In order to improve and modernize its online communication infrastructure, Blender chat is migrating to a new platform! On August 20th, Blender chat will be moved to a new system and a new domain. What will change:
Blender Chat will be moved from https://blender.chat to https://chat.blender.org and officially presented as the real time communication channel for the Blender community of contributors.
Existing user accounts and public channels will be migrated. Chat messages will not be migrated.
To facilitate the transition, the blender.chat domain will remain active (and read-only, with a prominent message mentioning the new domain) for a few weeks.
After that, redirects will be put in place so that blender.chat channels are easy to find on chat.blender.org
The chat system will change from Rocket Chat to Element (Matrix). While the user experience will be similar, we expect issues and will actively work to mitigate them as the migration happens.
You can get a functional and visual preview of the new chat by visiting chat.staging.blender.org and logging in with your Blender ID.
Yesss! I love it! I’ve been very vocal about this change and I’m really glad about the decission. Hopefully Matrix Calls land this year and we can also replace Meet as well.
Yes, but it’s kind of a “hack” using Matrix widgets. And don’t get me wrong, I think Jitsi is good and I’ll always support FOSS over proprietary (Jitsi over Meet), but having calls being seamless and native in your phone is a whole other story, which is what Matrix calls will allow.
I was looking at blender.chat recently and personally I found the Rocket Chat experience to be pretty confusing and unpleasant. I am pleased to see this move to Element which at a glance already looks much better.
You may be misunderstanding- Blender chat is not a generalized public discussion forum like BlenderArtists, it’s for Blender developers to discuss development primarily. It’s not a replacement or alternative for places Blender users may congregate to discuss Blender generally. For that, you’d be better off looking into the Blender subreddit, or there’s a variety of unofficial community Discord channels about Blender
I know, but a single synchronous channel isn’t a 1:1 replacement for a conversationally structured asynchronous forum. It’s an apples to oranges situation. But I’m veering off-topic, so that’s all I’ll say about that
This statement reads as if it’s self evident that rocket-chat is not modern and needs to be improved.
It would be good to reference what didn’t work exactly, personally it always worked well for me.
Nothing against the change, it may help other projects, even the rocket-chat project - to mention what the problems were exactly.
There are quire a few of things on different levels. The most user-facing things I can think of:
Mobile client does not work.
Reportedly, email notifications do not work reliably.
History retention is acting weirdly.
Every night the server side component rolls a d20, and if its below 17 it crashes.
A lot of other paper-cuts, UX issues, quirks, etc.
Some of the issues might be solved by an upgrade, but over the ears the experience is that upgrades are taking more and more time consuming, and require a lot of maintenance and follow-ups.
The policy on how old of a server side components are supported by the mobile client, does not help either. For mobile to work server needs to update very often (and see the maintenance cost note below).
So, instead of trying to fix the Rocket Chat, a decision was made to switch to a more commonly used platform, which also feels to have a better level of maintenance, QA, and things like that.
Very nice! One question I didn’t quickly find an answer for: will I be able to join from my own Matrix homeserver over federation? Or is this a non-federated homeserver which can only be used by logging in directly with Blender ID?
Fair enough, but I thought one of the big draws of Matrix was the federation? On the other hand, the last time I checked, logging in and recovering your previous session was difficult with no guarantee of success, so anything that makes that better is good.
I still remember the old IRC days, so tying stuff down to the Blender ID still feels a bit weird to me
