I know we love and embrace IRC here, but I find myself turning more and more to gitter to interact with communities around GitHub repos and have started to like it more than IRC.

Here's an example (for the Rust language): https://gitter.im/rust-lang/rust

Some notable benefits:

  • retains history for free, without some bouncer or paid web client
  • Markdown support (especially helpful for code)
  • accessible from mobile / easy cross-platform (if my machine went down, I could still access chat on my phone. IRC on mobile is possible, but not near as seamless)

Could this be useful to us?

edit: oh, and there's a beta version of an IRC bridge.

Generally speaking, IRC bridges are awful. They either act as a relay, causing join/leave storms when they connect or disconnect, or as a single user, breaking tab-complete and making it harder to know who's talking.

Apart from that, we really prefer self-hosted solutions where we have control over what data is collected and when upgrades take place (see also rollbacks on buggy upgrades).

Building on this, I really wouldn't want an IRC channel for pretty much any of the GitHub repositories we have. We already have budgie-desktop-dev for Budgie development and given I'm the main developer of it and do it on Solus, even I don't really make much use of it and arguably it has little to no value. I could probably delete it and make it invite-only tomorrow and nobody would notice. Dedicated IRC channels / Gitter rooms for anything in the GetSolus org would be overkill, introduce unnecessary noise and additional undesired moderation workloads.

Building on that, our primary development platform is Phabricator, not GitHub, so having something which caters to GitHub isn't something I'd want. #Solus-Dev is sufficient for development needs and even that is mostly just used by Core Team, Global Maintainers, and some individuals that want feedback on patches or help with packaging. If people wanted to engage enough in realtime, we already have a channel they can utilize.

We've also already expanded on what sort of communications platforms we would support in conjunction with IRC, e.g. Riot + our own Matrix server, should they meet certain criteria. They don't yet and thus they're not supported.