We’re happy to announce that GNOME Chat has officially moved to Matrix. This move comes as a result of our chat evaluation initiative, launched in February of 2021 to help solve the fragmentation in our chat communications. During the course of that initiative, we collected feedback from our community about which chat platform they were most comfortable on, features they needed to help their team communications, and which instant messaging system they preferred to use for their work with GNOME. Our survey results showed the majority of community members used mainly Matrix and IRC and overall had positive opinions and a willingness to move to Matrix over any other platform.
To learn more about our survey results take a look at this blog post from Foundation Board member Thibault Martin, in which he breaks down answers and outcomes in more detail.
Our main goals for a unified GNOME Chat platform are to create a space where our community can work together, can communicate across all teams with ease, and provide a low barrier of entry and a welcoming environment to newcomers. After hearing from our community we believe that the best solution is Matrix and an IRC Bridge.
We’re already up and running! Through our GNOME Matrix instance, you can now explore many chat rooms and find different groups based on your interest or team. Join us on chat through any Matrix platform of your choice: https://matrix.to/#/#community:gnome.org.