Replace Rocket Chat with self-hosted Gitter?

Infrastructure
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1

So RocketChat is nice and all but is it worth it to look into using a self-hosted instance of Gitter?

More or less just testing the water here to see other people’s opinions. No decision has been made, and nothing will be done until after GCI ends.

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I actually like RocketChat. A better mobile app would help, but it works fine like the IRC style chat. We are self-hosting RocketChat too, right? Gitter is fine too, but I don’t see the big advantage with it, and no big disadvantage with RocketChat to necessitate the move…

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The issue I have right now is Rocket Chat completely utterly lacks QA - for a company that sells hosting, for them to release something in the manner they did – bugs me to no end.

They broke theming, somehow…and I haven’t gotten a clear answer how to fix things. Our theme is still borked and on mobile, it doesn’t even show up anymore.

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Seems like busy work with out much clear benefit, to me…

5

FIgured it couldn’t hurt to ask.

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Mixxx just set up Zulip to replace our IRC channel and possibly email list too. We have only been using it one day and I’m loving it so far. It’s the only chat application I have come across that does anything notably different. The way it organizes conversations into two tiers (streams and topics) makes it easy to have many conversations going simultaneously without getting confused or being bothered by noise from messages you don’t care about. The server and client are under the Apache 2.0 license and Zulip offers free hosting for public free software projects as well.

As for Gitter, I posted my thoughts about that on the Mixxx forum.

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I’m not crazy about Rocket chat right now – but they’re trying.

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I attempted to use it (Zulip) at the GSOC summit and it was really bad, in my opinion. I was using the mobile app, however and have not seen the desktop. In anycase almost no one at the GSOC bothered to use it due to the mobile app issues, really poor interface design.

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The mobile apps are behind the web and desktop apps because they started them over from scratch with React Native only around a year ago. I find the Android app’s interface designed okay but sluggish. The design of the web and desktop apps is excellent though.