you simplify the ux (eg autodiscovering the right homeserver); hook it up to directory services and/or SSO; simplify the e2e crypto UX; change the logo and branding, and have a basis to build on for whatever future custom features they need.

This sounds great! I am looking forward to running it.

But I also need an admin panel to lookup user ip addys from the past 36 hours, ability to assign moderator user roles who can see other user's ips, ban ip addys, subnets, hostnames and cidrs easily.

Love to have some other needed admin options and run this! A stun / turn server to hide other user's ip addys and such as well, interception of images posted so they are scanned, exif stripped and hosted temporarily rather than giving the hoster everyone's ip info.

Stuff like that.

I guess blocking users from joining the huge main matrix channels through our server would cut down on the ram / processing needed..

I wonder if something like https://access.watch could hook into this, or if it needs something all in it's own language or what. Looking forward to this system growing.

were doing exactly that at the place i work at, riot has too many settings and can be quite hard for a "normal" user (someone who is used to slack for example).

would love some kind of integration with openid connect though, since that would enable us to easier integrate with our AD. of course we could make that ourselves but we dont have the manpower right now.

It has (or at least had, when I ran a server) support for CAS. JASIG CAS isn’t that difficult to set up against AD, I think Shibboleth has a plug-in that implements the protocol too.

Really? We are looking to use it for some of our work but are aware that the UI/UX esp around keys is a bit messy. Would be great to see how your simplifying it.

I like (and use) Riot.im but as an electron app that uses ~300 MB of RAM (I just checked) it is definitely not lightweight.

I can't think of any way they could make it lightweight either. Maybe if they treated the JS as pseudocode and re-implemented as native clients.

The lightweightness here referred to the complexity of the fork - i.e. it's not an attempt to entirely rewrite Riot, but instead a reskinning and UX simplification exercise. The intention is to be able to keep merging in updates from Riot proper (and indeed to port stuff back into Riot).

Agreed that Riot itself uses way too much RAM though - but we have some massive improvements on the horizon there; by lazyloading user data on demand rather than preloading it up front, we can improve RAM usage by ~5x. This work is happening over the next month or two (modulo GDPR).

Meanwhile, you can always use a desktop client; Nheko, Fractal and Quaternion are all looking increasingly good :)