Connecting our chat comms (slack,matrix,hubl,etc.)

Hi folks, I remember there being a CoTech Slack and I think there are people still in there if I am not mistaken? Is it still used?

We’ve started chatting on a public matrix channel and that is going fine but it’d be nice to bridge the two together. That was discussed as a first step.

We also discussed then working to bridge Hubl and/or other places people lurk? IRC would also be good.

We’d then have a kind of “general” chat room where it would be handy to be able to reach each other for this and that without all having to migrate our chat infrastructure.

/cc @3wordchant

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Answers:

  • Yes there is a CoTech Slack: cotech-network.slack.com
  • its usage is extremely low. There appear to be 95 people on it, but I count only 7 messages this year on the whole instance.

I guess it would be perfectly safe to shut it down? (And a relief to some!)

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Good timing @decentral1se I have been doing some Slack clean up and got @chris to make me the owner last week as he was (but never uses Slack, I don’t think)

@asimong answers are correct - I changed the URL last week from tech-coops.slack.com - seemed sensible to have cotech in the name.

I also discovered that reason digital had their emails whitelisted so they could just join… and so a few did! I removed them cos RD aren’t a coop, though they are nice from what I know. It made me wonder how and why that was done.

Slack usage is low but it is my only way to privately (and quickly) message @chrislowis which I really like - the forum doesn’t do it for me on that front as it’s not native. That is a preference and based on the way I work so I’d prefer to learn more about bridging these different channels and allowing peopel to use what they are used to than closing down Slack.
There may have only been a few public messages but I have definitely used it for private ones so not always easy to tell what’s really happening…

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@aaron how many rooms are there in the CoTech Slack?

And can you disable threading per-channel or per-instance in Slack? Neither Matrix nor Hubl supports it, as far as I know.

My suggestion, depending on those answers:

  1. Bridge the '#cooptech:autonomic.zone CoTech Matrix channel with the CoTech Hubl and the CoTech Slack (whichever someone is available to help with sooner; Autonomic can do the Matrix side)
  2. Set up additional bridged channels (#cooptech:events, #cooptech:chatter, etc.) as needed
  3. Offer CoTech members access, on request, to bridge their own Rocketchat / Mattermost / Slack / whatever to the CoTech channels, to make it easier for their members to participate.

It seems that, while all the different platforms have different sets of features, there’s a core “text instant messaging” which it’d be super-useful to spread as widely as possible across our network. People being able to use their familiar tools, even with limitations (haven’t seen a bridge that supports reaction emojis yet :cry:), could really help with that.

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@3wordchant I’ll look into your questions, bit stacked right, but will get back to you!

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Opened an issue about this here: Bridge to CoTech Matrix (#22) · Issues · Infrastructure / prosody-modules · GitLab

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I guess you know about matter bridge GitHub - 42wim/matterbridge: bridge between mattermost, IRC, gitter, xmpp, slack, discord, telegram, rocketchat, twitch, ssh-chat, zulip, whatsapp, keybase, matrix, microsoft teams, nextcloud, mumble, vk and more with REST API (mattermost not required!) it could do the Slack<>Matrix bits.

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Yes! Looks like it might also handle bridging with Hubl, if we can work out how to access Hubl’s XMPP server :thinking: Do you have any experience or interest in running Matterbridge? I would be very down to have a little co-hack this coming week to try it out.

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I installed it on a Vserver, but haven’t had a chance to look at it. I’ll DM some login details if you want to have a play with it.

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@Sam_UK that’d be fantastic, thanks! I’m coordinating with Matthew Wild who’s given me some great tips on the XMPP / Hubl side – one question that’s come up is if CoTech is still intending to run an XMPP server (apparently a separate one would be useful?); Matthew says there used to be an instance of webarch / prosody · GitLab running on office.coops.tech but it’s not currently accepting connections.

@chris (or anyone) do you know if server is still meant to be up? If so, anything we can do to help get it going again? Or if not, any hints what the process would be for CoTech to decide to reinstate it?

The XMPP server was available for the JavaScript XMPP Chat Nextcloud app, but it wasn’t really used much so it was uninstalled a while ago I’m sorry to say.

The CoTech Hubl does have a XMPP server, can you connect to that?

@chris that’s super-helpful to know, thank you! (and also Today I Learned about that Nextcloud app, very interesting)

I believe (but this is really really not my area of expertise) that the bot needs to run on a separate XMPP server. Matthew said this:

… Since this bridge won’t be an actual Hubl user we’ll probably need to set up a separate XMPP host for that

This may be a good excuse for me to try making a Co-op Cloud package for Prosody (I started looking at packaging Snikket last week and ran away in fear, think it’s probably sensible to start smaller…)

@3wordchant were you offering to do this pro-bono?

It might be something that CoTech would consider funding. We’d discussed financing some issues but haven’t spent anything thus far - in terms of time we have invested probably around a week total in onboarding and I did a couple of days’ development on a refactor as a contribution from CoTech