Announcing The Blender Community on Matrix.org!

I would like to announce the Blender Community on Matrix.org , an Open Source, decentralized chat protocol and server.

We currently have 32 users, but hope as more of the Blender Community (and the Open Source community abroad) adopts this new open technology that we will grow into a well known community where people can not only discuss, but also help one another more so than our small group can at the moment.

But enough boring stuff, lets get into why [matrix] is cool!

As stated before, Matrix is Open Source and decentralized, but what does that mean for the end user? Well firstly, rooms (similar to channels) can span across multiple servers, and have many different aliases. Don't like the address? Get a new one! All your current users won't have to worry that you changed (or added) a new one, but new users can join from any of the ones currently added to a room. This also means that if a server goes down, your room will still be there, usable to all users currently online.

The Matrix team also unveiled communities not too long ago, which allows you to group users and rooms together (with more functionality on the way!)

Rooms can be bridged with many other services, including IRC, Slack, and even Discord! (maturity of these bridges varies, but all of them are usable). We also have widgets, which are small HTML5 applets that can be embedded into rooms for things like cooperative document editing, videoconferencing (with Jitsi Meet), YouTube videos, or custom widgets of your own design.

But don't worry, we have bots too. Giphy search, Wikipedia, Github Integration, and RSS feeds just to name a few, and with a great community constantly developing new tools and projects based on it, it's sure to go uphill from here.

You can join Matrix right now from the official client, Riot ; no download necessary!

So from the room admin, I hope to see (at least some of you) there :-)