I heard about matrix for the first time a few months ago when mozilla officially shut down its irc servers and switched to matrix.
I'm really bad at documenting ideas, but I'm open to any and all questions.
Matrix is decentralized federated (nice fun buzz words again) chat system.
Vs IRC:
IRC has a large barrier of entry these days. Most people don't have irc clients anymore. No persistent logging. Really hard file sharing. No notifications. IRCCloud makes this simple, but costs money.
Matrix
Matrix has a matrix-ircd gateway to let irc clients talk to matrix, as if it was an irc server
Vs Gitter:
Gitter is pretty much abandonware these days, it was acquired by gitter and not much has been done since. They recently added threads, but I find them horrible, hard to track.
Notifications are inconsistent, they are pretty decent on desktop, but non existent on mobile.
Gitter is good in the sense that its low barrier to entry. You just need github, gitlab, or twitter account. And most people have that already.
Vs Slack:
* Can hook up to our jenkins ldap auth, so no need for extra accounts (if self hosting)
Useful features:
* Federated, people could use jenkins account (if self hosting) or
matrix.org, or any other server (for example I self host
chat.g4v.dev)
* Flair - like reddit, you can get various labels beside your names in channels, you could have "core-contributor" or "plugin-author" or whatever else we wanted
* I almost have helm charts for all basic features if we want to self host
* Bridging for most major services (gitter, irc, slack, etc) inside a matrix channel with 2 way communication. It will likely show up as bot on gitter side, but does work
as an example on gitter jenkinsci/docs