I wonder if there are any tools available for exporting data from a RocketChat server, in a format that can be ingested by a matrix server? If so, we could export the publicly-archived rooms on chat.nzoss.nz, and turn them into Matrix rooms, by ingesting them into matrix.iridescent.nz.
@lightweight shared this link in a Matrix room: https://ems.element.io/tools/account-migration
In May this year, RocketChat announced they were working on a native Matrix implementation. That post didn’t mention a delivery date, but according to a note added to the docs for the Synapse integration;
“Rocket.Chat’s native, built‑in federation will launch in August 2025 …”
So in theory, once a stable version of this Matrix implementation is shipped, we’ll be able to join rooms on chat.nzoss.nz from our matrix.iridescent.nz homeserver. Then (again in theory) we could add and publish iridescent.nz aliases to the rooms, and pull full histories into that homeserver. At which point we could potentially retire the RocketChat, since it would no longer be the only repo of NZOSS chat history.
Unfortunately RocketChat have decided to stick with MongoDB. Which AFAIK is still under a vanity license (SSPL) that was rejected by the OSI as an Open Source license, and is widely considered to be nonfree. So while I’m glad that @lightweight has maintained chat.nzoss.nz for posterity, I consider it proprietary software (due to the dependence on MongoDB) and advise against using it. If and when we can retain our chat history without retaining this proprietary service, I’d be in favour of shutting it down.
Quick update:
RocketChat 7.11 was released in Oct, and according to the announcement blog post, it ships an alpha of their native Matrix integration.
The legacy NZOSS RocketChat has been updated to the latest version, but @lightweight says getting the native matrix alpha working will take a bit of tweaking.
Note: If you’re having trouble accessing the chat after logging in, try removing the %23 from the URL. Hopefully we can figure out why this is happening (couldn’t be a DB issue with the proprietary Mongo DB, could it?) and get this fixed.
EDITS (Many!): Fixing the deeply broken links that resulted from copypasting from my Matrix post to here.
