Hi all,
for a while now, we've been discussing what to do about our Slack chat
service. It was very clear that we needed to do something: Our free plan
only kept a very short history, the non-free plan was pricey, and Slack
itself came with a lot of baggage (mostly related to privacy issues, and
the fact that the chat logs, even though we we couldn't see them, were
hosted on a server we don't own).
With the upcoming virtual GRCon, we wanted to get our chat solution
sorted out pretty quickly, which is one reason why we made an effort to
speed up the process and push out a replacement service ASAP.The bottom
line is that we will be moving to a Matrix-based solution. Go to
https://chat.gnuradio.org to join our Matrix server.
On https://www.gnuradio.org/blog/2020-04-27-moving-to-the-matrix/, you
can find the full announcement, and how we came to the conclusion of
choosing Matrix, as well as some details of how we're set up.
A personal note from a community standpoint: We have received some
criticism about how we made this decision without much community
involvement. And yes, that's true, we could have done this better. The
root cause, I would wager a guess, was procrastinating on the decision
until we really needed to sort this out. I would like to ask everyone
who wants to participate in the GNU Radio chat to give it a shot, and
provide constructive feedback other than "can we have giphys".
All things considered, Matrix brings a lot to the table: We can host it
ourselves (meaning, we have control over chat logs and the data), it is
an open standard, and thus supports many different clients, including
web and mobile, which help support people's different preferences and
personal requirements.
Again, for more details check out the blog post.
Cheers!
Martin