Hey. Im thinking about creating matrix client based on telegram. I think their UI/UX is one of the best among messengers. Plus their android app is open source.
I have to take couple of things in consideration, like: licensing, technical details and some more. Its very possible from the technical perspective and pretty unclear from the licensing/legal perspective (since they could change license any moment or even go private).
In this post i would mostly like to know if open source community even wants anything related to telegram. Not everyone likes it. The project would target mainly open source community and will be public as well.
So the questions: Do you think we would want it? And would you personally try it?
Thank you <3
EDIT: :V If you think its bad idea, please tell me. I see much of positive response (and i feel pretty happy about it), but i have to be real, so if you think im wrong or you see any problems, please speak up :)
Sorry, I’ve never used telegram and don’t typically use IRC type stuff because info is lost in the void, and I need time to collect my thoughts. I tried a matrix client around a year ago, but do not recall which one. I don’t use it often enough to have an app. I don’t like anything that keeps a persistent icon on my phone. I don’t even like the Andy WiFi and mobile data visible. IIRC the Matrix client I tried put an icon on my status bar, reduced my battery life substantially, and defaulted to notifications for nonsense.
I might use a matrix client if it were very light weight and didn’t intrude in any way. I would use it like SMS but for the internet. I’m weird though, like completely degoogled, use a whitelist firewall, and only accept messages and notifications of any kind if they are human messages by people in my contacts. I have a dozen FOSS apps total on mobile and do most things in browser… So probably not your best measure of user base, but no comments yet and I think what you’re doing is great.
Neither the Matrix clients nor servers are lightweight—largely by design. All of the clients take literal minutes to start up if you don’t use it regularly & chew thru data. Even if they managed to hide how slow syncing is, it is just being hidden & taking just as many resources in the background. The whole decentralized eventual consistency + chat history is permanent is a model that makes it this way. At least IRC understood the chat was ephemeral & the protocol—even v3—isn’t bloated.