Improve real-time text communication channels for TPI and the Tor Community
During the All Hands retrospective (2023-10-11), some Tor contributors shared that onboarding and using IRC can be frustrating and painful experience. These problems are also seen and experienced throughout the broader Tor Community. I've witnessed this during Outreachy and GSoC internships, Community Team public meetings, and IRC meetings with partners. I believe we must improve our real-time text based comms.
We already started to improve our chat experience with Matrix bridge, but it's still not smooth enough:
- If you want to join some IRC private channels, you'll need to run some extra steps
- Sometimes the Matrix bridge fails or disconnects and you need to run these extra steps again
- Sometimes the Matrix bridge fails and you loose some messages
- Moderation issues
Instead of just replacing it with another random tool, we should review how different teams are using IRC, list major pain points, and which features we would like to have (or we need to fix), and then look for better options.
As this will impact the entire organization and the Tor Community, we should follow our voting process, i.e., write a proposal, call for a discussion period, try to reach a consensus or vote.