How to link to a Fedora Chat matrix room

Project Discussion
1

This isn’t a policy, it’s just documenting something.

If you are in a room and want to send it to someone and pick “Copy Link” from the invite menu, you will get a link like this:

If you follow that link, you’ll be invited to join with various clients, but none of them are the chat.fedoraproject.org web client. But, if you add ?web-instance[element.io]=chat.fedoraproject.org to the end, et voilà.

I have an issue in with the Element Web project to make these links be the default (Configure trusted web instance to use with "Copy room link" to get `matrix.to` permalink to point people back to our own client · Issue #19082 · vector-im/element-web · GitHub), but I don’t think that’ll happen soon. So in the meantime, make sure to add the magic incantation when sharing links (and especially when documenting them).

6 Likes
2

Thanks for the info!

Out of curiosity, is this instance permanent and viable? I’d like to switch to it.

I just signed up and it’s working very well so far.

3

Yes, it’s permanent. It’s basically a soft-launch at this point (see Official Fedora Chat launch checklist).

4

Do you have any guidance for when we should and when we shouldn’t direct people towards Fedora’s infra? I’m inclined to think we would always want to encourage potential contributors to create Fedora accounts and use the Fedora systems. But maybe there are times/reasons that we don’t want to do that?

5

I think in general we want to point to our own infra. That has the best experience in automatically joining people to the Fedora spaces, and shows our code of conduct.

6

I just tested this link in an incognito window and I noticed that the first link is actually Open in app rather than Open on chat.fedoraproject.org and the first link didn’t seem to work for me on Fedora Linux 35 (it popped up a prompt for xdg-open which didn’t do anything when I clicked on it). Is this normal or is something wrong with my system? Maybe direct links to https://chat.fedoraproject.org/ would be better than these https://matrix.to/... links?

7

The problem with this URL is that it doesn’t allow the person to switch back to the matrix.org Element instance. So if people (like me) have a matrix.org account instead of fedora.im account, they can’t use this style of room invite URL.

So I still need to document two URLs everywhere, one for fedora.im users and one for everyone else :slightly_frowning_face:

8

https://matrix.to/#/#social:fedoraproject.org?via=fedora.im&via=matrix.org&via=one.ems.host.

Does that work better as a matrix.org user?

9

That works just fine for me. But I only see Element (meaning matrix.org) in the options, I no longer see chat.fp.o listed there. So this again doesn’t seem to be universal for everyone.