On Fri, Jan 13, 2017 at 10:16 AM Alexandre Franke <afra...@gnome.org> wrote:

> On Fri, Jan 13, 2017 at 7:02 PM, Michael Catanzaro <mcatanz...@gnome.org>
> wrote:
> > The rest of your points are still valid, though. Sounds like they could
> > be resolved by improving the Matrix website (maybe needs a big "take me
> > to chat" button).
>
> The matrix.org homepage has two "Try Matrix Now!" links, one in the
> menu (second item) on top and one in the middle of the screen. The
> page that leads to has a selection of four clients for four platforms
> (command line, desktop/web, ios and Android) and only below that is
> there a more exhaustive list. Clicking on Riot links to a presentation
> page with a link to launch it directly.
>
> I think that's rather reasonable.
>

I tried Riot, the web client, again today and I must say I was pleasantly
surprised! As others have noted it's improved by leaps and bounds in one
year.

Anyone else who wants to try it out, come chat in #gnome:matrix.org! (link
for web client: https://riot.im/app/#/room/#gnome:matrix.org) You don't
even need to create an account to try it out. It's really low friction.

There are IRC bridges to freenode and moznet on matrix.org, and you can
join IRC channels on those servers using the Matrix client. We could
probably set up a bridge to gimpnet, although I have no idea how much
hassle it is to do that. If it's not too much hassle, I'd say let's do it
as soon as possible!

I think the friction could still be reduced by quite a lot, particularly
since (for me) the main reason to direct people to Matrix is to make
chatting in the GNOME community more open to new community members,
inexperienced ones, and non-software-oriented ones.

Here are my suggestions for reducing the friction, both for newbies (maybe
coming from Slack) and for old hands coming from IRC:

- The front page of the web site is really not suitable for us to redirect
people to as part of a "welcome to the GNOME community" process. It's
pretty sleek but its target audience is ... well ... Matrix developers.
Here is my tongue-in-cheek analysis of my thought process on seeing it,
with and without my techy hat... [1]

- The client is described as "If you like glossy and feature-rich web
clients, try Riot." In other words, "normal" unless you come from IRC :-)
As a new contributor to GNOME, am I going to be judged for being too
"glossy" and not hardcore enough if I click on that? Maybe we could just
link people directly to [2] and only secondarily to matrix.org if they
wanted a phone app or commandline client.

- You have to turn on the RTF message editor to get some features like
emoji that people would expect coming from other messaging apps, but it's
buried in Settings and is marked "experimental". I'd suggest we wait until
it's stable and enabled by default before recommending a switch for the
GNOME community.

- Searching for information about how to connect to IRC rooms or set up an
IRC bridge on matrix.org, the best I could find was this: [3] :-(

Re. the last point, I eventually discovered how to connect to
already-bridged IRC rooms though in another link posted elsewhere in this
thread [4]. After a bit of experimentation I determined that if a
particular room hasn't been used yet on the bridge, it won't show up in
search results, but you can just type the name it would be expected to
have, and it'll get created on demand. So, e.g., I
created #freenode_#hotdoc:matrix.org.

Regards,
Philip C

[1] http://pasteboard.co/pqKKmBt7l.png
[2] https://riot.im/app/
[3] http://matrix.org/docs/guides/application_services.html
[4] https://solson.me/2016/10/08/irccloud-to-matrix.html#irc-bridges
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