EDITS.WS

Tag: matrix

  • WordPress Launches Slack/Matrix Bridge

    WordPress meta contributors have just logged an important milestone in their efforts to explore replacing Slack communication with Matrix, an open source federated chat system. The team hosted a meeting on the Meta Slack channel and the corresponding #meta:community.wordpress.org Matrix room simultaneously, enabled by the project’s new Slack/Matrix bridge.

    The bridge allows users to follow the chat and participate from either Matrix or Slack, with messages showing up in real-time. It’s a tool that will make the transition easier as the WordPress project moves towards replacing Slack. The team is still in the process of importing the history for channels but the bridges are already in place for all public Slack channels/Matrix rooms.

    DM’s do not work over the bridge, although they work between Matrix users. The bridge doesn’t have access to anything that is private, and the historic data import into Matrix will only apply to public Slack channels. DMs and private channel history will not be ported over.

    Meta contributor meeting inside Chatrix instance with room switcher disabled

    The Matrix team has created a Gutenberg block that embeds a Matrix client called Chatrix, which can be added to any WordPress page/post or P2 blog, as shown in the screenshot above. This example can be accessed at https://make.wordpress.org/meta/chat/. WordPress.org users can sign in with SSO inside the block and authorize their accounts to connect:

    Now that the Matrix server is live at community.wordpress.org, WordPress users who want to attend team meetings or join rooms via Matrix can now do so using their choice of Matrix clients that support SSO. Logging in uses the same credentials as the WordPress.org account.

    “Compared to Slack this means a vastly simplified onboarding process,” Automattic-sponsored contributor Alex Kirk said. “Instead of waiting for an e-mail arriving at a special e-mail address, you set the server in your Matrix client to community.wordpress.org and click ‘Login with WordPress.org’ (the name of that button might vary by client).”

    As the channels’ history gets migrated over, Kirk said WordPress users will be automatically invited to rooms on Matrix that they have already joined from the Slack side. The team is planning to make more wide-scale public announcements after the Slack/Matrix bridge has demonstrated that it is running stable.

  • WordPress Contributors Continue Exploring Migration of Public and Private Messages from Slack to Matrix

    In early 2023, WordPress and Matrix contributors proposed a new Meta team subproject to explore replacing Slack communication with Matrix, an open source federated chat system. After the team’s most recent meeting, Automattic-sponsored contributor Alex Kirk published an update on the status of recent experiments in migration.

    After researching more on migrating public messages, Kirk said the team is now evaluating whether the Apache-2.0 licensed Slack Matrix migration tool could work for this project.

    “It operates on Slack export files and requires a fresh Synapse server,” Kirk said.

    “We haven’t yet been able to confirm whether it actually can import the messages and hope to be able to share more on the next meeting.”

    On the subject of migrating private messages, Kirk said the team is leaning towards ensuring users have the tools to save their own external archives.

    “For migrating private messages in DMs or private groups we’ve concluded that we won’t want to attempt their migration but will look into providing tools for achieving that,” Kirk said.

    “Here we’ve found that browser extensions exist which allow you to download your own Slack direct messages inside your browser as a text file. Possibly it’ll be our recommendation to use those tools to export the messages for yourself.”

    Kirk also addressed some accessibility concerns that WordPress Accessibility Team contributor Alex Stine raised during a meeting at the end of March:

    Slack is well supported and accessible to a very wide audience. Something that is not up for argument, a lot of these open-source/decentralized concepts are not accessible to all or most.

    The decentralized media world walks a fine line between a great thing and a lot of hypocrisy. On one hand, claiming to give users a voice, on the other hand, knowingly excluding users of assistive tech.

    Years of GitHub issues do not lie. Matrix has not been around all that long but there are plenty of other examples that have been around long enough…The Slack accessibility team is best in its class. They are constantly responsive and very engaged with users.

    Kirk linked to an article published by Mozilla accessibility engineer Marco Zehe titled How to use Element and Matrix with a screen reader. Mozilla replaced IRC with Matrix in 2020, identifying Matrix as an “excellent open community collaboration tool, with robust support for accessibility and community safety.”

    Zehe’s post is essentially a guide to help those using assistive technology find their way around Element and the Matrix Eco system more easily. It also highlights a few things that do not yet work well, including keyboard navigation for the members list and messages.

    “I hope some of these issues are no longer problems,” Stine said in response to Kirk sharing the article. “If they still are, this would be no doubt a far worse experience than Slack was in some of its worst times. The fact that users have to switch their screen reader modes just to have basic functionality support is not cool. Here is the way I see it. If modern apps do not follow a similar pattern for your OS to the point where you have to look up docs to figure out how to use it, it is probably too complicated and/or not accessible by my definition.”

    The question of whether it would be beneficial for the WordPress project to replace Slack communication with Matrix is still yet unanswered, but the initial response to the idea was overwhelmingly positive. More research into the logistics of migration will be a necessary part of the decision.

    The Matrix contributors proposing this new exploration will meet again on Wednesday, April 19, for the regularly scheduled bi-weekly meeting and plan to discuss the research on migrating messages from Slack.

  • WordPress Project to Evaluate Replacing Slack with Matrix Open Source Chat

    WordPress and Matrix contributors are proposing a new Meta team subproject that would explore replacing Slack communication with Matrix, an open source federated chat system. Matrix already powers a variety of communication tools, including Element, the most mature Matrix client – a universal chat app that is often described as “a Slack alternative.”

    In 2020, Automattic invested $4.6M in New Vector, creators of the Matrix open standard for decentralized communication. At that time, Mullenweg indicated his intention for Automattic to adopt Matrix-based tools and build bridges to WordPress.

    The contributors proposing this new exploration outlined a few of the major benefits of Matrix over Slack for the WordPress community’s official real-time communication tool. They contend that the Slack onboarding experience is difficult because it requires an invitation email to a WordPress-hosted email address and users have to identify the correct Slack workspace to join.

    The Slack client is also not the best communication tool for some local communities where users are more active on their mobile devices than desktops.

    “One of the benefits of Matrix is it supports free choice of clients, one of them being a client that is very similar to Telegram, called FluffyChat,” Automattic-sponsored contributor Alex Kirk said. “There are also particularly lightweight clients (called Hydrogen), a full featured client called Element (previously known as Riot), a client that is more like Discord called Cinny, CLI clients, and many more.”

    Kirk’s team has done some preliminary legwork in an effort to make a compelling case for the switch from Slack, including a Single-Sign On flow where OpenID Connect is used with WordPress as an authentication provider. New users would only need to authorize wordPress.org to send their username to the Matrix server.

    Kirk’s team has also made it possible to embed a Matrix chat into a Gutenberg block, powered by a plugin called Chatrix. It adds a Matrix client to WordPress pages through the Block Editor or as a popup.

    “This could even be set to a particular room, so that users can be asked to join a specific room or Make team by giving them a link to a particular WordPress(.org) page.,” Kirk said. “This could make taking part in Make WordPress teams much easier and possibly encourage more contributions.” 

    Should an open source project use an open source chat system if problems like onboarding can be fixed? Is Matrix a good fit for the WordPress project? Will it be able to provide the same or better reliability as Slack with third-party integrations that speed up contributors’ communication workflows? Are there other benefits like cost savings or features that Slack cannot accommodate? Can all the previous Slack content be migrated? These are important questions the newly formed meta sub-team aims to discuss by beginning bi-weekly meetings. Kirk is encouraging anyone who wants to take part in the meetings to comment on the Make.WordPress.org/Meta post.

    “In particular, we’d like to contribute our projects Chatrix and OpenID Connect Server to the WordPress project,” Kirk said. “Additionally, work with people of the community interested in Matrix to see which Slack integrations would need to be ported and how that could be done, as well as understand through testing with other WordPress teams how good or bad the experience is, either on its own, or comparing it to Slack.”