Use Mattermost instead of Telegram to discuss about UT

[Keneda]

@cliffcoggin
Plus on forums, everything stays and can be searched.

[manland]

Interesting debate here. Let me put my through in this discussion. But before who am I.

Hello i'm Romain a french dev which love UT (daily drive it since 1 year now). I'm also the mattermost mvp for version 5.11. And the author of the official plugin gitlab.

So I guess i'm legitime to talk about this subject

I think the main point of telegram vs mattermost is about open-source. Télégram is not open-source, mattermost is. Just like github vs gitlab.

But no, ubports fundation are not hosting it's own gitlab @Fla. We use the global instance gitlab.com which is not linked with a mattermost instance. So the effort to host one is necessary.

As all decisions I take every day, this is a table whith pro/cons:

Pro	Cons
open-source	need to be hosted
open api	no native app (they have react-native mobile app but react-native don't support ubtouch, they have eletron desktop app but electron don't support ubtouch :crying_face:)
self discoverable (channels about dev, QA...)	no publicly accessible (need to register in ubports instance)
notification possible	need dev in MM (not in ubtouch and the man power for our OS is already light)
lot of plugins to bridge	need lot of configuration
no spam bot	not more debate to add a captcha

As you can see, As much I love mattermost, we can't do all this stuff in short/medium time. Maybe in long, very long time

As an advice, this is how I considered moving to mattermost (but unfortunately no time now...):

• buy a starter at 150$/year https://mattermost.com/pricing/
• create all channels in it (general, dev, qa, os...)
• bridge them to telegram (and why not matrix...) https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge
• invite people to come

If after 1 year no one use this instance don't renew it and you have "only" loose 150$.

If you do that, and users use it, I'll dev a native mattermost app for UT (or at least a way to have notification from it :smiling_face_with_halo: )

[TotalRando]

@cliffcoggin I like the Forum and it works fine.

@wgarcia have you seen groups.io?

[libremax]

@fla Since your sentence about the situation in Russia and its consequences for Telegram is baseless, it would be good to cross it out to avoid spreading fake erroneous [I didn't mean that it was intentional] news on this forum. And then the discussion about Mattermost could take place under healthier conditions.

[Lakotaubp]

@libremax That has already been countered by both @AppLee and @TotalSonic quite comprehensively with the correct info that Telegram is nothing to do with Russia as a country. There may be others that also think the same thing so just crossing it out won't help and is a form of censorship in itself as it is not so much an attempt to spread fake news but a commonly held error. I feel it is much better to leave as is and let the conversation follow with all it's mistakes, corrections, suggestions and ideas.

[libremax]

@lakotaubp Crossing out an erroneous sentence is not the same as deleting it, and it allows the error to be kept for the record and corrected for the reader's sake.
Otherwise, readers who only read the first post or who do not link to the correct answers will continue to be possibly misled which is not a good thing.

Edit: I replaced the word fake with erroneous in my previous post because I never intended to imply that the erroneous nature was intentional.

[libremax]

This post is deleted!

[Fla]

@cliffcoggin & others about why not only a forum. Yes obviously for exactly this kind of topic (debate, announcement etc) a forum is perfect. But there are other use cases when you need live chat, debugging together with a user, preparing a release... Just jump in the Dev group or the Axolotl one in telegram and you'll see what I mean. And Mattermost would make all this groups much more discoverable.

That being said, sorry I didn't remember that ubports wasn't hosting their own gitlab, in that case obviously there is a bit more work to be done to put it in place and that's maybe not worth it at the moment (because I think the advantage is also to be self hosted, not to use a sass solution)

[arubislander]

@fla Self hosting is not really a viable solution for the Foundation. We mustn't forget that self hosting takes up a lot of time in set up and maintenance. Someone in the community could volunteer to do that though.

[wgarcia]

@totalrando Yes, but, what do you mean? This community does not want to use mailing lists, it seems.

[TotalRando]

@wgarcia I was just suggesting it if you liked email groups

[klh]

Is it necroposting after a month?

seems also that Mattermost is a paid service once you go beyond wanting basic features and small numbers of participants

Mattermost is FOSS, you don't have to buy hosting from them. Hosting always costs money.

other than this easily accessible forum

Mettermost can be public, it's not a secret society

Plus on forums, everything stays and can be searched.

Same, but Mattermost is real-time, so I don't understand comparisons to forums - they are not exclusive.

Mattermost can definitely be more organized than Telegram, but:

• bridges suck, one party will always get shitty UX
• you can't expect everyone to move over

It could be nice for developers, especially with all the (possible) integrations, but I wouldn't expect the 3500 people from the UBports [ENGLISH] TG group to move over - there are people who use TG for stuff other than UT so it's convenient for them

[PhoenixLandPirat]

@fla Whats wrong with the official Matrix groups, even if matrix gets taken down, you can still interface with the chats using other homeservers, its versatile, and will make "Cut off from the interent" situation harder, not to mention we already have apps for Matrix both Fluffychat, and Cinny is being developed as a click, and hopefully one day we will get NeoChat as well.

we have a few spaces, and we could make more as time goes on if the community feels need for it.

They're already up and working, the question about bridging comes up, and I'd love to have some of these chats bridge, but at least the last time it was talked about properly, the legal implications of hosting userdata, and the fact that in some cases a chat can be even minutes behind when bridged, led this to not be an ideal situation, perhaps over time this will be more viable?

If you want a different chat option to become officially supported, it will also at least need a decent Ubuntu Touch app, so that anyone using ubuntu touch can actually participate, with notifications, and other little nicetys that make the experience, much easier and better than just a webapp.

[dubudoregil]

@fla I think you are ignorant. Telegram is based in Dubai. It is not Russian based at all. It has NEVER been Russian based or a Russian company. Telegrams servers are spread all across the world.

Nice virtue signal though.

[Moem]

@dubudoregil You are right about Telegram being based in Dubai, but you could really be nicer about it.

[Lakotaubp]

@dubudoregil Badly informed might be a better way of putting it, ignorant comes accross as harsh.

[dobey]

@dubudoregil said in Use Mattermost instead of Telegram to discuss about UT:

Telegram is based in Dubai.

Actually, it is multinational. And it's founders are indeed a pair of brothers from Russia. Not that having operational headquarters in Dubai, nor legal domicile in the British Virgin Islands, is somehow a particular improvement with regards to anything discussed here, beyond there being better infrastructure and not currently in the middle of a war.

The majority of concerns one might have with Telegram anyway, are not solved by moving to pretty much any other service. And there is not enough inertia to move away from it for our needs.

Maybe it's time to just lock this thread @Lakotaubp ?

[Lakotaubp]

@dobey Yes I think with this one all the bases have been covered.