motivation

The one mobile messaging service that shall not be named destroyed the world of "unified communication" by constructing a walled garden in recent years although there was a bright outlook with XMPP/jabber in before bundling all communication by providing an open standard and especially transports. I would like to revisit the state in 2017 and combine my text chat based communication needs from different end devices, namely my work notebook and my private smartphone.

To implement OTR function on IRC client, to make chatting private. pure-python-otr (potr) has lack of maintenance for a long time and been considered as "potentially insecure". So I will call libotr5 directly with C.

Matrix.org is a project to create a protocol and server implementation to replace IRC. Unlike closed tools like Slack, or even open Slack clones like Rocket.chat, Matrix is not focused on a web-client only, but on the protocol to cover all types of clients (text, desktop, web), it is federated (no single server), and it covers good IRC integration (the public matrix server is even on Freenode), and it adds features that Slack clones have like persistent history, pictures, etc.

GitLab provides a bridge to connect to Gitter using an IRC client. The source code is at https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitter/irc-bridge/