[Sugar-devel] Proposal to move communication to other platform

[Alex Perez]

Prashant,

We also offer our own Sugar Labs specific IRC chat gateway, at 
http://chat.sugarlabs.org:9090/

I'd like to understand more fully why you believe IRC is hard for you to 
use. Is it hard because you've never used it before? Is it hard because 
you have no familiarity with it? IRC can absolutely be used on mobile 
devices, and this basic misunderstanding shows me that you're not 
particularly familiar with some basic IRC facts, nor have you bothered 
to open your mobile phone up, go to the app store, and type "IRC" in to 
the search field. Which mobile platform are you using? Android? iOS? If 
you tell us, we can recommend some clients for you.

The issue of loss-of-state when you're disconnected from IRC is a known 
problem for 25+ years, and many ways to address it have been developed 
over that period of time.  There are IRC bouncers, web-based IRC 
clients, and all sorts of other solutions to these problems, if you can 
be bothered to search for them, instead of assuming that no solution 
exists, which is sorta what seems to have happened here.

There are several reasons why we don't use Slack, Discord, or other 
proprietary messaging systems, which I'm not going to get into the 
details of here, but since they are corporate owned-and-operated pieces 
of infrastructure, they may or may not exist in the future.

The primary problem with using Gitter is that it requires you to have a 
GitHub account, and has no other authentication mechanism. Developers 
are not the only people we care about, and IRC is accessible to all, and 
is fundamentally democratic.

> Prashant Sengar <mailto:prashantsengar5 at gmail.com>
> March 4, 2020 at 6:33 AM
> Hi,
>
> I am sure this request must have been raised earlier as well. I wanted 
> to ask if Sugar could create a communication channel on another 
> platform such as a discord server, Slack or Telegram instead of IRC to 
> make communication easier.
>
> The reason why others will be a better option:
> 1. The chats will be accessible even if I am offline for a while, 
> unlike IRC where I cannot see any earlier data.
> 2. IRC cannot be used on mobile devices, so it creates a barrier in 
> communication. On the other hand, the other chat applications are 
> available on all platforms for everyone to use.
>
> I would like to request the team to please consider this request. If 
> such request has been made earlier and denied due to some reasons, 
> then I would like to know them so that I can understand the reasons 
> and work accordingly.
>
> Regards.
> Prashant Sengar
>
>
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