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 
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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.
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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.
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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?
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We will not federate. So you will only be able to login with your Blender ID
blender.chat appears down to me atm, as well as the new site.
I’m curious, what are the reasons behind this?
Federating adds maintenance and development overhead, and we wish to offer login using only Blender ID.
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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
Awesome! That Rocket chat thing always felt a bit anachronistic anyway.
Are there plans to add a theme that looks more “in line” with the one on devtalk and projects.blender.org?
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That currently is a user preference setting
the one that is close to Devtalk theme I think “Discord Darkk”
Thanks, I know. There are plenty of themes available there. I can live with whatever dark theme there is. But it would “feel” a lot more consistent if there was a 100% matching one.
BTW: I would prefer a neutral dark grey theme instead of a slight blue tinted one anyway. But that’s another topic.
PS.: Blender’s default UI “Blender Dark” by @pablovazquez is perfectly neutral grey and I love it! Grey can be such a beautiful and inspirational color 
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It seems to work seamlessly for me. The subscribed channels were automagically added to my interface, pretty cool. Matrix is only going to get better, I think this is generally a good bet.
Anyone experiencing such cramped UI on mobile devices ?
Seems like the sidebars won’t collapse leaving little room for the thread.
Hi all,
A quick message to confirm that we consider the migration complete. Special thanks to @bartvdbraak for working hard on this, and to everyone else who helped with the transition.
All channels (and their members) have been migrated, with a couple of exceptions. The “general” channel has been migrated, but its users have not. The “support” channel has not been migrated.
Both channels had a very high number of inactive users, and very low/scattered activity. We keep the “general” channel, and people are free to join to discuss general topics. When it comes to user support, we should advertise the support page on blender.org instead.
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The current theme selection comes directly from aaronraimist/element-themes.
Maybe someone will create a PR with the “Blender Dark” colorset at some point
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Tell the browser to show the desktop version of the site…
I created a FAQ where I’ve compiled all questions that I received regarding the chat with their answers from the past few weeks:
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