The Grand Unified Theory is the codename of a project to offer several ways to communicate and bridge them together.

Candidates are IRC, Discord, Mattermost and Telegram.

Context

To create a community in 2020, a lot of doubt exists about the relevance of IRC as the privileged way to exchange instantaneous messages.

We see open source and free culture communities creating alternatives on private solutions like Slack (Laravel, Spinnaker, RabbitMQ) or Discord (Rust). They generally note a more friendly onboarding approach (no need to download and configure a specialized client).

Recently, @inidal made a case for Telegram. Arguments were low memory, group chat, no need for a web page (native clients seems also an argument for IRC).

Finally, open source alternative to Slack exist, like Mattermost. They should be priviled.

Some communities don't made choice: TCL uses XMPP and IRC while Lobjan uses Telegram, Slack, Discord, Mattermost and IRC.

Research

Performance. Create a way to benchmark lag between medium for messages to be relayed from one to another platform.

Evaluation of current state of art. Evaluate if matrix.org could be used as a glue or if it introduces a latency and vendor-locking.

Architecture. Compose a modular framework to bridge only or offer other services like archiving, search.

Deliverables

The following deliverables will be provided:

• A framework to be used by any community willing to create a bridge
• A user guide with an howto documentation to use it
• A developer guide to explain how to extend it.
• A set of Docker images to allow quick deployment without installing dependencies
• Instructions to build it manually (be it a guide or an Ansible/Salt/Puppet/Chef/whatever solution) will be available.

Reference implementation

The framework will be implemented for Nasqueron.

That will allow to eat our own dog food and to document how it can be deployed.