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Comment by jsiepkes | Hacker News Reader

While I applaud the initiative of Gitlab to opensource Gitter I think the target audience for self hosting is rather small. I think alternatives like Zulip or Mattermost are probably better suited for most organizations.

I am however interested to see if the community starts making the "main instance" (gitter.im) better.

Interested to know what the Gitlab / Gitter guys and gals think what the target audience is.

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Great question.

We're trying to achieve two things with open sourcing Gitter.

Firstly, we see Gitter as more of a community than a product. That we have nearly 1,000,000 developers coming together on the platform to talk about code and open source software where public rooms far, far outweigh private rooms, is testament to that. So we're not trying to compete with MatterMost.

What we're trying to facilitate is to allow the community and users of GitLab to contribute to the experience of the community. We've always had a very small team at Gitter and the surface area of the product is massive. This way the community can help us make it a better place by improving the product.

We also have some communities who are interested in running their own public instance entirely. Sure they could use other products, but Gitter is built community and public first and suits a lot of different needs that other products don't necessarily facilitate out of the box.

I agree that self-hosting audience is probably small for this, but open sourcing also changes its image and workflow a bit.

I'd much rather pay for a hosted FLOSS app, than a hosted closed source app (assuming similar capabilities). Being able to inspect the code, and knowing that anyone's free to collaborate or reuse the code really makes a difference on where I choose to put my money.

They are creating the infrastructure for some kind of projects that currently don't exist. Local / national Githubs/software communities might be a thing soon, and Gitlab will be powering it if happens.

Self-hosting market isn't that small. The entire gov/aerospace/anything with ITAR/ETAR etc is stuck with very few options that are self-hosted or fedramp approved cloud options.

Maybe something like GNU social. They already use Gitlab CE for the repos. Add gitter and we have replaced IRC.

You say that as if it's a good thing...

IRC is not going anywhere but projects like neovim use gitter primarily while IRC is linked using a bot. They view the IRC chat in gitter.

Dunno if Gitter is better than IRC as I have only used for help and support (for me) but Gitter was far easier to use than IRC. Just Login and start chatting.

I don't think IRC is going anywhere either... We just have alternatives to freenode now in Gitter

Gitter has had an IRC bridge since pretty much day 1. This allows you to connect to Gitter via any IRC client.

https://irc.gitter.im

it's not very comfortable to use though. Partially because the gitter features don't match how IRC is used 1:1, partially because it seems to have some bugs and sometimes does the simplest possible but uncomfortable thing (which might now get fixed!)

Apropos, does anyone know of a hosting provider with one-click installs of Weechat? It would be nice to have something slightly more self-hosted than irccloud to recommend to the GsoC/GCI students who keep disconnecting from freenode :)

(You'd think with all the Wordpress one-click-installs that this would exists, but I can't find any yet at least.)

I'd suggest using Riot.

See https://opensource.com/article/17/5/introducing-riot-IRC, https://about.riot.im/ and https://matrix.org/.

Actually, there is. There’s a sandstorm config for Quassel, with webinterface, quassel bouncer, etc included.

I’m not sure if quassel-irssi is also included, but that and quassel-rest-search should be easy to add.

Does Gitter have federated servers using a standard protocol and a vast array of programmable extensions? None of these hosted solutions are even in the same league as IRC, and we are worse off for it.

As someone who has written an IRC server implementation, there is no standard protocol. There is an RFC, but no one implements it. Instead, each server uses its own mix of poorly documented pseudo-standards.

IRCv3 FTW. I don't think they'll achieve their goals before IRC completely dies, though.

Last I checked, IRCv3 had also given up standardizing the server-to-server protocol.

IRC isn't federated either, FWIW.

IRC is federated. It's just a closed federation of fully trusted servers, whereas you probably took me to mean an open federation which it is not.

> IRC is not going anywhere

I don't know if this still holds true. I've been a IRC user for ~20 years and the current state is a fraction of the fraction of it was once before. Compared with the entire internet, it can already be considered irrelevant, imo.

IRC as general chatting service is outdated. IRC as communication between developers and for tech support is relevant because it's easier and simpler to set up and use.

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