hpr2169 :: How I connect to the awesome #oggcastplanet on mobile
I give a quick overview of the challenges of IRC on the go and how Riot and Matrix solve them for me
Hosted by clacke on Thursday 2016-11-24 is flagged as Clean and is released under a CC-BY-SA license.
Tags: matrix, irc, federation, mobile, im.
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On HPR #2162 I mentioned that I'm connecting to freenode IRC using Riot and Matrix. Here I explain a bit of background to why, what Matrix is, and why you should use it too.
Quick-quick version
Just go to https://riot.im/app/#/room/#freenode_#oggcastplanet:matrix.org, click Join and you're on the channel! If you register a user there (or maybe on another instance, like @lambadalambda's https://matrix.heldscal.la/), you can then log in with the same username and password in the Android app and see all your joined channels there.
Correction to audio: Riot is on F-Droid. For some reason I couldn't find it at the time, even though it's clearly there, so I'm currently using the version from the Google Play Store. I hear that battery use may be an issue if you're independent from the evil GOOG.
Alternatives
Other ways of connecting to IRC over flaky or intermittent connections without losing context:
- ZNC
- In particular, check out this pretty elaborate ZNC-on-ZNC setup to solve the issue with having multiple devices that all want an independent scrollback buffer. I was just about considering setting up something like this when I discovered the Matrix bridge instead.
- One colleague of mine uses Quassel and loves it.
- Another colleague uses irssi ConnectBot or something similar and can't understand why anybody would want anything else.
Criticism
- Matrix is a big fat NIH, why not just use XMPP? (short pump.io discussion)
Fodder for further HPR episodes
- Man there are a lot of Slack alternatives out there. (pump.io post)
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