Hector Martin

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.

Mattermost is pretty configurable, and you can setup IRC bridges to it if you want. I tried many groupchat systems, and I'd say stick to Mattermost if it suits for your needs. Although I don't understand why would you want to use a chat system in the first place. Forum, maybe?

Forum software is even more stagnant tbh

If you don't understand why I would want to use a chat system, you've never worked on reverse engineering. I don't know a single reverse engineering team that *doesn't* use a chat system as their primary form of communication.