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Comment by randtrain34 | Hacker News Reader

> Our plan is instead to merge Gitter’s features into Element (or next generations of Element) itself and then - if and only if Element has achieved parity with Gitter based on the above list - we expect to upgrade the deployment on gitter.im to a Gitter-customised version of Element. The inevitable side-effect is that we’ll be adding new features to Element rather than Gitter going forwards.

Wonder what existing Gitter users think about this?

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Hopefully they'll be happy that Gitter will sprout all Matrix's funky features like E2EE, VoIP, Widgets, Read receipts, Reactions, a bajillion clients/bots/bridges, the open standard API itself... and as long as Element-branded-as-Gitter looks and performs and smells enough like Gitter, and the community & rooms are still there, all will be well.

And if they don't like it, they can always go spin up their own Gitter instance and maintain it, bridged into Matrix - it's FOSS after all :D

Using it mostly out of necessity (a project I'm involved in uses it for communication), but I'm mostly enthusiastic about no longer having that annoying Matrixbot - there were always a number of Matrix users, and the implementation was incredibly confusing.

It's a nice bonus that I'll no longer be dependent on Gitter's somewhat buggy Web UI.

(That said, I am somewhat sceptical about whether we'll see any reasonable results in a reasonable amount of time - GitLab promised Gitter rooms for GitLab projects as well when they acquired it, and I'm not even sure if that ever saw the light of day.)

> That said, I am somewhat sceptical about whether we'll see any reasonable results in a reasonable amount of time

As Element we are if nothing else highly financially motivated to get Gitter bridged into Matrix, so we can run it via our normal Matrix server backend farm rather than keep an entirely parallel deployment running of Gitter infrastructure. We also want to stick to our word :)

I'm rooting for you!

I don't think Gitter development was very active, before or after their acquisition by GitLab. It has been pretty much the same since 2016. It being folded into another tool felt inevitable to me.

I'm hyped for this; RustPython uses gitter as its main communication platform for developers and contributors, and while it's certainly worked quite well for us so far, I was slightly worried the slow pace of development and the deprecation of mobile apps. It seemed (to me, at least, and I don't follow the gitter changelogs or anything - edit: just looked at them now, so yeah, what follows is pretty unfounded. Anyway,) like gitter was sorta becoming a ghost ship, still running along smoothly but not much was happening at the helm -- this also might be because I mainly use the Android app, which is deprecated, so I see very few updates to gitter if any. Anyway, yeah, I think this is a great direction to go for gitter, if only so I'll have an updated mobile app :)

I am ecstatic. The Element Android client is quite good and getting better, and I'd love to be able to access gitter from that.

I'm happy about it.

For me, one shortcoming of gitter is that it has always been tertiary in my pool of chat services. The more tertiary services are accessible through matrix the better, that way I'm less likely to miss notifications.

I don't think there are big downsides, I can't think of anything in the core gitter chat that I would miss when switching to matrix.

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