AGP 5: Migration to Open Source Messaging Platform

[Smokyish]

Goals

• Migrate the community from Slack to Rocket.Chat or Riot
• Create a Rocket.Chat client app in collaboration with other Ethereum projects with a project selector if Rocket.Chat is the chosen platform

Description

As Slack was designed for internal use of projects, the tools to run public facing communities are lacking in features that these projects would benefit from having. Migration to a open source project, Rocket.Chat or Riot, will help us manage and govern our communities more efficiently.

Our idea is to fork of the Rocket.Chat Electron app and together in collaboration with other interested projects create a new app for the Ethereum community to have a project selector similar to Slack. The selector could be pre-filled with a list of Ethereum community projects for ease of use. This would help community members by only having one app for the projects that choose to use Rocket.Chat instead of other alternative chat apps and thus bringing the community closer to each other by using a shared tool that can be updated by anyone via Pull Requests to the community driven repository. Projects using this could also pool resources together and support the development of Rocket.Chat, as well as making it more usable.

Initially we would like to hear from other projects in the space to see how much interest there is in such a tool and migration process. Setting up Rocket.Chat requires projects to set up their infrastructure for the service, more information can be found in the Rocket.Chat Documentation and there's an Import tool that can easily migrate your users and channels to Rocket.Chat (but not DM's and private channels).

Riot does not require such efforts as Rocket.Chat, but has the option to run your own infrastructure.

Uncertainties

• Are other projects interested in such an effort We now have support from 5 projects
• How will our community members react to the migration from Slack to Rocket.Chat The Aragon community has been positive about possible migration to another platform

Situation update

I have now created and updated the documents so projects can evaluate the features and possibilities provided by the two open source projects, Rocket Chat and Riot.

Read about RocketChat.

Read about Riot.

If you have anything you want to add or change in the files, please do so via a Pull Request.

Projects supporting this migration

• Aragon: 6k members
• Decentraland: 3.5k members
• Cofound.it: 5k members
• 0xproject: 4.3k members
• Indorse: 3.3k members
• Auctus Project: 1.3k members
• TenX: 12k members
• FOAM: New, some members
• Colony: 4.4k members
• Santiment: 3k members
• Auctus Project: 1.3k members
• OmiseGO: 10.9k members
• Golem: 9.9k members
• Streamr: 1.5k members

[Souptacular]

I change my vote to Riot.im (but if more people want RocketChat that works too).
I believe this is a good idea. Of Slack alternatives Rocket.Chat seems to be best. z.cash uses it.

[MiguelBel]

👍 Slack is unsustainable.

[5chdn]

Just for the records: https://riot.im

https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/6v2ui9/a_shoutout_to_matrixorg_building_the_future_of/

[luisivan]

@Souptacular @5chdn we used Riot internally for a while. What are the reasons that make you like it for a community? For me, it lacks things such as:

• Mentions
• Pinned messages
• Reactions support
• Customized emojis
• Community-only view (aka filtering channels to those that belong to the community you're in in a particular moment)
• Fine grained admin tools

Riot's bridging capabilities are awesome and the fact that you can message anyone in any Matrix server makes me really like it, but the client lacks some features that are very important for a community

[5chdn]

Riot supports mentions, and pinned messages. Can't comment on the other points.

[luisivan]

Last time I checked mentions only highlighted the username, with no notification or unread messages inbox whatsoever. Do you know if they did change that?

[DeveloppSoft]

Yes 👍 slack is annoying by times, also a real p2p solution would be interesting, maybe https://github.com/ssbc? (secure scuttlebutt)
cc @dominictarr

[Smokyish]

@Souptacular Do you see any projects that you represent supporting this proposal?

[arimeilich]

Let's do this!

[kennyrowe]

I've been using Rocket chat for several projects. It works pretty well, and the fact that the team recently got funding should help with future features.

[MicahZoltu]

Re: Rocket.Chat. Of all of the chat apps I use, it has the most problems. The desktop app is really laggy when typing a message more than one line long (for no apparent reason). The mobile app is amazingly slow to open, and at this point I avoid responding to Rocket messages on mobile because it is just too much of a pain (whereas Slack I'll hold entire conversations from mobile). I will also randomly get pop-ups on Windows from Rocket.Chat desktop app asking me to approve some random SSL certificate.

Re: Riot.im. I only have one group I'm part of with Riot but at a glance it is sorely lacking in features as others have mentioned. No ability to mention (I don't want every instance of my name to be considered an @mention, and I want auto-complete on @ character), no reactions, no code blocks/syntax highlighting/snippets (that I have seen), its notification settings feel fairly broken (I can't have desktop notifications on for IMs and off for channel messages). These are all features that I use incredibly frequently in Slack and when I'm in a chat client that doesn't support them I feel hamstrung (reactions especially, I want the ability to ack a message without having to ping everyone in the channel). Note: some of these features may exist and I just don't know how to use them, in which case please ignore.

fork of the Rocket.Chat Electron app and together in collaboration with other interested projects create a new app for the Ethereum community to have a project selector similar to Slack

This feels way out of scope for Aragon. There are a lot of people already iterating in this space (online chat applications) and I don't believe it would be a good use of funds to spend time rolling your own instead of using an established one.

I recognize Slack has some issues that make it less than ideal for open community chat (as seen by the scammers lately) but Slack does have the best feature set of all of the chat apps IMO and I'm not convinced the cons outweigh the pros in this case.

Perhaps instead of not using Slack, consider changing the way you do invites so people can't as easily sign-up with bots? Or at least, force the bot authors to build custom bots for targeting Aragon sign-ups (right now since everyone uses the same Heroku app for invites the scammers just need to target that one app).

[luisivan]

@MicahZoltu I agree with some of your points. Our idea was to join forces with other 5-6 projects and pool some funds to hire someone full-time to work on Rocket.Chat and address our needs, not work on it alone.

We could work on some short-term fixes to keep Slack working. But long-term wise, I think trusting the fate of all our communities to a proprietary service developed by a startup that clearly doesn't care about our use case doesn't seem like the best idea.

[janisakovic]

I really like the idea. Cofound.it has 5.000 community members.

[luisivan]

Nice to see you here @janisakovic! Counting you guys in 👍

[Smokyish]

@MicahZoltu @luisivan

This feels way out of scope for Aragon. There are a lot of people already iterating in this space (online chat applications) and I don't believe it would be a good use of funds to spend time rolling your own instead of using an established one.

We're not looking on developing a chat app, it's basically just maintaining the servers.json that gives the app a default list of servers/projects, building a new release on changes and keeping up to date with the upstream.

[lpmorin]

Please don't fork into yet another messaging client. I already have to use Franz to get track of all the different chat systems available...

Can't we just support a riot.im server or a rocket chat server? Why a fork?

[luisivan]

@lpmorin fork would only be necessary to add a set of pre-defined communities on the Electron client. You could still use Franz to join into any community, because they'd be all running their web version of Rocket.Chat

[diofeher]

Did you guys considered using gitter.im?

[5chdn]

Gitter does not allow running your own (set of) servers, afaik.

[5chdn]

I know you want Rocket Chat really bad, but, but, ... https://medium.com/@RiotChat/riot-im-web-0-12-7c4ea84b180a :-)

Riot 0.13 is going to be a big one too, with Communities (aka Groups) finally landing: letting folks group sets of rooms and users into a mini teams, and hopefully a bunch more Performance and End-to-end Encryption improvements too.

[PhABC]

We have been considering to move to rocketchat for sometime at 0x and now that the sale is over we wanted to start investigating. So you can count on 0x to help with this. We should bring in projects already using rocketchat.

[Smokyish]

@5chdn Read that today, and it does alleviate some of our previous concerns with the platform.

[luisivan]

@PhABC sounds great! Will count you in 👍

[jbrukh]

We have been strongly considering moving CoinFund Slack to Rocket.Chat or another sustainable platform. Let's see what we can come up with!

[FUSED-ID]

We have a serious collection of projects and we are in charge of 2 or 3 Slack Groups

• Riot.im looks to be a better option ?

[avadhootkulkarni]

Avadhoot here, CMO at Indorse.io. We're a community of 3.3k members on Slack. We ourselves have been thinking to move our community to rocket.chat because of spamming/phishing attacks. This is a fantastic initiative. Please count us in & consider our full support to help make this happen.

[PhABC]

Hello all,

Would it be possible to have some sort of systematic/organized evaluation of the different platforms we could migrate to? We should build a list of pros and cons that we could all contribute to. We should start experimenting with creating a new group on each platform to see how it can be configured, but also joining an existing project on these platforms to see how the dynamic is.

I propose something like ;

Platform name :
Projects currently using this platform :
Pro :
Cons :

We could breakdown the pros and cons in different subgroups, such as security, cost, flexibility, capacity, etc.

Perhaps create a markdown file for each platform and we can all do some pull requests?

[kingsleyh]

Hi - we have been working on an alternative platform for community chat that is dedicated to the crypto community. We did an initial demo to Aragon a couple of days ago and took on board their feedback. We are essentially building something very like a cross between Telegram and Slack but with extra security controls and features specialized and dedicated to crypto. With features that help pre ICO's as well as post ICO communities.

It's still in the early stages of development - most of it is going to be open sourced - but we are also keen to prevent scammers from taking the code and popping up phishing sites of our software.

So we are currently taking requirements and can do a demo of what we have so far to anyone that is interested. When we get further along we will open it up for people to test. Essentially we want to build something that the crypto community wants so are open to all suggestions.

Of course everyone will choose whichever platform they feel offers the best experience for them but we hope that our platform will be good enough that some of you may consider it, as well as contribute. We realize that our platform is not yet ready and we are still putting together a roadmap and timeline but will keep you posted.

[charlottefranklin]

Hi phABC thanks for the invite. I work with Kingsley as the UX on our team. We are an agile team and are in very early stages of user interviews and demos. It's our policy to be embarrassed by what we are doing early and often so we can take on feedback and figure out user needs. It was great demoing to Aragon earlier this week because we know we still have a way to go, but the features they want are now on our board.

[charlottefranklin]

Our team is made up of 4 devs, a creative director and a UX copywriter. We met Gian Bochsler a few weeks back and he is helping with the business side of things and seed investment. So in the meantime while we get our video demo and our website live if anybody is keen to meet us online for a demo of the app we are building that would be great.

[luisivan]

@PhABC great idea, I added a directory to add all alternatives there https://github.com/aragon/governance/blob/master/AGP-5_Migration_from_Slack/. Started with Riot, will do Rocket.Chat next. If you have any ideas/suggestions, please PR them!

[bneiluj]

What is the final answer, Riot.im or rocket.chat ?

[Shalmezad]

@bneiluj Looks like it's still being decided. For a big community migration like this, a decision shouldn't be rushed, and the pro/con list mentioned above seems like a reasonable way to find the best solution.

[ara4n]

(Disclaimer: i work on Riot):

• Proper mentions landed in Riot 0.12 (last week)
• We've had a notification inbox for ages; in Riot/Web it's an icon in the top right on the app which switched the righthand panel to show notifs
• Group/Community support is landing in 0.13 (in a few week's time)
• We are also fully decentralised (similar architecture to Git), and support e2e crypto, widgets, native clients on Android and iOS, the upcoming Matrix-native Librem 5 phone (https://matrix.org/blog/2017/08/24/the-librem-5-from-purism-a-matrix-native-smartphone/), a whole ecosystem of alternative community clients, servers, bridges and other cool stuff in the works.

Agreed that Rocket.Chat has a friendlier UX though :)

[5chdn]

Proper mentions landed in Riot 0.12 (last week)

can confirm

We've had a notification inbox for ages; in Riot/Web it's an icon in the top right on the app which switched the righthand panel to show notifs

now that I'm aware - can confirm xD

native clients on Android

the native client is pretty decent compared to the web app.

[ara4n]

if you like native Matrix clients, https://github.com/mujx/nheko is in active development and coming along really well; it behaves suspiciously similar to Telegram :)

[luisivan]

Thanks @ara4n! Tried to reflect all of that in https://github.com/aragon/governance/blob/master/AGP-5_Migration_from_Slack/Riot.md, @Smokyish will also fill in the stuff I missed

[Smokyish]

Situation update

I have now created and updated the documents so projects can evaluate the features and possibilities provided by the two open source projects, Rocket Chat and Riot.

RocketChat.md in our repo

Riot.md in our repo

If you have anything you want to add or change in the files, please do so via a Pull Request.

[ludmila-omlopes]

I represent Auctus Project and we currently have 1328 member in our Slack. We are happy to support you migrating to another chat app, you can count on us on testing, giving feedback and improving it.

What do you guys think about using a Decision Matrix for deciding between the apps that are being listed in your repo? Could be an easier way for comparing pros and cons.

Cheers,

[Smokyish]

@ludmila-omlopes Glad to hear that, i've added you to the list of Projects supporting the proposal!

Some kind of matrix/grid does seem like a good idea, since the two projects are quite different from each other, so right now the evaluation is mostly subjective.

[ludmila-omlopes]

@Smokyish super! I'll make one and as soon as I have it ready I'll post it here

[Smokyish]

Currently we are still gauging interest and looking for projects that are willing to be the early supports of the proposal, we have enough interest to move forward with the proposal.

The next step will be to begin discussions on what platform to support, how and when that will happen, and then start talking about details of doing a joint migration to the chosen platform.

Please do make changes to the RocketChat.md and Riot.md documents if you see something missing or off and let us know your thoughts on the proposal here.

[lrettig]

Wouldn't it make more sense for the crypto community to put its money where its mouth is and spearhead a native blockchain-based communication tool? Features that seem like a no brainer include:

• "Pay to play" (costs ETH to send a message, which naturally helps prevent spam and abuse--users could be allocated a certain amount of the token when they join, and/or could earn more through likes, upvotes, or other constructive contributions)
• Ability to natively send ETH or other tokens embedded alongside messages
• A platform upon which ETH-based tools, bots, games and other apps can be built (a bit like Toshi and Status)
• An "app store" for this sort of app
• File storage to IPFS
• Decentralized backend

I don't know enough about Matrix.org, Riot, RocketChat or other projects to know whether they could be forked or extended to add features such as these. The obvious downside here is that it would be a few months before the system would be stable enough for widespread use.

[kingsleyh]

Hey - your description of that platform is a lot like what Charlotte and I are building - it's a dedicated chat app for the crypto community - decentralised, open source mostly and with a host of features similar to those you described - if you are interested in feeding us requirements or helping out in any way please let us know :)

[charlottefranklin]

Hi there, Charlotte here from JAM. I work with Kingsley.

This is where we started out - we were sure we could fix the Slack issues: https://medium.com/@altcoinio/slack-api-for-icos-de61df6448c3

But quite quickly realised we needed to build a chat app dedicated to the crypto-community, that took requirements, and prioritised feature requests, directly from only this community.

In the time since we wrote our medium post we now have 4 developers, a creative director and a UX copywriter working on the project – and Gian Bochsler is helping us out with seed funding. We are hoping to have our MVP ready quite soon – but we do have a working demo, built in Elm and Scala – and anybody who wants to feed in requirements, give us feedback etc – please get in touch. I am the user experience person on the project, and from experience we know the magic in any app comes directly from talking to people and understanding their needs.

We are building something that helps the crypto community, old and new, feel safe communicating in a community of unknown people, and to be able to trust the information they are given, in the JAM chat app.

We are working with Christian and Paul at uPort, building our own JAM KYC and reputation layer to help people be able to trust information and user identities on the platform we are building.

Our intro / team website will be up in a few days – I have been on holiday – but will post here again shortly when JAM.network is live :-)

[ara4n]

Two things:

• Matrix is very similar in many ways to a blockchain (albeit lacking doublespend protection). It's a fully decentralised Merkle DAG datastructure per room with a consensus protocol for merging state changes. Rooms are replicated over all the nodes participating in them like a DL. There is even a proof algorithm used for semantically important events (kicks, bans, etc)
• Building a new chat system that competes adequately with Slack (especially if you don't build on a foundation like Matrix) is many manyears of work. Stuff like e2e encryption synced across multiple devices in a decentralised environment alone was about 2-3 manyears of work for us. Then you want proper native mobile clients, desktop clients, as well as web... and stuff like badge counts, notifs, voip, screensharing, encrypted filetransder etc. Huge kudos to those who have done it, but I would caution those considering starting from scratch to consider building on something existent like Matrix or even XMPP than starting anew.

[onbjerg]

@lrettig The blockchain is not for everything. There is no reason you would want to persist instant messages on a blockchain. For end-to-end encryption you would just sign and/or encrypt the message, broadcast it and forget about it.

[5chdn]

OmiseGo just shipped in $30k for Riot. 👍

https://twitter.com/omise_go/status/905794416765435905

[PhABC]

I briefly discussed with two Storj team members (Storj has been using Rocket.chat for a few months, with 8000 users) and here's what they had to say ;

[@Knowledge]:
"Philip runs it on some server he has at the office, I believe. He just recently upgraded it because it was having some performance issues. Uploads don't work so well right now. There are typically at least one annoying issue that appears whenever we upgrade to the next version to solve an old problem. Last time users weren't able to join groups unless they specifically typed in /join group. So that sucked. Now people can't really upload. Otherwise, it is fine. Some people like Discord better and so we use that for voice communication to users, but we're not planning on switching to it right now. Since we have 4 admins and various Storj employees with similar powers, those who are trying to scam or spam get banned very quickly. Though, in general, we haven't had extensive issues with this."

[@alexey]:
"Riot not good for me, very strange and not comfortable. Rocket.Chat is good enough, but use only stable release and do not upgrade it very often"

Storj do not seem to have implemented super strong security measures either, like URL and ETH addresses filtering.

[luisivan]

Thanks for the insights @PhABC! I agree that Riot's UX is not very comfortable right now, and they're totally planning on solving that.

[blitzio]

Hi guys, Mike from TenX here. We are behind you on this!

[Smokyish]

Hi @blitzio! Glad to hear that, i've added you to the list of projects supporting the proposal.

[shea256]

We at Blockstack (w/ 3.8K Slack group members) have been considering alternatives as well.

[shea256]

In fact, we tried switching to Rocket.chat a year or so ago when Slack was down for a day and we ultimately switched back to Slack because the experience gap was too large. I'm sure a lot has changed since then of course.

[shea256]

I've also seen several projects considering a switch to Mattermost (https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-server). Surprised this hasn't been brought up here yet.

[Smokyish]

@shea256 We've excluded Mattermost mainly because of the freemium model, some key elements of the platform require the Enterprise subscription. With the sizes of some of the projects involved in the proposal, a minimum price of $1.67/USER/MONTH is something that we don't see being acceptable.

Pricing a platform/product as a per user model is not a good business model for projects that are looking to grow their public communities and include as many users as possible.

[PrismIO]

@PhABC Discord has that feature, I have a server you can see an example of over here

https://discord.gg/nf9jCaU

Like I said above, ever user who joins is auto assigned a default role, so “guest” you can configure these users to be unable to PM, chat, join voice channels ect

[PrismIO]

While there is ways to PM users (adding them as a friend) these will exist in almost all platforms, what discord offers is distinct and visiable roles, so admins can be easily identified from normal users, currently in the slack system, any user with a simallar name can attempt to mislead users, while on discord the shear fact you can see who’s actually in the role of admins/mod/staff, and who’s a guest/normal user will stop people editing their description to “founder and ceo” and sending out phishing links.

With discord users can be given access to a single text channel, a single voice channel, have no access to bots/chat commands ect, while providing a level of protection and clarity not found before, gone would the days of “has the presale started now, I just got an email”, “no it hasn’t” , “but the email was from you!”

[jet86]

while on discord the shear fact you can see who’s actually in the role of admins/mod/staff, and who’s a guest/normal user will stop people editing their description to “founder and ceo” and sending out phishing links.

On Slack you can easily see if someone is a workspace owner or admin simply by clicking on the account. I'm skeptical that being able to see a users role (even if it is more visible than in Slack) will stop scammers from attempting to mislead people.

[Newbb1]

If they need a token to perform actions, then how is it free?

The basic messaging service is free, the token would be needed for premium functions.

[PrismIO]

@jet86 you can only distinguish between owner admin and member when the slack is on the paid version and multi channel guest user and single channel guest user are enabled

https://get.slack.help/hc/en-us/articles/201314026-Roles-and-permissions-in-Slack

“Circle — Workspace Owner, Admin, or regular member
Square — Multi-Channel Guest
Triangle — Single-Channel Guest
Heart — Slackbot”

The problem most slack phishing scam have had is they allow all members to be regular members, hence allowing them to share the same identifier and permissions as admins and owners to an extent.

A number of ICO and community’s have already moved operations to discord and have resolved most issues arising from slack, I’ll hunt down the list of ICO’s and orgs to make the switch shortly

[benjyz]

@Smokyish what about a new IRC client? there you have an open Internet protocol https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2813 Rocket.chat looks like a bad option. MeteorJS stack gives dependence on Meteor company, MongoDB, and in general very bad architecture which doesn't support open protocols. Anyone who tried writing advanced meteor app probably can verify. It looks nice for tutorial but anything sophisticated is very hard to do.

[philipcmonk]

@PrismIO I'm not seeing any settings in Discord that stop PMs. I only see ways to stop them from posting to channels, which isn't usually the problem.

[jet86]

@jet86 you can only distinguish between owner admin and member when the slack is on the paid version and multi channel guest user and single channel guest user are enabled

@PrismIO that's completely wrong. I'm in 19 different Slack workspaces, all of which are on the free tier, and in every single one of them I can see if a user is a workspace owner or workspace admin.

[Smokyish]

@benjyz IRC network and client was an option that another project looked into before we started this proposal, but since they decided not to move forward with that, we started this proposal.

IRC could be a viable option, but it just would require a tremendous amount of work, some in creating the infrastructure for the network back-end, but mostly it would be about creating a really good quality front-end client with all the things that would be required, things that have been mentioned here a couple of times, reactions, emojis, markdown etc etc.

So that would require either using a lot of our own resources or outsourcing and paying someone to create one, and it would be so much work that the option was abandoned.

[PhABC]

I contacted Discord and they aren't interested in us paying them, which can be a good and bad thing.They said they consider new features based on votes on their feedback platform. In the case of disallowing DMs on the server end, this is what we should vote for in mass ;

https://feedback.discordapp.com/forums/326712-discord-dream-land/suggestions/31200028-add-a-server-setting-to-disallow-private-messages

If you think discord is a good option, please share among your communities. Without this feature, Discord is not a viable option unfortunately, since the same thing happening on slack would happen over discord eventually.

[5chdn]

Riot is the new IRC, some IRC clients have interfaces for Matrix already (e.g., weechat).

[ara4n]

Hi all; we've just published thoughts from the Riot side on how we can best support the cryptocurrency ecosystem: https://matrix.org/blog/2017/09/19/matrix-riot-for-cryptocurrency-communities/ has the details, and hopefully provides more context to some of the discussions here with respect to Riot!

[anton48]

just in case: https://keybase.io/blog/introducing-keybase-teams

[5chdn]

Certainly interesting!

[onbjerg]

I'd be very willing to use Keybase Teams if it wasn't for two factors

• Keybase is still invite only
• The teams are capped at 1K people for now

But it does look interesting.

[anton48]

they are not 100% invite only: keybase/keybase-issues#2703 (comment)

but anyway anybody who got an account automatically earn some invites (I do have 94 out of 100 for example).

[onbjerg]

We just experimented a bit to see how it was. My takeaways from Keybase Teams:

Pros

• Feels good
• Easy verifiability of users by checking their socials (and if you follow someone their name becomes green, so if people follow core members it's easy to check if they're being scammed). On Keybase, socials are verified via a proof, so it's impossible to pretend like you control a persons Twitter account for example.
• Subteams are a nice abstraction to keep messages cryptographically seperate from the community
• Multiple channels

Cons

• Very small font in UI, not so good on the eyes
• No autocompletion for emojis or mentions (yet)
• Keybase is (sort of) invite only
• Teams capped at 1k members
• No reactions
• No way to make "locked" channels, e.g. for announcement channels

[ChaceHunter]

Hey @Smokyish, confirming that Colony is on board with migration to a new communications platform as well. Thanks for putting this all together.

[Smokyish]

@ChaceHunter That's great, added Colony to the list!

[ara4n]

Another datapoint on the Riot side: we've just updated https://matrix.org/blog/2017/09/19/matrix-riot-for-cryptocurrency-communities/ with details of a quick demo showing develop branch of Synapse running a version which disables invites to DMs and rooms, and provides a hook for content filtering (currently rejecting all messages containing the word SPAM). You can check it out at https://phishfree.riot.im

[onbjerg]

Just a quick aside to my list on Keybase Teams: Announcement channels will be supported in a future update. Most of the other points are merely cosmetic (except for the invite only part and the hard cap - but both are planned to be removed anyway).

[ara4n]

Another datapoint from Riot: there seems to be some confusion over communities/groups in Riot. Right now, anyone can run their own matrix server instance (or we can run it for you if you ask nicely :) which provides a pretty good community experience: the server has its own room list, user list, you can autojoin a set of rooms etc, and you can define whatever antiphishing rules are needed for that server. This is basically the same model as RocketChat etc, and it’s available right now today, plus it ALSO has the advantange of federating with other servers as needed.

Now, separately, the groups/communities support which is coming in the next few weeks lets you define communities within or across existing servers - rather than the simpler solution above. But the point is that we do have communities equivalent to Slack/Discord/MM/RC today anyway if you simply use your own Matrix server(!!)

[mdtanrikulu]

Here is a little modification of Rocket Chat. It has role based URL-Blocking (and IP with/without port) feature basically to avoid spam bots (DM included).

A simple demo;

Fork is here on block_url branch.

[engelgabriel]

Thank you, community, for reaching out to us with your detailed requirements. Since our meeting, we have been planning, and working day and night on improving Rocket.Chat in anticipation of your migration. We continue to welcome your input and generous support in making Rocket.Chat the choice collaboration platform for cryptocurrency communities.

Today, Rocket.Chat is excited to announce a strategic alliance and partnership with MetaCert in the development of Rocket.Chat for Cryptocurrency Communities. This sector-specific version of Rocket.Chat will have all the features that you demanded, PLUS MetaCert’s enterprise-grade security features baked-in “out of the box”, including familiar security bot, compliance monitoring, web link archival, world-class phishing and malware detection, and for the very first time Direct Message validation and protection. Given that MetaCert can protect DMs, we would like to invite the community to comment on whether we should protect DMs, or disable them by default.

We anticipate the official release of Rocket.Chat for Cryptocurrency Communities for the first quarter of 2018, with access for early adopters beginning the fall of 2017.

Rocket.Chat for Cryptocurrency Communities will carry the same liberal MIT open source source licence as the current community version of Rocket.Chat.

[ara4n]

@engelgabriel the Rocket.Chat GIF demo looks cute :) Perhaps the bottom line here is that both options (Rocket.Chat or Riot) can work and folks should use whatever resonates best for them, bearing in mind the different trade-offs of both. And hopefully any fragmentation can eventually be conquered by getting all the systems jacked into Matrix!

On the Riot side, the content & invite filtering stuff landed in Synapse on Tuesday, and we're not going down the corporate path but instead hooking it up to FOSS antiphishing stuff like the logic in https://github.com/PhABC/antiScamBot_slack/blob/master/plugins/AntiScam.py. Of course folks would also be welcome to hook it up to MetaCert or whatever if that floats their boat - it's trivial to shove stuff in the spamcheck.

[claptrapxl]

hey there @Smokyish , Santiment (3000++ users) will be supporting this initiative. Slack's recent upgrade is a clear security risk to the crypto community. Enough is enough.

Much thanks to PhABC for pointing me to this discussion.

[engelgabriel]

@ara4n the Rocket.Chat GIF demo looks cute indeed :) Thanks @mdtanrikulu for sharing!

[5chdn]

Rocket.Chat would be a nice front-end for Matrix.Org :-D

[gnouts]

@5chdn could be nice :)

some interesting bridges ...
https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-appservice-rocketchat
https://github.com/exul/matrix-rocketchat
https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge

[ffmad]

A good thing to do for everyone that has a PAID team in Slack, is to mention Slack on twitter and say you will quit Slack because of the display name feature and the war against open communities.

Until now the only great alternative (UX/UI) I've seen compared to Slack is Discord. Their rights management is incredible.

[PhABC]

@engelgabriel, I agree with @ara4n. For things like URL filtering and additional moderation tools, I think FOSS is best. Metacert have been pretty agressive with their adoption campaign and I think some projects were left with a bad impression of their productand approach. In addition, their solution isn't as secure as simpler options imo. In general, I think it would be better to disallow DMs by default for now (as long as we can control this in settings) and then later unroll some filtering/monitoring tools for DMs after testing them thoroughly.

[Smokyish]

Announcing Our Migration To An Open Source Messaging Platform
Aragon will migrate to Rocket Chat along with 10 other Ethereum projects

Today we are announcing the plan of several Ethereum based projects to migrate to the open source messaging platform Rocket Chat.
Aragon will be migrating our community out of Slack and onto Rocket Chat in the next couple of weeks.

https://blog.aragon.one/announcing-our-migration-to-an-open-source-messaging-platform-420b25e74284

[ara4n]

okay; /me -> ensuring that Matrix provides a fabric which connects both Riot & Rocket.Chat users, so that in the end folks can safely use whatever frontend they prefer :)

[PhABC]

Just to be clear @ara4n , I think every crypto project loves what you are doing and what the Matrix protocol stands for. I am sure people will be happy to contribute to you and your team so that you can collaborate with Rocket.Chat :).

[izqui]

Huge +1 to @PhABC.

@ara4n Matrix is an incredibly important piece of infrastructure for the new web. Thanks so much for all the work and help these weeks. Wishing the very best!

[ryancharleston]

This is awesome to see! You can add Sweetbridge to this list - I'm their social/community manager. A couple weeks ago I finished setting up and customizing our instance of Rocket Chat which you can find at chat.sweetbridge.com

[ludmila-omlopes]

That's great @ara4n, I think it's really important that we converge our efforts in order to build with more efficiency a safer messaging environment for our community

[5chdn]

Parity moved away from Slack to Rocket, and then from Rocket to Riot. I hope you feel comfortable with Rocket Chat, and wish you all the best with that decision, but I can't hide my disappointment, just tried to make you comfortable with skipping the intermediate step completely. 😞

The communication stack and protocol developed by Matrix is just perfect for our needs. All what's lacking is more usable interface, but there are multiple options already in development. And that's what's so sad about Rocket. If you use Rocket, you will ever use Rocket, no alternatives. But if you use Matrix, you can use what ever interface suits you best (Vector/Riot, Matrix web, Nheko, Weechat, ... your frontend here). And since you already said, you wish to contribute to development according to our needs, why not something custom for Matrix or improving Riot? Just my 50 wei. ❤️

[ludmila-omlopes]

@5chdn As I replied to you at Reddit check @ara4n message above about his plans for Matrix supporting Rocket =)

[luisivan]

I just deleted @paulfwalsh comment from here because I'm tired of someone trying to impose their proprietary solution down our throats. We precisely want to migrate to an open source solution so we don't have to give permissions to random third parties to read everyone's DMs, filter everyone's links, etc. We're in a free market so feel free to try to sell your product as hard as you can and using all possible tactics that you can but this isn't the place for it. On the other hand, we welcome your apologies. In the spirit of openness, giving new chances makes sense. This is just a bad channel for that.

[blitzio]

Well said @luisivan thank you.

[sull]

Interesting discussion.

Fwiw, our obscure crypto project announced a month ago that we are leaving Slack and entering the Matrix. Though the plan for Rocket.Chat and Metacert sounds great too. Matrix just resonates with us more and is a very flexible protocol not just a "chat product". We are now building on Matrix as well.

Also, the censorship drama was sad to see. Lighten up, we are all in this together.

[Smokyish]

I wanted to keep this issue open in case other projects were interested in following the plan of moving to an open source alternative or discussing this subject, but this is getting out of hand, won't tolerate being attacked on a completely off-topic issue, which is why I unfortunately must go ahead and close this. This proposal was a huge success, thanks everyone who participated! Looking forward to pooling resources together to ensure a smooth transition.

[fvsegarra]

Hey guys,
I'm Fran, from Internxt. Due to the continuous phishing attempts going on in slack and slack's unwillingness to do anything to solve this, we're also joining this movement!

[timdierckxsens]

hi @luisivan

Regarding your comments

"We could work on some short-term fixes to keep Slack working. But long-term wise, I think trusting the fate of all our communities to a proprietary service developed by a startup that clearly doesn't care about our use case doesn't seem like the best idea."

And

"Our idea was to join forces with other 5-6 projects and pool some funds to hire someone full-time to work on Rocket.Chat and address our needs, not work on it alone.

We could work on some short-term fixes to keep Slack working. But long-term wise, I think trusting the fate of all our communities to a proprietary service developed by a startup that clearly doesn't care about our use case doesn't seem like the best idea."

---

This is exactly the use case for why we are building FundRequest. Fundrequest is a platform to incentivise and reward a(n) (open source) community.

Our alpha/demo is almost ready and our presale is scheduled for tomorrow.

We are moving quickly to support you guys as soon as possible!

[luisivan]

Hey @timdierckxsens we're looking for a messaging platform, not sure how something that incentivizes open source contributions fits in here

[timdierckxsens]

@luisivan Yes I am aware.

Here you were mentioning that you were working together with 5-6 projects and might pool funds to hire someone full-time to work on rocket.chat to address your needs.

In this sense I would say that you should be able to create issues in the Rocket Chat repository and add funds linked directly to your issue/bug/feature request(s). If your issue is a common issue for multiple projects then funds can be added to the same issue to make the reward more worthwhile.

A community member supporting Rocket Chat would then rewarded for solving your issue. Saving you the hassle of hiring a dedicated individual and at the same time give back to the community.

[luisivan]

Oh, gotcha @timdierckxsens

[cyclops24]

+1 to RocketChat

[ara4n]

Fwiw, on the Riot/Matrix side we just completed a port of @PhABC's slackbot over to being an antispam module for Synapse: https://github.com/matrix-org/antiscam, which will be shipped in Synapse 0.23 due in the next few days. (@PhABC: would be good to chat about how to keep this in sync going forwards, as obviously it suffers a bit from copypasta atm, but the original slackbot code is very entangled with Slack specifics).

[Blocklancer]

+1 to RocketChat
Blocklancer also supports the proposal for RocketChat
Community: 790 members

[PhABC]

Can chat anytime @ara4n ! Ping me on Riot : PhABC