The chat options have been a thorn in our side since day one. We initially went with an open source custom coded iteration of Matrix and Element. The reason was we were able to use Single Sign ON for authentication, eleminating the need for an additional username and password. It also offered end to end encryption, file sharing, private messaging, voice and video chat, mobile app, great notifications and more. The problem was many users could not figure out how to sign in. It just feels like it was overkill.
We considered Slack (too corporate) and Discord (Chinese owned) but both of those options we do not own the data and we could lose the account since we do not own the service. Currently we decided to code our system from scratch. We own the service and it can not be disabled, we can control the authentication from withing the website, the data is not shared with a third party and we have the ability to add any feature we want.
We are proud to introduce the new Sideband Chat. It is available to any signed in user. A few of the main features are audio notifications, 2 themes (light & dark), amazing threaded messaging, and excellent image sharing. We also added the private messaging and the tagging of users (both by username and callsign). We will soon be adding a voice channel for auido chat. The new Sideband Chat is active and available to all users now, it can be found under apps at the top of the page.
Over the next couple weeks we encourage all users to try it out and not only help identify mistakes in the code but also to suggest additional features to make it work the way you want.
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