Banquets and Barbecues



1-1 woes






A way out?





The Banquet and the Barbecue







Fracturing Fractal





Messages and Discussions






18 thoughts on “Banquets and Barbecues”

  1. This is an interesting direction, but one of my most common use cases is switching from a public, high traffic chat room or a team chat room to 1-1. This is either (a) to move a detailed conversation about a technical topic to a space with less noise; (b) to have a personal conversation; or (c) to get a quick response from someone who may not be in a shared chat room but is logged into the chat client.

    1. The additional friction of switching windows is definitely a concern, but I think if the two apps are integrated well (e.g. allowing you to start a 1-1 from a contact in the Banquet app) it shouldn’t be a huge problem. It’s a trade off, but I think the more focused interfaces in both apps should more than make up for it.

  2. I’ve read so many blog posts about this barbecue vs banquet idea.

    As a long time slack/discord user I really don’t understand what the problem is.

    Slack has a long list of rooms/users and it works OK admittedly it is not great.
    I think the better model to follow would be Discord. You have two views “banquet” being the default and “barbecue” being a click away.

    I really think it will be a mistake to make two apps for messaging. I constantly flick between group and direct messaging and it works fine in discord. Having two apps is just going to confuse people who are used to having both modes of communication in a single tool.

    1. I can second this.

      I believe that Discord is the gold standard for messaging apps in many ways. Studying it closely would be of great value to any team developing an alternative. If it were an auditable, open source project I wouldn’t look elsewhere.

  3. Nice! My problem with Riot is indeed, that it tries to replace Signal (and the evil twin WhatsApp) with some kind of IRC. Therefore it offers a complicated and bloated UI. What I need for communication in general is a “barbecue” and for coordination a “banquet”. I think your on the right path, either seperate applications or a really clever UI (maybe two vertical panes aside, one with rooms and one with people?).

    But please, don’t use a generic names. It’s really hard to remember the name of an application or even tell people to start something, if the name is just an generic one. The .desktop-files make live so easy:
    GenericName=Inspector for Gtk-Toolkit

    R. I. P. GtkParasite :(

  4. I’d say the reason why Matrix is not used to replace WhatsApp and Telegram is because the mobile apps of WhatsApp and Telegram are really great compared to the mobile apps for Matrix.

    1. I agree that this is an important factor, but I think before we can build great Matrix apps, we need to solve the fundamental problem that the protocol was designed to do more than a single app can handle.

      It’s a lot harder to compete with Telegram when you need to also support IRC/Slack/Discord-style use cases.

      1. I live in around 10 technical focused Telegram Super Groups, have family and close friend groups, groups created for our work “sprints” and 1 on 1 conversations.
        Personally, I do not find the UI hard. I believe most people do not find WhatsApps UI hard either.

        I do agree however that for this to take off, most matrix implementing apps need to sort of agree on a user interface, kind of how like all email applications sort of behave in a similar way.

        1. 10 is nothing, in barbeque land (e.g. GNOME IRC), many people have dozens or even hundreds of rooms :)

          But even with 10 highly active groups, you’re going to have a hard time keeping track of slow-but-important groups or 1-1s, because the high-traffic ones drown out everything else.

  5. I generally agree with Derek: a single button to switch the sidebar from groups to individuals would be enough, and simpler, than using two separate apps.

    But if you decide to go with this, I definitely think the clearest division between apps would be individual vs all group chats, regardless of their openness or number of users. “Messages” Vs “Discussions” sounds exactly like that.

  6. I also think this is an interesting direction, but I feel it’s maybe not the best to split it up into two programs with a clear cut without some overlap.

    In some way Matrix has the oppertunity to merge both IRC-style chat and IM-style chat into one program. Before this was mostly tied down to protocols even if there was no real limitation in the procotols. For ex. I have 1:1 conversations on IRC, but if it become more private it’s usually moved over to a more private IM-program (before XMPP, nowadays Matrix). I do like to have a very private space with people that are close but the divide is note made on the basis of if it’s 1:1, smaller-group-chat etc or not. So both programs need to be able to handle 1:1 (People) and public rooms/private rooms. I also wonder how you would handle forwarding/sharing of messages when you have to switch between apps. I feel it’s not that often that you actually add people to some kind of “private” list. But it’s still important to have that divide.

    Maybe it could be a setting to etiher automatically move all 1:1 chat to Messages, or that you do it manually by tagging them with “Private”/”Friends”. If every 1:1 chat would show up in Messages, it would be messy for me and divert me from the task at hand. For ex just having a shorter conversation with someone from a public room for a short while. In both apps you could have “Favourites”. An both apps you should always be able to easily share messages between all your contacts/rooms.

  7. Instead of splitting the same app into 2 similar apps, why not just keep Fractal and do the separation in the app itself? You could for example have a tab-view. Number of unread messages are displayed in the tab that is not in focus. And if wanted the user can drag the tab out of the window to create 2 separate windows, similar to the old Gimp. I think that would be a better option than having two too similar apps with different names etc..

    1. No, because splitting them allows us to optimize the UI in both apps for the respective use case, which benefits both apps.

      Splitting them allows us to have power user features to manage huge message volumes in the Banquet app, while keeping the Barbecue one clean and simple.

  8. I disagree splitting the chat apps is the right solution. Would just lead to confusion for end-users.

    I could see a separate UI for 1:1 chats vs group chats being useful.

  9. Simple.

    Chat list:
    * Start with listing three groups and two movable space dividers between them.
    * By default list 1-to-1 attentive chats in the first group, 1-to-2 up to 1-to-5 chats in the middle, and one-to-many babbling chats in the third group.
    * Allow the user to manually move conversations into another group.
    * As long as the movable dividers are not pinned to a position and the total list thength allows it, the deviders may move freely, so that all chats can be listed. Only limit a group’s list view by showing scrollbars for those groups that would take up more than their even share (one third) IF and ONLY as much as necessary (i.e. use space of other groups, if they did not reach their share).

    Chat view:
    * own messages in bubbles on the right side
    * all other messages on the left side with zebra striped backgroud to distinguish between messages
    * in groups, show sender names in messages

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