[Raion]

I'm proud to announce that within a week, we are likely to have ourselves a fully featured, convenient, IRIX-compatible and federated chat system using two protocols in tandem.

Allow me to give a brief overview:

chat.irixnet.org has been moved to a new instance I am still working on. There are a few things we need to finish, but things are pretty damn close.

The two protocols are Mattermost, which we trialed earlier this year, and XMPP (Jabber). 

Mattermost is robust, discord-like, performant and clean. It has a number of clients, including Matterhorn, which is not yet IRIX compatible but could be in the future.

XMPP is a very common protocol that already has IRIX compatibility.  We are using the Openfire implementation, which I have prior experience with from my days at InMotion Hosting in the early 2010s

Currently, I've bridged three pairs of channels with matterbridge. We can add more at any time. You can use one or the other, or both.

We've neither fully ironed out the rules nor requirements, but for those of you who have been here at least 30 days and have a history of active participation, you will be able to get an account. Note that our XMPP instance will not allow pre-existing XMPP users to connect to the multi-user group chats. That will require you to register an XMPP account on our servers. This is for security reasons, and to eliminate issues that we had with discord or IRC, where raiding was possible.

Speaking with Kaigan, he believes in the value of an eventual SSO -- the reason I've shied away from this is complexity and the fact our services can't all speak the same protocols and LDAP, Oauth etc. are all really hard to get *right*.  I'm open to it, but that'd be the first time we'd need to actually do a migration at scale.

Stay tuned.