It’s incredibly sad that we’ve lost the open, federated team chat space to #Matrix—where the only viable server isn’t open source, it’s debatable whether the underlying standard is truly open, and the most charitable thing I’ve heard about the UX is that it’s 'OK.'
@daniel to be fair, while I agree with your other points, I'm also pretty sure (with apologies to the other client authors, who suffer from the normal lack of funding/participation, not their fault) that Conversations is the only app that supports XMPP that has a decent UI too. I think I would honestly take one client per platform that was "OK" over that.
@drq @daniel yah, Dino's what I use. It's probably the closest after Conversations, but the UX leaves a lot to be desired and there are lots of little UI issues (ie. don't use it for a day or two, then enable it… your entire screen will be covered with notifications and everything will lock up while all the chats flicker new messages constantly as it downloads everything said in every chat room you've ever missed). Also adding contacts and starting chats is pretty hidden, etc.
@sam Nah, we do. Kinda. But it's nowhere near what Matrix has to offer, let alone big teamcomm platforms like Slack.
I mean, consistent searchable group chat history? No such thing, here's 20 latest messages. Unless you have a bot or a server plugin that records it in some HTTP-accessible archive, so it's not truly native.
Integrations? Well, bots is the only framework you have, and you have to work within that. There's no external integration API.
Links to messages in message history? Forget it.
And those are only the essentials for modern teamwork.
Matrix at least *somewhat* supports those. Plus, the groupchat survives even if the origin server goes down, so that's a perk.
And don't get me wrong: I don't really like Matrix. But it's the best thing we have right now for that purpose.
@drq @sam @daniel the group chat history can be completely stored on the server side, e.g. with https://modules.prosody.im/mod_muc_log.html showing the last 20 messages is also just a configuration default. But yeah, other than that a lot is missing or not standardized