Hi B2Geeks !
I have a proposal for you today 
As you can see, the telegram group is useful for instant chatting, but start to be a bit messy, with a lot of conversation at the same time (not easy to follow), too few history features, maybe too much noise for people wanting to have a quick overview of the discussions / who don’t have time to read 40 messages when them come back after only 1 day off-line.
There is also no email notification when you are quoted for instance (which can be handy for people that are not super-connected), and a non-uniform version depending of the system you use (webapp, b2g os, desktop app, android app…).
(Well, we could also say that the server is not free and that the messages are not encrypted until you click the right button on the android app)
That said, telegram seem to be far from the perfect tool for team communications.
Today I want to propose switching this channel to another tool, Mattermost, which is a free software providing an alternative to Slack.
Here is a quick list of the advantages, compare to our current Telegram Group (this means I will not list common features like private message):
- It’s multi-channel, so we could still have a channel for funny discussions and off-topic chat, while having a channel for each working group (which ease a lot the process of getting news on one subject)
- (fully) Free software, self-hostable
- The website is responsive, well working on a phone, a desktop app is also available
- No need of phone number to register (that can be blocking for some contributors)
- Join by invitation, or using an url (that can be changed if we have too much spammers, unlike telegram.me)
- It’s possible to join with email / gitlab account / or simply login + password (without email)
- Have an IRC bridge (used by Mattermost dev’ team) and the possibility to develop bridge with new applications
- Ability to create private groups - kind be useful to have private discussions with a group of people
- Ability to define key words that generate notifications (like @pseudo, meeting, breaking news, TODO, pizza…)
- (custom) Themes - including dark themes
- Clear conversation flow when replying to someone (a panel is opened on the side). It’s the same when someone use @yourpseudo
- Markdown editing
- Powerful research tool (“quotes”, message from someone, from some channel)
- (Optional) email notifications
If you wanna try it, I use this channel to test it: https://framateam.org/signup_user_complete/?id=wyt63r87ufgkpecfsqu5qh3xzo
To be honest, I really think it’s a great solution to replace telegram - which start to be really limited - for internal communication. But I submit to it to you B2Geeks to know what’s your toughs on this point.
One thing to note it that if we don’t change the tool right now, it will be a lot more difficult if we want to do it later, when we will be a lot more on the telegram group.
In case we all agree to choose this tool, we have still an issue: helping people to migrate from Telegram to Mattermost, and has we already spread the link in some communication channel (like in the Call for contribution) we can’t change instantly.
I have a proposal for migrating smoothly:
- first, change the list on the wiki/MDN to help new people to come to the right channel (or we keep the telegram link, saying that it is historical/deprecated)
- we setup the IRC bridge and the group channels
- we start spreading the new, especially to newcomers on telegram
Let’s say that we can do the change within 1 month, setting up everything (channels, IRC bridge,…) during 1 or two weeks, testing it deeply during 1 or 2 weeks, and after that starting to use it all the time.
One thing that can help the migration is to put Mattermost between IRC and Telegram (there is a telegram bridge), as a transition before removing the Telegram part.
We could also keep Telegram for off-topic chat + Mattermost for important discussions - but it feels like too much tool, like a double, IMHO.
What’s your toughs ? 