Hi all, couple of inputs from my side, with both a KDE and a freenode hat on:
First of all, I do agree that the situation is not great and could be improved. However, I doubt that "switching to a single product" / "abandon bridging" would really improve the situation. Projects that went that path, e.g. Mozilla, suffered from even more community fragmentation, because some people are not happy with $product for various valid reasons (forced registration, not-open, lack of well integrating or accessible clients etc.) This is something we wanted to avoid back when the discussion came up that did lead to the current situation. Also Matrix, from what I can see, seems to have bridging issues that do not include IRC, so e.g. bridging Telegram and Matrix directly might improve the situation, but not fully solve it. And while IRC is improving (and you are very welcome to participate e.g. in #ircv3 or #freenode-dev on freenode) two of the main pain points people mention (lack of an endless scrollback / offline history, uploading media directly) are unlikely to fully happen on freenode / IRC, due to both technical and privacy / legal reasons. There is very likely to be (offline) backlog, but it will be time-limited due to the above constraints. Not having these constraints means someone else (neither freenode nor probably KDE) has both the storage and the legal willingness to store that data, with all implications this brings (DSVGO, security and privacy, ...) These are usually profit oriented companies, and having to rely on these brings up some new issues. Some of these issues can be solved already though, various well improving bouncer solutions have been mentioned, and exchanging media / displaying it can be solved in the frontend, as some clients already do. It just means relying on an external service, but we already do that in other areas. On the XMPP / messenger end I can't really say much other than the situation being most likely not satisfactory, but as people around me stopped using these protocols and switched to (semi)proprietary solutions, so unfortunately did I. Kind regards, Christian