A German school forked FluffyChat, a Matrix messenger

Re:A German school forked FluffyChat, a Matrix messenger by nani8ot on Monday January 24, 2022 @09:28AM (#30057954)

I do think a fork was the right decision, after reading their reasoning and what changes they made. The client-changes sound great for young children in a school context and not federating is imo a necessety in this case to protect the users — we are talking about children in elementary school!

They also clearly stated which software to use and where the upstream is. Other schools/uiversity pay for a proprietary system, which can't be used the moment the company goes out of business (Happened to my uni — now we are using a 8 years old web-interface which can't be updated because the company no longer exists.

NOT good is, that they are still using 0.26.1, instead of 0.40+ or the new 1.0. There version is 10 months old, which is bad because FluffyChat developed extremely fast all this time. Hopefully they will make a big upgrade every year, else they won't profit from incoming changes like native voice calls, like in Discord, instead of using jitsi. I just hope they updated synapse properly...

Edit: typo

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:A German school forked FluffyChat, a Matrix messenger by thisisnacho on Monday January 24, 2022 @10:20AM (#30058682)

We've done some small changes in the last months which I didn't merge yet, but we are indeed stuck in 0.26.1 - I was working on an update to 0.41 but got stuck with some navigation stack errors and notifications not working. Hopefully the interview will help us find someone more savvy than me who can tackle this - I guess someone who knows flutter could solve those problems in a matter of minutes.

And yes, synapse is being updated properly by someone who knows what he is doing :-)

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:A German school forked FluffyChat, a Matrix messenger by stevenicr on Monday January 24, 2022 @06:22PM (#30065561)

" synapse is being updated properly by someone who knows what he is doing" - you are lucky to have such help (or the knowledge to do so if it's you!)!

I've perused the needed changes a few times as I try to prepare for an upgrade from 1.26 to current.. I'd love to have some mercenary help with the process - especially if it could be not just upgraded synapse, but also transfer to a new server and made to work with Debian 11 - (mine is currently on Debian 9) -

If nothing else I'll be exploring the porting / moving of the postgres DB to a new datacenter with larger HDs and trying to connect the syanpse from the old DO drop.. then try to move the rest -

My first three experiences with installing synapse makes me worry that I'll give up and nuke the whole thing and try to start with a fresh new install and see if that even works on the new box.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:A German school forked FluffyChat, a Matrix messenger by jeroenhd on Monday January 24, 2022 @09:50AM (#30058260)

Their Gitlab repo might just be behind, because the latest change to the source code was about 11 months ago. I think they stopped maintaining the application.

The Google Play link 404s for me, but that may just be a region restriction causing confusing Google error messages rather than a maintenance problem.

There's a separate Gitlab project for a more recent version that saw more changes since: https://gitlab.com/hermanncoders/hermannpost-0-41-4

Edit: the CI/CD refers to this F-Droid repository: https://fdroid.nordgedanken.dev/ where seemingly more recent versions of the fork can be found. I don't know where the source for those versions is, though, I suppose the most recent version is not open sourced as of yet. It's GPL-3 software so you could ask for the source if you really want it, of course.

[ Parent | on HN ]