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Comment by 3np | Hacker News Reader

While open source under Apache, Zulip is still centralized and single-server. It can make sense for internal communication e.g. in a company but for a public open source project like Gnome, a federated protocol like Matrix makes a lot more sense. Namely, outsiders can join the chat without registering accounts to a server used by the Gnome project. It absolves them of having to take or outsource responsibility for the security of everyone joining in.

I find it quite reasonable to pick IRC and Matrix as the two contenders. If there would have been a third, XMPP.

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Zulip currently has better support for public-view chat rooms than Matrix: https://zulip.com/help/web-public-streams

AFAIK, Matrix currently only supports this properly via its Gitter network. It’s in progress as a core feature though.

Matrix has view.matrix.org, and also has read only view of public rooms as per https://app.element.io/#/room/#matrix-dev:matrix.org (which should work if you’re not logged in).

Meanwhile we’re also applying the Gitter approach to the whole Matrix ecosystem: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-public-archive

> which should work if you’re not logged in

It doesn't. That page has all sort of placeholder elements on it and Signup/Login buttons instead of what I assume would be a room view.

Try using incognito mode yourself.

Huh, for some reason #matrix-dev:matrix.org hadn't been set to be world readable; I've now flipped the bit to make it visible. Meanwhile, a room which is already world-readable like #matrix:matrix.org should look like this: https://matrix-client.matrix.org/_matrix/media/r0/download/m... if you hit https://app.element.io/#/room/#matrix:matrix.org in an incognito tab.

It's far from perfect (e.g. doesn't support mobile web; very sluggish to load) but the feature is at least there in principle.

It's readable now. Thank you for addressing the issue!

Also I feel like mobile view would be in usable state if one could just collapse that side panel on left side. But desktop view is quite functional for now.

While it's a feature that could use some work in implementation, it's orthogonal to the Matrix protocol. There is (and should be IMO) no notion of this in Matrix as such, while great support in implementations can be desirable (and is underway).

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