblasted maybe rocket.chat could be an alternative. They're working on the federation feature.
@brainblasted OTOH, something like IRC excludes people on a usability basis. I'm not saying you're wrong. You are not and I agree with you. But open communication tools are often woefully inaccessible to non-technical folks and we need to grapple with that.
@benhamill We do, but IRC isn't the only option.
Interestingly, Slack originally had the IRC bridge because IRC was more accesible. What are some of your accesibility issues with IRC?
@benhamill Another great thing about FOSS: With FOSS network software, often anyone can make third party clients that are more accesible, or contribute accesibilty features to old clients :) (remade again because I forgot to fix)
@brainblasted Well, there most immediately alienating thing for "regular" folks is nick registration. Right of the bat you have to understand some technical details to understand why you have to do it and you drive it by typing somewhat arcane commands into a text box with little explanatory text.
The second is the difficulty of getting caught up when you were offline.
None are insurmountable. I've just not seen anyone bother to surmount them.
@brainblasted what alternatives do you like? Riot?
I haven't tried most of them ,but haven't had a need. I use IRC for a few things(AsteroidOS and SailfishOS channels ).