Add in-house matrix bridge - matrix.gitter.im
In light of Gitter going fully open source and more service-agnostic (no longer exclusive to GitHub) in the near future, I'd like to put in a feature request for a first class "matrix-bridge" project, equivalent to the irc-bridge for the IRC protocol.
Chat software is at a critical point right now.
-
Freenode is under the PIA umbrella. While I ultimately think this is a huge win for Freenode (yay for sustainable open source!) it does mean Freenode is a little less free than before. I trust the Freenode devs & PIA to continue to shepherd the Freenode project & community responsibly, but at the same time I firmly believe that competitive alternatives are the best way for any project to "stay true to itself".
-
Slack is a great tool (I use it every day for work), but it's not good for open source. No really, it's just not.
With Gitter going open source, backed by a truly open source company, Gitter could easily become the spiritual successor of Freenode. More user friendly; just as open; sustainable and, lastly, multi-protocol.
I'm aware of #1076 and matrix-appservice-gitter, but all of these solutions require a degree of setup that most projects can't be bothered with. By far the best way to make the Matrix protocol accessible would be to support it to the same degree that you already support IRC.