Hector Martin

Matrix seems to be intended to be this federated utopia, with all the complexity and moderation headaches that entails. There are bridges to other platforms, which like all bridges, randomly break and are inconvenient.

Mattermost and Rocket Chat are just Slack clones mostly intended for businesses to self-host or pay for cloud subs. I've used both. I'm not very impressed.

I'm trying Zulip and it's... overcomplicated? I can see how topics make sense in certain larger communities with lots of task management (like Rust), but not really for a project like Asahi Linux. And then there's the bad first impression their approach to auth gave me already.

Plus most of these haven't reached critical mass / appeal, except Discord and Slack (out for the aforementioned reasons)... and IRC.

And so I'm left with the idea of just having a freenode channel, with @whitequark's logging bot in it, letting people bridge in via the Matrix bridge at least until that becomes a problem, and calling it a day...

Yes, it's terrible, it's plain text only, it has no sane file transfer, it has no log integration, it's not particularly newbie-friendly... but nothing else seems to be strictly better in enough ways. And at least I already know how it works and so do most FOSS devs.

I haven't made my decision yet, feel free to try to change my mind.

Discord will be the best free option you are going to get with all the integrations/bot capabilities it has until you come up with something better. I don't see the point spending too much time focusing on it. Do you?