The Lounge
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The Lounge | matrix.to | |
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61 | 250 | |
5,351 | 840 | |
1.3% | 3.6% | |
8.3 | 5.1 | |
about 9 hours ago | 2 months ago | |
TypeScript | JavaScript | |
MIT License | Apache License 2.0 |
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.
The Lounge
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Simplicity of IRC
IRC as a protocol is indeed incredibly simple and easy to get started with. Years ago did discover this when I was able to make [this atrocity](https://github.com/creesch/discordIRCd) bridging IRC and discord where for IRC I effectively did a simple server implementation.
There is a caveat, though. Like many older protocols (ftp) there is a lot that was not initially written down or left up to clients and server implementations. This, does lead to a lot of edge cases you need to be aware of once you want to actually support a wider user group.
Also, as this is apparently is still a discussion. IRC is not simple from a modern user UX perception. Registration can be complex and confusing, though hidden a bit through clients. Managing channels with various flags is a whole other thing. Then there is also the fact that these days people are no longer used to the fact that they can't see messages from periods where they were not connected. Of course, the latter can be easily handled by a BNC or fancy clients like https://thelounge.chat . But, that is only easy for technically inclined folks.
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Posthog is closing their Slack community in favor of forum
> It’s 2024, people aren’t going to go out of their way to setup “bouncers” to keep up with conversation that happens when they’re not online or leave their computer running 24/7.
You can just set up something like The Lounge [0].
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Show HN: GodotOS: A Fake Operating System Interface Made in the Godot Engine
Excellent idea! You'll have a mature, open standard protocol under the hood, with no vendor lock-in, excellent extensibility, and great modern frontends like The Lounge (https://thelounge.chat/) or Convos (https://convos.chat/) to choose from (and you can choose).
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IRC Is the Only Viable Chat Protocol
> But all of the modern services like Teams, Slack and Discord, have seamlessness between client devices as their first priority.
Can't speak for the others, but Teams is really hit-or-miss. Missed notifications, missed messages, out of order messages. Then it appears to be fixed for three months only to happen again. It mostly seems to happen on Android.
In general, you're right, multi-device appeared to have been solved for IM - at least MSN messenger and Skype had it - right around the time when the smart phone came around, but then we had the same problem again in the mobile world, because somehow those messengers couldn't successfully move to phones: WhatsApp and the likes was bound to one device again. They added web access later, but that was more of a hack than true multi-device support.
The big problem the phone messaging apps solved was that their protocols didn't require a persistent connection. Theoretically, all the other protocols, MSN, ICQ, Skype, IRC could have been extended to support this too, but it's always faster to just build something new and be first to market.
If you want to use IRC today and have that modern multi-device experience, IMO the most decent solution is Quassel[1] (and Quasseldroid for Android). It's like a bouncer, but uses a custom protocol between the bouncer (quassel-core) and the GUI (quassel-client), so that it can perfectly sync state across all devices, and with flaky connections on mobile. It obviously required you to run the core on some server so it's accessible from everywhere, so nothing for "normies" as TFA calls them, but to me it's what makes IRC usable in the modern world. I wouldn't want to use irssi in a screen via ssh in termux on my phone.
The next best thing, if you're a Web 2.0 aficionado is probably The Lounge[2].
- Show HN: Halloy – A GUI Application in Rust for IRC
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Matrix 2.0: How we’re making Matrix go voom
For the other layers one can front-end IRC with TheLounge [1][2] or Convos [3][4]. TheLounge only persists history in private mode meaning that users are created in that front-end and chat messages are in Redis. For small networks or groups of friends this is probably fine.
Notably missing is voice chat. I use the Mumble client [5] with the Murmur or uMurmur [6] server which is light-weight enough to run on ones home router. I use it on Alpine Linux, works great. It's not a shiny and attention grabbing as Discord but probably fine for everyone else. For people to create their own voice channels would require the full-blown Murmur server.
[1] - https://github.com/thelounge
[2] - https://thelounge.chat/
[3] - https://github.com/convos-chat/convos/
[4] - https://convos.chat/
[5] - https://www.mumble.info/
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Most used selfhosted services in 2022?
TheLounge (https://github.com/thelounge/thelounge) - web IRC client that I set to listen on my vpn/mesh. Works great on desktop and mobile, and supports push notifications.
- TheLounge: Modern, responsive, cross-platform, self-hosted web IRC client
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IRCv3 2022 Spec round-up
FWIW TheLounge [1] and Convos [2] can front-end an IRC server giving it much of the look of a modern client and also chat persistence when using TheLounge in private mode. The trade-off in my opinion is scalability. With a bog standard IRCD I can handle tens of thousands of clients per node. Adding web persistent chat adds memory usage.
[1] - https://github.com/thelounge https://thelounge.chat/
[2] - https://github.com/convos-chat/convos/ https://convos.chat/
matrix.to
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The KDE desktop gets an overhaul with Plasma 6
There is this list of 15-minute bugs that should be easy to tackle https://bugs.kde.org/buglist.cgi?bug_severity=critical&bug_s...
Also strarting on smaller KDE applications is usually a great way to start, For example the Plasma widgets/applets or KDE games or educational applications.
You can join the New Contributors char room on Matrix to get help with starting out https://matrix.to/#/#new-contributors:kde.org
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Contributing Scrutiny to Nixpkgs
There's also https://matrix.to/#/#review-requests:nixos.org
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The Matrix Trashfire
Hi, I'm the Thib person mention in this article, and I agree that QA is super important. I can mostly talk about matrix.org, since I have little power over the Element clients. Disclaimer though: I'm technically employed by Element (to make paperwork simpler since I'm France-based, Element has an entity in France, and the Foundation is UK-based), but I'm working for the Foundation full time.
This kind of article is super valuable since it gives us the perspective of a new user. I opened https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix.org/issues/2178 to translate the gripes mentioned in the issue into actionable items for us. I took action on the most urgent one (updating the Try Matrix page), but want to take the time to go beyond the surface symptoms and address the root cause of the other gripes.
On the Foundation side, we're a small but mighty team of four. The website is currently maintained part time by me and a volunteer who is doing an excellent job at it.
As I wrote recently in a blog post "Tracking what works, not people" (https://ergaster.org/posts/2024/01/24-tracking-what-works/), I would love to have the resources to conduct user research and user testing on the website but I unfortunately don't. We deployed privacy-preserving analytics to see where people drop and what confuses them. It's not nearly as good as proper QA and user testing, but that's what we can afford for now.
Overall I'm grateful to the author for documenting their frustration, and even more grateful for reacting constructively to our responses and integrating them in the blog post! One of the strengths of open source is to find and address issues collectively. I consider this blog post to be a good open source contribution.
If people around believe in our mission and want to help us with their brainpower, I invite them to join our "Office of the Matrix.org Foundation" room: https://matrix.to/#/%23foundation-office:matrix.org
For those aligned with our mission and who want to support us financially, the https://matrix.org/support/ page should give you all the information you need to help us out.
- OpenBao – FOSS Fork of HashiCorp Vault
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Show HN: Desert Atlas, a Self-Hosted OpenStreetMap App for Sandstorm
Hi all,
This project release is a long time coming. It was a big uphill battle, and by far my largest endeavor so far. I built it for Sandstorm because I believe in Sandstorm's model, and I wanted to show that there's still life and potential in it. If you're inspired, joining our OpenCollective would be really helpful: https://opencollective.com/sandstormcommunity (keeping in mind that Sandstorm has now moved from its original leadership to a community project https://sandstorm.org/news/2023-11-03-from-io-to-org).
You can also join our mailing list or connect on the fediverse: https://sandstorm.org/community (The IRC link is outdated, we've effectively moved to Matrix for now due to the libera.chat split: https://matrix.to/#/#sandstorm:libera.chat)
Also: I'm open for hire! You can see some of my skills in putting things together in this blog post. I'd love to work in something FOSS or OSM related, but not a requirement. I mostly do Python and Golang, with a bit of Haskell under my belt. Other projects and resume here: https://github.com/orblivion/me
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Shutting down the Matrix bridge to Libera Chat
I really appreciate you sharing your concerns, and for all the hope and energy you've put into Matrix to date. Very much to your point, we're not yet in a state where I recommend Matrix to friends and family. Right now I only use it with people in FOSS and other circles where folks are a little more patient with the tech.
Only time will tell, and of course I'm biased as the Matrix.org Foundation's Managing Director, but I think there's good reason to remain hopeful:
The spec continues to evolve with major improvements expected in feature set and performance in the next year as we get to the 2.0 spec release, the Foundation is staffing up and beginning to fundraise, we're on the cusp of holding our first ever community elections to seat a Governing Board, and adoption has continued doubling on an annual basis.
I invite you and anyone else who is invested and/or concerned to join us in the Foundation's new office room – it's a way to get a view into ongoing activities, ask questions, provide direct feedback, and celebrate all the little wins on our way to collective success: https://matrix.to/#/#foundation-office:matrix.org
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USB Made Simple (2008)
Cool! Just in case you haven't come across this, we've got a (rather quiet lately) chat that might be useful.
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Google Docs adds tracking to links in document exports
Hey, very happy to see you so enthusiastic!
I'll be sure to transmit your feedback to the CryptPad team.
I'm not an expert myself so while I might know some stuff, it'd be better to talk to them directly.
Come say hello on the Matrix #cryptpad-general channel [1], don't hesitate to open issues on the bug tracker, and to browse the CryptPad's website [2].
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Firefox Finally Outperforming Google Chrome in SunSpider
Thanks for the mention! Capyloon (https://capyloon.org) had a grant from Protocol Labs (the IPFS stewards) in 2022 so we focused quite a bit on that indeed. We learned a lot - especially about the maturity and usability of the IPFS stack.
I'm still very bullish on the dWeb pieces: content based addressing, UCANs (https://ucan.xyz/) for distributed auth, new web app models (https://hackmd.io/@robin-berjon/tiles) to create an ecosystem that is not locked by centralized app stores.
There's a lot to do, all contributions are welcome (frontend, device ports, platform apis...). We have a Matrix channel (https://matrix.to/#/#capyloon:matrix.org) and you can try desktop builds easily following the steps at https://github.com/capyloon/nutria#quick-start
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Ask HN: What Matrix channels do you visit?
General law/legal professional channel to discuss ... well, law things.
What are some alternatives?
ZNC - Official repository for the ZNC IRC bouncer
Kiwi IRC - 🥝 Next generation of the Kiwi IRC web client
Convos - Convos :busts_in_silhouette: is the simplest way to use IRC in your browser [Moved to: https://github.com/convos-chat/convos]
Quassel IRC - Quassel IRC: Chat comfortably. Everywhere.
Weechat - The extensible chat client.
InspIRCd - A modular C++ IRC server (ircd).
cinny - Yet another matrix client
fluffychat
syphon - ⚗️ a privacy centric matrix client
YiffSpot - A real-time web chat for "yiffing" randomly with other furries anonymously.
Glowing Bear - A web client for WeeChat
Ferdi - Ferdi is a free and opensource all-in-one desktop app that helps you organize how you use your favourite apps