23 ms·

Mozilla is giving up on their IRC server

355 points by ori_b 8y ago

Dylan16807 8y ago
I don't really understand how switching to a different system is going to do anything about levels of abuse and harassment. I'm sure it will be easier to use, at least. IRCv3 was trying to solve some of this but I haven't heard a peep in years.
- josteink 8y ago
  > I don't really understand how switching to a different system is going to do anything about levels of abuse and harassment. It’s just another failed attempt at trying to find a technical solution to a social problem.
  - IfOnlyYouKnew 8y ago
    Do you have any social solutions to the “social problem”?
    - josteink 8y ago
      The standard solution? Culturing people? Technical solutions are placebos at best.
    - user17843 8y ago
      The solution to a social problem can be social in nature. If you apply this to the OP blog post you can see that the desire to get away from IRC to "safer" products comes from the desire to deal with the social problem in a social way, but in a hidden way: The technical solution will supposedely make it easier to apply the social solutions, i.e. the barrier of entry for undesired participants will be higher. An undesired participant can be someone who questions Mozilla on a fundamental level (i.e. on the topic of meritocracy, privacy, inclusion, activism, etc.) The proposed solution is reverting to a "safe space", i.e. something that promises to automatically protect against undesired participants, because Mozilla has long ago decided that it does not tolerate being questioned on a fundamental level. This ultimately results in a reclusive filter bubble, where a significant part of the audience is no longer allowed to exist. Since Mozilla does not seem to want to invest in moderating these spaces in a democratic and open way, which is very costly (but human relationships are always costly), the proposed solution is to build a fence between "us" und "them".
- hopscotch 8y ago
  It can put registration and private messages, etc, under their control. They they can raise their anti-spam bar arbitrarily high to block alt registrations and enforce bans. Sight of all PMs could be used for anti-harrassment too, but don't know if they'd do that.
- newscracker 8y ago
  The post says the new system will enforce authentication, and hints at dealing with bots and spam accounts. But it’s not going to be easy without inconveniencing users to some extent (or a greater extent than now).
  - Dylan16807 8y ago
    IRC could enforce authentication without much effort. You could use email registration, etc. Maybe there's some black magic in other services to do better anti-bot/spam than that?
    - stormbrew 8y ago
      Generally speaking, systems that add registration onto irc tend to make it even harder to use than it already is. In order to make it better you basically have to make it at best act strangely with existing clients, or at worst make it completely incompatible with them.
      - 0db532a0 8y ago
        You sound like you have absolutely no idea. You are greeted by NickServ on connecting with an unregistered nick, asking you to register with your email by sending a standard /msg. You open the email and click the link. I remember doing this for FreeNode at the age of 13. It’s fine.
        michaelt 8y ago
        Then you close your laptop and reopen it and you have to reconnect. Oh, you want it to automatically reconnect? No problem, you can automate identifying yourself to NickServ with a simple command like /NETWORK ADD -autosendcmd "/^msg nickserv ident pass;wait 2000" ExampleNet Oh, a ghost session stopped you connecting as YourName and now you're YourName2 ? No problem, NickServ can kill your ghost session so you can get your registered nick back. Oh, you want to do that automatically? No problem, just download this script - a mere 10 lines of perl - and put it into your irssi autorun directory. Easy, as you say. Anyone who disagrees has absolutely no idea :)
- ve55 8y ago
  Spam can be difficult to stop on IRC compared to modern webchat applications. From lacking things like javascript, captchas, cdns, and so on, to having a distributed network architecture and fewer ways to verify users.
  - josteink 8y ago
    > From lacking things like javascript, captchas, cdns, and so on In what way are any of these technologies relevant for a chat platform?
  - joepie91_ 8y ago
    > having a distributed network architecture and fewer ways to verify users You have exactly as many ways to verify users as are implemented in your NickServ, and pretty much every snazzy web-y proprietary chat platform has a "distributed network architecture" as well. IRC has plenty of real problems, but your particular list of arguments seems completely irrelevant.
    - xena 8y ago
      NickServ is not typically required for IRC usage.
      - varjag 8y ago
        If your network is large enough to have spam and identity issues, you have nickserv.
    - TheRealPomax 8y ago
      NickServ is not part of IRC. It's just a bot that people wrote to overcome one of the key shortcomings of IRC, and is used at the discretion of individual server administrators. IRC itself has literally no way to verify users, and more importantly no _opinion_ on how you should verify them. Sure, people have written bots/services that have become part of some server packages' standing offering (chanserv, nickserv, opserv, etc.) but there's no spec for them, every server's implemention has (sometimes wildly) different command sets, and as effectively text-scroll CLI, they don't actually make things all that much easier. They're a chore to use. And I say that as an IRCop. IRC as a platform is insufficient in today's world, so if you're going to spend a lot of time either finding -- or more likely, making -- services to take care of all the administrative tasks that IRC itself does not cover, you might as well just go one step further and go "you know what? IRC isn't sacred, if we're spending time and money on trying to make it usable in 2019, then how we instead spend that same time and money on finding a good solution to the problem we're having, rather than sticking with IRC for no good reason".
- nullc 8y ago
  Accessibility, especially from bandwidth efficient light weight software or text only devices is at odds with blocking automated spam. If you make it much harder for anyone with unusual software to connect, you make it harder for spam (and also a lot more legitimate users than spammers, but those don't count because they don't cause issues for operators).
  - ori_b 8y ago
    Registration solves this rather well. Especially when paired with requiring an email account to get a registration password.
    - duskwuff 8y ago
      At the expense of making it even more complicated for users -- especially inexperienced users, or users on mobile devices -- to access the chat.
      - tastroder 8y ago
        Realising that I am at a point where I don't reflect the majority of their user base, how did we get to the point that registering via anything that's not a fancy web interface is considered too hard for inexperienced users? I'm relatively certain that wasn't considered a problem back when I got into IRC and there were more active networks and channels out there. You for whatever reason logged on and were often greeted by messages or even a bot that helped through the sign-up process. Even most GUI clients contained relatively straightforward ways to automate the authentication steps afterwards as well. Again realizing that I'm now in the "snarky old grump" position, discord and slack often feel like a step in the wrong direction. On the one hand it's nice that these platforms include rich media, message archiving/replay, and technically inept users (although the latter would have worked fine with bouncers/webapps back in the day), on the other hand it's just moving my personal communication to yet another corporate silo with weird monetisation. Not trying to imply that IRC would represent something more convenient messaging wise but did we really have to move in the completely different direction there just to integrate a few solutions and add monetisation?
orev 8y ago
As an IRC user since the early 90s (EFnet and freenode), I can say that it really feels like it is dying. There are still a few popular channels with helpful people, but the vast majority of channels are silent with no one but afk users logged into a seemingly forgotten ‘screen’ session. And of the channels that do have real people, those people often seem to be there for no reason other than to tell people to RTFM, play topic nazi to such an extreme level that apparently nothing is actually on topic, or just generally berate people for having the gall to say something in the channel. Ops are extremely touchy and seem willing to immediately kick people rather than have actual discussions about things that challenge any of their beliefs about a particular topic or how the channel is being run (any such challenge, no matter how genially presented, is perceived as combative and results in a swift kick). The heyday has past. People moved on, had families and other responsibilities, with no time to sit idly chatting anymore. The newer generations are on various messenger apps, Slack, or Discord. Though The Lounge looks pretty nice.
- travbrack 8y ago
  >those people often seem to be there for no reason other than to tell people to RTFM, play topic nazi to such an extreme level that apparently nothing is actually on topic, or just generally berate people for having the gall to say something in the channel. Ops are extremely touchy and seem willing to immediately kick people rather than have actual discussions about things that challenge any of their beliefs about a particular topic or how the channel is being run (any such challenge, no matter how genially presented, is perceived as combative and results in a swift kick). Funny, it's been my experience that IRC culture was always like this, especially in the late 90s when I started using it.
  - bamboozled 8y ago
    Came to say the same, I can hardly remember participating in a constructive conversation over IRC within the last 10-15 years. Not saying they don’t happen, just my experience has been the same as the parent posters.
    - 8y ago
newscracker 8y ago
> We are not rolling our own. Whether we host it ourselves or pay for a service, we’re getting something off the shelf that best meets our needs. I sincerely hope it’s not Slack and some restricted search archive platform. Moving away from IRC to a newer system could provide long lived archives to users. But if privacy is very important, then a “no archive” option would be fine (similar to IRC). Anything in between, like “search the last 10000 messages”, would be a disaster for active channels with many members. > It needs to be accessible to the greater Mozilla community. We are evaluating products, not protocols. I’m sure whichever the chosen product is, it’s going to be based on HTTP to allow “schools, colleges or corporate networks” to be able to connect. It seems weird that we’re dumping everything on to HTTPS, and one day in the future there would be a world where only port 443 would be open and all the mess, and the holiness, would flow through it, and it alone. In the name of securing networks, we seem to have gone to an illusion of security by moving to one port for almost all communications. > We aren’t picking an outlier; whatever stack we choose needs to be a modern, proven service that seems to have a solid provenance and a good life ahead of it. We’re not moving from one idiosyncratic outlier stack to another idiosyncratic outlier stack. I still hope it doesn’t come down to Slack or Hipchat or some commercial offering. Maybe host a Matrix instance? Or Mattermost? Or Rocket.chat?
- edoceo 8y ago
  We put our FOSS community on Mattermost - it's awesome!
  - garaetjjte 8y ago
    It lacks administration features - kicking, banning, etc.
    - edoceo 8y ago
      Has to self script, it's all packed in a PostgreSQL database - you can do anything you want!!
      - 8y ago
meribold 8y ago
I had a question for the Firefox UX team a few months ago and went to #ux on irc.mozilla.org. The channel was completely dead. Someone that wasn't from the UX team was still there and told me they all moved to a private Slack channel.
- stupidthrottle 8y ago
  > Someone that wasn't from the UX team was still there and told me they all moved to a private Slack channel. So private channel and closed platform. Excellent discoverability and excellent UX, eh?
superconformist 8y ago
Mozilla's talk: > Our mission is to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all. An Internet that truly puts people first, where individuals can shape their own experience and are empowered, safe and independent. Mozilla's walk: Fuck it, spin up a Slack room.
- kibwen 8y ago
  You could levy this complaint if they actually end up picking Slack (or something similarly proprietary like Discord), but that seems quite premature. I'll miss moznet as much as anyone, but there's no denying that IRC has been left in the dust this past decade or more.
  - progval 8y ago
    Rust is moving to Discord https://blog.rust-lang.org/2019/04/26/Mozilla-IRC-Sunset-and-the-Rust-Channel.html https://blog.rust-lang.org/2019/04/26/Mozilla-IRC-Sunset-and...
    - floatingatoll 8y ago
      HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19761836 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19761836
  - ori_b 8y ago
    It seems that by left in the dust, you mean "remained lightweight and simple". The popular alternatives so far don't seem to have any clients I find pleasant to use, and are rather strongly discouraging anyone from writing third party clients.
    - larkeith 8y ago
      I've not used it myself, but have you looked into Matrix?
      - 8y ago
okasaki 8y ago
Users seem to have given up on Mozilla a long time ago.
- axaxs 8y ago
  You're not wrong, even if it is an unpopular opinion. It's really sad to me as an early internet user. Their side projects have all seemed to fail, and Firefox has never been further behind. I don't see them as being solvent in as little as a few years.
  - tannhaeuser 8y ago
    That's too harsh IMO. FF is working absolutely great on my desktops, phone, and as dev browser. And Rust seems extremely popular with a vocal minority on HN at least. But yeah, I'm concerned as well - Mozilla should focus on producing a good browser rather than pouring energy into side projects such as Rust and especially WASM which do not contribute to that goal.
    - axaxs 8y ago
      I want to believe that, and even tried to go all Firefox for the previous two weeks. I will say they have good Sync, which nobody outside of Chrome had achieved at all. The desktop browser is mostly OK, no real complaints. On mobile, however, Firefox is noticeably slower than any of the usual blink based browsers, and most importantly to me, uses way more battery life. I love PL things and am glad Rust exists, but from the outside it feels like a wasted effort, for now.
      - tannhaeuser 8y ago
        For me, speed and bandwith savings come from using uBlock in FF, especially on mobile.
        axaxs 8y ago
        That's what I'd been trying. But I've found that Brave and even Opera (issues aside) do it better, and at a fraction of battery life. On my phone battery is king, so I really wish that part were fixed.
nwmcsween 8y ago
Irc unauthenticated? IRC has supported auth services since what 1995? There are also plenty of web irc gateways so I don't understand the reasoning to move to something more complicated for little gain, want history? Run ii in a tmux session and tail to a file, want to post images with a fancy GUI taking a gig or so of ram use slack.
- incompatible 8y ago
  They apparently want anyone to be able to easily connect and talk to developers, except for trolls, scammers, spammers etc. I'm not really sure what kind of authentication provides that, but they seem to have something in mind.
  - maximilianburke 8y ago
    Perhaps something like being able to browse and search without registering, but if you want to chat you need to create an account?
    - behringer 8y ago
      So basically muting all unregistered users by default. Something IRC can do.
  - nwmcsween 8y ago
    OK easy peasy have the auth services send a captcha that has to be entered to register.
  - neiman 8y ago
    > I'm not really sure what kind of authentication provides that KYC combined with sms confirmation, CC details and a Google account. All "normal" people have and share that, what's wrong with you?! weirdo. Welcome to the web of 2019:-)
petre 8y ago
What are they replacing it with?
- Sphax 8y ago
  It's right there in the blog post: > Very soon, I’ll be setting up the evaluation process for a couple of candidate replacement stacks They don't know yet.
syntheticnature 8y ago
Reading the comments, it amuses me that those who support Linux fail to realize that IRC is the microkernel (i.e. Minix) approach in messaging. Want authentication/security/archiving/etc.? Layer things of variable quality on top, and hope there aren't any holes on them!
doomrobo 8y ago
I just want to say, for all it's worth, that the #rust channel on MozNet has been by far one of the most healthy and productive IRC channels that I've participated in. The channel is always active, and there is a constant presence of extremely qualified and patient folks in the chat (and often Rust core members as well). I hope that whatever they switch to will be able to foster a community as open and welcoming as their IRC.
- floatingatoll 8y ago
  Rust’s post about this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19761836 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19761836
Perceptes 8y ago
Please, Mozilla, choose Matrix. https://www.ruma.io/docs/matrix/why/ https://www.ruma.io/docs/matrix/why/
TheSwordsman 8y ago
As an admin helping out the Go Slack workspace, which is about to cross 39,500 registered users, they would be ill-advised to go with Slack if moderation is one of their goals. Full disclosure: our Workspakce does have some sort of agreement with Slack, so our space isn't a free space (we have full history), and even then we aren't able to get them to provide support around moderation of users. There is no mechanism to ignore a user, mute a user, or temporarily suspend a user if they need a timeout. The first two are completely impossible, while the latter today is manual / mostly possible using undocumented APIs and mechanizing of HTTP requests. Users reporting spam is done by them sending a message to an admin, or in the admin channel, and requires someone to manually intervene and moderate the message. So we effectively need to aim for follow-the-sun moderator coverage, which is a bit painful. In terms of usability and accessibility, some of the things Slack does (e.g., threads) are not super-inclusive or accessible to users who use screen readers. Today, based on feedback I've gotten, IRC is still superior for users who rely on screen readers due to some form of visual impairment. Whichever product they go with, it'd be nice if they provided an authenticated IRC gateway which would allow this class of user to have a better experience using the platform as they could use one of the text-based IRC clients that has served them well. For everyone who is saying they hope Slack isn't the choice, I'm fairly confident with these issues today they won't pursue Slack. If anyone from Mozilla, or any other org, would like to discuss some of the challenges we've had using Slack as an open community I'm more than happy to schedule time. I'd like to help you provide the best experience and community for your users.
- pcwalton 8y ago
  That experience report is valuable, thanks. I'll bring that up internally.
  - carbocation 8y ago
    On the user side of things, I work at a large academic institution where I occasionally get unwanted contact (overly invasive, won’t stop messaging even when asked). I totally get that at an office workspace, the solution here is HR. But this is a loosely federated place, and even in my own opinion the conduct doesn’t merit such a response. I just want to be able to mute people.
unicornporn 8y ago
Only Matrix would make sense. Here's something worth paying for if they don't want to selfhost: https://www.modular.im/ https://www.modular.im/ https://medium.com/@RiotChat/introducing-modular-awesome-hosting-for-riot-matrix-665a7a0c616 https://medium.com/@RiotChat/introducing-modular-awesome-hos...
deanclatworthy 8y ago
I don't understand what moving to slack is going to give them, which is inevitably where this is going to lead (or a similar web-based chat). IRC has the same tools for banning users as Slack, if not more powerful as you can ban ranges etc. You can require people to register with an email in the same way slack does, although I'd argue being anonymous and being able to talk without an account is one of IRC's best features. I can't say I ever went on Mozilla's IRC, but I have spent almost 20 years on other IRCd's. Seeing it be replaced, just to be able to use rich messaging breaks my heart.
- josteink 8y ago
  > You can require people to register with an email in the same way slack does, although I'd argue being anonymous and being able to talk without an account is one of IRC's best features. As someone from the “old” and free internet I agree, but there seems to be a new generation of users who seem to have the ability to perform censorship as a core requirement (although they prefer to call it “governance”). It’s sad to see the direction they are pulling the internet, one of the few truly free platforms which has ever been created.
  - laughinghan 8y ago
    How would you have them deal with harassment and spam, or do you not believe it is as much of a problem for them as they claim it is?
    - spamthrowaway 8y ago
      I wrote a short reply to this, and then HN for whatever reason flagged it as spam and wouldn’t allow me to post. I think that provides a great meta-comment supporting my stance on not allowing too much central control and censorship.
    - mrweasel 8y ago
      I seriously doubt that both harassment and spam is a much of a problem as Mozilla, or others make it out to be. That's not to say that it's not a huge issue for a subset of people and it should be dealt with, to some extend. If someone want to harass you online, they will find a way, regardless of what governance or censorship you put in place.
neilv 8y ago
Freenode works for other open source projects. Mozilla might even be able to direct a little resources and governance influence their way. (If Freenode didn't work out, it was worth a try, and an easy move from irc.mozilla.org.)
- j_koreth 8y ago
  Mozilla has some channels on freenode
- Svoka 8y ago
  Rust has unofficial channel on Freenode, and it's mentioned in Rust team announcement for moving away from IRC: https://blog.rust-lang.org/2019/04/26/Mozilla-IRC-Sunset-and-the-Rust-Channel.html https://blog.rust-lang.org/2019/04/26/Mozilla-IRC-Sunset-and... I am sure other products/teams have channels there too, they just won't be official go-to place to chat.
mschuster91 8y ago
As you are considering multiple alternative stacks, may I suggest Mattermost? Runs decently across all major client OSes, supports Slack-style hooks and thanks to multi-team capability can also be used to further the development of other OSS projects.
josteink 8y ago
> We are evaluating products, not protocols. So not using the open internet protocols Mozilla claims to champion. What a disappointment.
- kentrado 8y ago
  It is! This is one of the things where they can be principled instead of pragmatic because their browser share will not diminish due to this decision (unlike the inclusion of DRM).
neiman 8y ago
I use IRC quite heavily. Especially for cryptocurrencies and local hackerspace channels. They're all very active. But I agree with the post, "irc is not fine", and never was fine if you want to communicate with "regular" people. It doesn't have spam filters, easy GUI or easy registration process. You could build all of those on top of IRC, and I'm sure that some people did, but there's no "standard" and most people just can't be bothered. As the post said, often "IRC traffic isn’t allowed past institutional firewalls". Besides, when was there a time in the history of the internet that irc was used to communicate with laypersons? If that's Mozilla's goal, they're right to switch. That said, irc is fine, or even the best, for some communities. Especially communities of internet-savvy people. It's decentralized, open, easy to access and inclusive. Such communities rarely meet the need for spam filters, and each of their members possess a well-distilled taste for personalized tools for irc. That's why cryptocurrencies or hackerspaces channles are great on irc. That's why #rust channel is fantastic. I still didn't find any modern substitution as good as irc for those communities. And yes Matrix, I'm looking at you! You're just not there yet.
- obhmt 8y ago
  >But I agree with the post, "irc is not fine", and never was fine if you want to communicate with "regular" people. That's cool. I don't want to communicate with regular people, I want to communicate with hackers. If I wanted to communicate with regular people I would use Twitter.
  - gtirloni 8y ago
    And you're not Mozilla (which does want to communicate with laypeople) so...
    - obhmt 8y ago
      If they wanted to communicate with laypeople they'd offer support over the channels laypeople expect support nowadays, namely Facebook. Instead they are going to choose some middle ground that will displease everybody; they will botch it, as they like to do. They are already working on botching it, since they've moved the Rust channel to a closed source alternative with no expectations of privacy: https://blog.rust-lang.org/2019/04/26/Mozilla-IRC-Sunset-and-the-Rust-Channel.html https://blog.rust-lang.org/2019/04/26/Mozilla-IRC-Sunset-and...
bayareanative 8y ago
The danger of giving up on IRC and going with a hosted corporate product is the chilling effects on free speech by being at the whims and mercurial mercy of corporate interests. They ought to stay with a self-hosted product that cannot be shutdown by whichever government or corporation decides to ban or restrict speech, thereby ceding what should've been public commons to being under the thumb of a particular government or corporation, and what they deem acceptable, not the community/community leaders deciding. I suggest hosting it somewhere like Iceland.
obhmt 8y ago
I sometimes feel bad about Mozilla dying, then I see all the stupid stuff they do and I realise it serves them right.
fulafel 8y ago
There's really a need for IM interop. These fragmented islands stall the network effect (Metcalfe's law) that is needed to sustain and grow communities. I guess the best thing for the current situatio would be a headless service that would connect to your IM identities, and buffer messages, from many different IM identities and protocols. You would then have intermittedly connected web or terminal or mobile apps as its clients. Does something like this exist?
- ATsch 8y ago
  sounds like matrix.org
  - fulafel 8y ago
    I think bridges are not a good enough level of integration. You really need to have your personal connection to your IRC servers. (Unless the matrix IRC bridge connects to the IRC server with a server-to-server type connection and can thus address messages from/to virtual users on the IRC protocol level. But that would need a lot of coordination and authorizations from IRC server administrators, which brings in so much friction that it probably kills the idea.) edit: it seems possible that the matrix irc bridge will make a new client irc connection per bridged user, which sounds like a better idea. hard to make out from the docs though.
    - ATsch 8y ago
      This is precisely what happens. The matrix.org bridge has approximately 25k open client connections to freenode. It would probably be a good idea to switch it to server-server connections to save resources, but afaict nobody has experimented with that yet. If you've ever seen users with an [m] at the end of their names, that's the default name for bridged matrix users.
- waz0wski 8y ago
  this is what IRC ... does. The xmpp standard and ecosystem of clients/servers has also provided this for a decade plus. If something 'modern' is required, Matrix protocol and its ecosystem is a contender. Also look into the world of ActivityPub federated applications, which cover everything from replacing Twitter to blogging. My personal setup is to use bitlbee or libpurple to connect to every major chat network that exists today, bridged to my irc client via znc. This provides a consistent presence, status, and ui across desktop/mobile, push notifications, filtering, and behavior under my control, all with chat client that doesn't take up 1GB+ of memory with phone-home telemetry and useless emoji
andai 8y ago
If I'm reading this correctly, the main problems they have with IRC is that it's too "old"/obscure, and too open — simultaneously too difficult and too easy to access. Hard to control who gets in and what they say. I haven't seen much spam or harassment on IRC, but I haven't been to Mozilla's server. As for newbie accessibility, doesn't a web gateway solve that? You could change the font family from monospace to Lato and it's instantly 20 years more modern :)
- andai 8y ago
  > And when we’re talking about blind spots and invisible social access controls, of course, what we’re really talking about is privilege. “Working in the open”, in a world where computation was scarce and expensive, meant working in front of an audience that was lucky enough to go to university or college, whose parents could afford a computer at home, who lived somewhere with broadband or had one of the few jobs whose company opened low-numbered ports to the outside world; what it didn’t mean was doxxing, cyberstalking, botnets, gamergaters, weaponized social media tooling, carrier-grade targeted-harassment-as-a-service and state-actor psy-op/disinformation campaigns rolling by like bad weather. The relentless, grinding day-to-day malfeasance that’s the background noise of this grudgefuck of a zeitgeist we’re all stewing in just didn’t inform that worldview, because it didn’t exist. http://exple.tive.org/blarg/2018/11/09/the-evolution-of-open/ http://exple.tive.org/blarg/2018/11/09/the-evolution-of-open...
  - saalweachter 8y ago
    Given ... everything ... about the internet, do you ever think we're at the "throw one away" point of the dev cycle?
    - andai 8y ago
      I'd like to take your argument and apply it to the human species. In both cases, I think the good outweighs the bad.
- progval 8y ago
  > As for newbie accessibility, doesn't a web gateway solve that? Until this week, Rust's Community page [1] linked to Mibbit, which allowed you to join IRC just by entering a username and pressing Enter. Now there's only the Discord button, which works the same (besides an extra click to accept the ToU), and you get a popup and a red banner asking you to register. [1]: https://www.rust-lang.org/community https://www.rust-lang.org/community
spystath 8y ago
It's a shame that IRC usage is dwindling especially in techie circles. However I can understand it if it doesn't work for them any more although in my opinion IRC has a lot of moderation tools available. In any case, the "problem", of sorts, is not abandoning IRC but what comes next. The web is choke full of proprietary communication protocols that cannot talk to each other and you have private entities acting as gateways to online communication. Instead on relying on protocols and let clients decide how they connect to the network you have users being herded into walled "communication" gardens. This goes beyond Slack or Discord or chat-app-of-the-month. Having a flagship open-source project behind a proprietary platform for communicating with the users and developers can't help but leave a sour taste in the mouth. Well, at least there is still Matrix to hope for.
- josteink 8y ago
  > This goes beyond Slack or Discord or chat-app-of-the-month. I can probably name up to 10 chat-networks and products which is existed in the 90s. None remain. IRC does though. Exactly because it wasn’t a product, but instead a protocol specification. Whatever rationale Mozilla has for this, it’s going to be proven short sighted.
  - gtirloni 8y ago
    It depends. If they choose something open like Matrix or XMPP, it could work well in the long-term.
    - tazjin 8y ago
      The blog post says "We are evaluating products, not protocols". There are no XMPP frontends that can compete with the "shininess" of the modern, proprietary systems like Slack so that's out already. As for Matrix/Riot ... maybe, but I don't think it's likely that they'll go with that.
      - throwaway2048 8y ago
        I like how they came right out and rejected open systems out of hand, hats off mozilla.
eadmund 8y ago
> We’ve come to the conclusion that for all IRC’s utility, it’s irresponsible of us to ask our people – employees, volunteers, partners or anyone else – to work in an environment that we can’t make sure is healthy, safe and productive. I don't know about healthy or productive, but I am fairly certain that IRC is safe. What worries me is that 'safe' has become a bit of a euphemism to mean 'unchallenging,' and what this really means is that the organisation which booted Brendan Eich really wants to unperson anyone who blasphemes this week's orthodoxies.
- IfOnlyYouKnew 8y ago
  > ‘safe' has become a bit of a euphemism to mean 'unchallenging I doubt the concerns are about people discussing Rust vs C++. And, this being Mozilla’s semi-internal technical discussions, even the most intellectual, data-backed hot takes on the culture wars de jour are probably out of place: getting DMs like “here are twenty proven statistics girls are bad at math” because you happen to use a female handle is still harassment, even if (hypothetically) true.
acd 8y ago
Matrix and Riot is good open source replacements for IRC. With Matrix and Riot you get a modern interface yet can bridge out to IRC open source networks and channels! Here is links to Matrix and Riot. https://matrix.org/blog/index https://matrix.org/blog/index https://about.riot.im/ https://about.riot.im/ Please support open source projects! The Internet was built on open standards.
agustif 8y ago
Mozilla could be interested in the greatest new chat product from the getstream.io folks. It looks like not an outlier, being used by PH, unsplash, and other great websites. Maybe worth checking out! https://getstream.io/chat/ https://getstream.io/chat/
miki123211 8y ago
I know there were/are a few blind people working on Mozilla's stuff and the move to anything that is not open source will make it much harder for them. There was a person[1] who had done significant work on the Rust compiler and said that he would have a much harder time doing it now, since the move to Discord and that he might not be able to participate in the community after the switch[2]. Proprietary solutions are a little bit better for the 80% of people, but way worse and/or unusable for the 1 to 5 percent, depending on how techy the community is. We have to realize that those solutions have big gains, but they also have huge tradeoffs. IRC inconveniences some people. Discord excludes some completely. [1] http://camlorn.net/posts/April%202017/rust-struct-field-reordering.html http://camlorn.net/posts/April%202017/rust-struct-field-reor... [2] This thread https://twitter.com/camlorn38/status/1121879891035602945 https://twitter.com/camlorn38/status/1121879891035602945
- ohithereyou 8y ago
  It's really frustrating to me how inaccessible Discord is. At its heart, Discord is text and voice chat, which you would think would be the easiest forms of communication to make accessible. Due to a genetic condition I have that predisposes me to blindness I have preemptively installed NVDA on Windows and Orca on Linux, and the inability of either of these tools to deal with Discord the last time I tried is shameful.
- spicytunacone 8y ago
  Bryan Smart's reply to that Twitter thread depresses me. >Don’t worry. They’ll totally fix Slack and Discord around the time everyone is using VRChat and VisualTeam. It’s always been this way. Accessibility is catchup work. The next big thing always destroys our gains. The language at the end of the blog post "We are evaluating products, not protocols" and "We aren’t picking an outlier" almost guarantees we're looking at solutions as heavy as Slack and Discord which I would not have been able to run on my laptop back when I was involved in the switch to Firefox Quantum. It's challenging enough having to advocate for "niche" (my words) features and work out their implementations, but IRC was also necessary to keep track of which builds on what dates would introduce which breaking changes, since this information was published nowhere else, and also to minimally participate in decision meetings that ended up in video chats anyway. If they do move to a heavier, but closed, solution, I hope they also find ways to make contribution less reliant on chat. For what it's worth, I thought Mozilla had a fairly decent wiki page for IRC[0]. I always believed a streamlined quickstart section, suggesting one or two clients at most, walking through steps to registration and configuring authentication with ghost killing, and how to get activity from when you were offline either via bouncer or just logs[1] would more than adequately address ease-of-use without rolling out a newer, modernized client. Even working from libraries wasn't an issue for me using web-based clients like Kiwi IRC. [0]: https://wiki.mozilla.org/IRC https://wiki.mozilla.org/IRC [1]: https://mozilla.logbot.info/ https://mozilla.logbot.info/
norswap 8y ago
I never see addressed the biggest reason (according to me) why IRC loses, so let's spell it out. IRC isn't persistent (i.e. you can't read messages delivered while you were offline) unless you setup an IRC shell. This is technically difficult (much more so than dicking with nickservs and so, which is already a pain point). Hosting it is also not free. Count 5$/month on CloudOcean or some such. https://www.irccloud.com/ https://www.irccloud.com/ is a great service that alleviates the pain, but now you're paying 5$/month and you just have IRC — you can't run other services on your server. If you value 5$ or your time more than the idea of "fighting for freedom by using IRC", you just don't use IRC unless you're forced to. This is not unreasonable, so many people do that, and consequently, communities miss out on these people. You want to save IRC? Make a free (as in free beer) clone of IRCCloud. Easy.
- swalladge 8y ago
  I wonder how much work it would be to extend the IRC protocol and popular implementations to include some sort of persistence. It's such a shame that a simple, open, accessible protocol for communication is being lost simply because of this and that it's "too difficult".
  - the8472 8y ago
    IRCv3 has history replay message types. It's there in the protocol. But it's only useful if both clients and server or proxy support it.
  - theclaw 8y ago
    Very simple - the server can push to the client when joining a channel. This would require the channel to be logged server-side and that the user authenticates with nickserv before joining channels. It does not need client-side changes so you could still use any client.
- mirkules 8y ago
  Once all the chat systems without persistence have disappeared, some new hip company will come along touting “no persistence” as a feature, maybe even a privacy feature. But seriously, I don’t understand why persistence is such a huge deal to people. Chat is for transient chat - it is meant to be non-persistent just like verbal communication. There are so many mechanisms for persistent messaging (forums, text messages, emaills, and everything in between), I don’t understand how an entire industry spawned from a concept we already had?
bdayx 8y ago
No surprise here. The popular people have taken over software "development", which means that in a group of 40 people 36 talk and 4 work. The talkers need things like GitHub and Slack in order to appear productive. The more bureaucracy and distractions the better.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
bastawhiz 8y ago
When I worked at Mozilla, "talking to a room full of bouncers" was a common joke on my team. In a fully distributed team (we were spread out across the northern hemisphere) this is a terrible way to work. You don't know who is online or whether you can contact them. There's no guarantee they'll get your message if you send them something urgent. Everything that's not "typing text in real time" is harder and worse (search, sharing files, sending long messages, mobile support, etc.) and everyone has to scrounge for their own tools to work around these insufficiencies. In a work environment, using a tool that only does part of what you need it to do is a crazy irresponsible use of resources. IRC might be useful in some circumstances, but supporting team communication—especially for remote teams—is not one of those circumstances.
- izacus 8y ago
  How is that different from Slack though? Did people use bouncers that don't set /away ?
  - bastawhiz 8y ago
    On slack it shows whether someone is active or away. It also guarantees they'll get the message. You're not praying that you picked the right bouncer to direct your message at and that it's configured to let them know when they get back.
    - dijit 8y ago
      You can easily see if someone is active or not. Most clients even tell you that the user is away. The other problem you describe is related to it being an open standard. If you had a custom slack client or server you also would not be able to make assumptions about how it works on the remote end.
      - bastawhiz 8y ago
        If you're an organization like Mozilla that uses IRC for company business, you can just tell employees what they must support (with an or closed product).
itchyjunk 8y ago
Looks like I am too late to this party. I just recently started visiting the mozilla ircd. There are lots of channels and very little way of navigating around. I was trying to figure out who to talk to about network support or if such a channel existed and no one had an answer. People come in asking support questions but no one has an idea of which channels to best ask in. #firefox, #introduction and #newbie are 3 channels doing the same thing and the questions just get split off. If they can't maintain their ircd, maybe just register a project on freenode who seems to be able to handle roughly 80k people just fine. Edit: Just checked, freenode has a #firefox, not sure how official or how maintained it is.
pojntfx 8y ago
Please use Matrix. Please.
lenkite 8y ago
Please Mozilla! Use an open alternative like Matrix/Riot or even better - BUILD one of your own if you think Matrix doesn't cut it. A foundational OSS company depending on a closed source product and closed protocol for such a fundamental need such as communication is simply wrong.
ParadisoShlee 8y ago
This is a good watershed moment for FOSS as a whole and I hope Mozilla decide to fork Mattermost or something similar and expand it to suit their needs over using Slack if that's the direction they head. Something federated and encrypted like Matrix/Riot would be fun. Having something that's federated would be lovely to see other members of the FOSS community start to come together over time. but there is a lot of problems with those rich text/react/Electron thick apps can be "painful" tho
swiftcoder 8y ago
Off of the main topic, but this blog is basically unreadable to my form of colour-blindness. The link colour is unreadable against the page background, and the right nav is so low in contrast I can't read any of it without using text selection to artificially improve the contrast.
zgramana 8y ago
I’m more than a little surprised nobody has chimed in advocating Openfire, which is Apache 2.0, standards based (XMPP et. al.), extensible, and also has some pretty nice browser clients out there (e.g. conversejs).
- j--r 8y ago
  There are way better XMPP Servers now ;)
agentultra 8y ago
That's too bad. Personally I dislike this trend towards a plurality of chat "services" and "apps." Now each project I interact with has their own chat service. I have to maintain accounts on all of them and install several applications to interact with each. It's a pain to manage. Not to mention that most of these services use Electron-based chat clients which exclude a bunch of people who cannot afford the kinds of machines required to use them or they have to suffer a poor experience on lower-end hardware. It also excludes people who use accessibility software or automation that doesn't integrate with web-based clients. The user experience on IRC scales better. Anyone can write a rich, easy-to-use client or server. If you happen to be a programmer you can write your own tools to manage your own user experience. The drift from casual user to power user isn't stopped by a walled garden of a tightly-controlled user experience that doesn't integrate with anything.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
car12 8y ago
I hope they move on to using Matrix. I think the successor to IRC ought to be not slack or any other closed source chat app but an open source one.
peterwwillis 8y ago
Are Riot and Matrix compatible with irc clients? If so, wouldn't that mostly solve the problem? You have a way to phase out legacy clients and time to work the kinks out of an open solution.
zzo38computer 8y ago
Many things mention about other services are still possible with IRC; in some cases by the client side and in some cases by the server side. Server side logging is possible (and I have implemented this once) with IRC. Still, you can make it available with multiple protocols, and you can alter an implementation of a IRC server even if you do not have it available with other protocols too. IRC is also easy to use without any special software. I currently have a NNTP server set up, but not IRC or any other kind of chat system (but if I do set one up, it will almost certainly be IRC).
ivank 8y ago
Discord is blocked in China, and a large number of people in China are not willing to use VPNs. Discord uses themes that do not meet minimum contrast guidelines (#747F8D on #FFFFFF is 4.06:1, failing WCAG AA for normal text). Discord says third-party clients[1] and even client-side CSS modifications violate their ToS https://twitter.com/discordapp/status/983359562458849280 https://twitter.com/discordapp/status/983359562458849280 [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/8tukek/ripcord_unofficial_native_discord_client_no/e1adbu5/ https://old.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/8tukek/ripcord_...
mcguire 8y ago
Whatever happened to XMPP?

355 points by ori_b 8y ago

I don't really understand how switching to a different system is going to do anything about levels of abuse and harassment. I'm sure it will be easier to use, at least. IRCv3 was trying to solve some of this but I haven't heard a peep in years.

josteink 8y ago
> I don't really understand how switching to a different system is going to do anything about levels of abuse and harassment. It’s just another failed attempt at trying to find a technical solution to a social problem.
- IfOnlyYouKnew 8y ago
  Do you have any social solutions to the “social problem”?
  - josteink 8y ago
    The standard solution? Culturing people? Technical solutions are placebos at best.
  - user17843 8y ago
    The solution to a social problem can be social in nature. If you apply this to the OP blog post you can see that the desire to get away from IRC to "safer" products comes from the desire to deal with the social problem in a social way, but in a hidden way: The technical solution will supposedely make it easier to apply the social solutions, i.e. the barrier of entry for undesired participants will be higher. An undesired participant can be someone who questions Mozilla on a fundamental level (i.e. on the topic of meritocracy, privacy, inclusion, activism, etc.) The proposed solution is reverting to a "safe space", i.e. something that promises to automatically protect against undesired participants, because Mozilla has long ago decided that it does not tolerate being questioned on a fundamental level. This ultimately results in a reclusive filter bubble, where a significant part of the audience is no longer allowed to exist. Since Mozilla does not seem to want to invest in moderating these spaces in a democratic and open way, which is very costly (but human relationships are always costly), the proposed solution is to build a fence between "us" und "them".
hopscotch 8y ago
It can put registration and private messages, etc, under their control. They they can raise their anti-spam bar arbitrarily high to block alt registrations and enforce bans. Sight of all PMs could be used for anti-harrassment too, but don't know if they'd do that.
newscracker 8y ago
The post says the new system will enforce authentication, and hints at dealing with bots and spam accounts. But it’s not going to be easy without inconveniencing users to some extent (or a greater extent than now).
- Dylan16807 8y ago
  IRC could enforce authentication without much effort. You could use email registration, etc. Maybe there's some black magic in other services to do better anti-bot/spam than that?
  - stormbrew 8y ago
    Generally speaking, systems that add registration onto irc tend to make it even harder to use than it already is. In order to make it better you basically have to make it at best act strangely with existing clients, or at worst make it completely incompatible with them.
    - 0db532a0 8y ago
      You sound like you have absolutely no idea. You are greeted by NickServ on connecting with an unregistered nick, asking you to register with your email by sending a standard /msg. You open the email and click the link. I remember doing this for FreeNode at the age of 13. It’s fine.
      - michaelt 8y ago
        Then you close your laptop and reopen it and you have to reconnect. Oh, you want it to automatically reconnect? No problem, you can automate identifying yourself to NickServ with a simple command like /NETWORK ADD -autosendcmd "/^msg nickserv ident pass;wait 2000" ExampleNet Oh, a ghost session stopped you connecting as YourName and now you're YourName2 ? No problem, NickServ can kill your ghost session so you can get your registered nick back. Oh, you want to do that automatically? No problem, just download this script - a mere 10 lines of perl - and put it into your irssi autorun directory. Easy, as you say. Anyone who disagrees has absolutely no idea :)
ve55 8y ago
Spam can be difficult to stop on IRC compared to modern webchat applications. From lacking things like javascript, captchas, cdns, and so on, to having a distributed network architecture and fewer ways to verify users.
- josteink 8y ago
  > From lacking things like javascript, captchas, cdns, and so on In what way are any of these technologies relevant for a chat platform?
- joepie91_ 8y ago
  > having a distributed network architecture and fewer ways to verify users You have exactly as many ways to verify users as are implemented in your NickServ, and pretty much every snazzy web-y proprietary chat platform has a "distributed network architecture" as well. IRC has plenty of real problems, but your particular list of arguments seems completely irrelevant.
  - xena 8y ago
    NickServ is not typically required for IRC usage.
    - varjag 8y ago
      If your network is large enough to have spam and identity issues, you have nickserv.
  - TheRealPomax 8y ago
    NickServ is not part of IRC. It's just a bot that people wrote to overcome one of the key shortcomings of IRC, and is used at the discretion of individual server administrators. IRC itself has literally no way to verify users, and more importantly no _opinion_ on how you should verify them. Sure, people have written bots/services that have become part of some server packages' standing offering (chanserv, nickserv, opserv, etc.) but there's no spec for them, every server's implemention has (sometimes wildly) different command sets, and as effectively text-scroll CLI, they don't actually make things all that much easier. They're a chore to use. And I say that as an IRCop. IRC as a platform is insufficient in today's world, so if you're going to spend a lot of time either finding -- or more likely, making -- services to take care of all the administrative tasks that IRC itself does not cover, you might as well just go one step further and go "you know what? IRC isn't sacred, if we're spending time and money on trying to make it usable in 2019, then how we instead spend that same time and money on finding a good solution to the problem we're having, rather than sticking with IRC for no good reason".
nullc 8y ago
Accessibility, especially from bandwidth efficient light weight software or text only devices is at odds with blocking automated spam. If you make it much harder for anyone with unusual software to connect, you make it harder for spam (and also a lot more legitimate users than spammers, but those don't count because they don't cause issues for operators).
- ori_b 8y ago
  Registration solves this rather well. Especially when paired with requiring an email account to get a registration password.
  - duskwuff 8y ago
    At the expense of making it even more complicated for users -- especially inexperienced users, or users on mobile devices -- to access the chat.
    - tastroder 8y ago
      Realising that I am at a point where I don't reflect the majority of their user base, how did we get to the point that registering via anything that's not a fancy web interface is considered too hard for inexperienced users? I'm relatively certain that wasn't considered a problem back when I got into IRC and there were more active networks and channels out there. You for whatever reason logged on and were often greeted by messages or even a bot that helped through the sign-up process. Even most GUI clients contained relatively straightforward ways to automate the authentication steps afterwards as well. Again realizing that I'm now in the "snarky old grump" position, discord and slack often feel like a step in the wrong direction. On the one hand it's nice that these platforms include rich media, message archiving/replay, and technically inept users (although the latter would have worked fine with bouncers/webapps back in the day), on the other hand it's just moving my personal communication to yet another corporate silo with weird monetisation. Not trying to imply that IRC would represent something more convenient messaging wise but did we really have to move in the completely different direction there just to integrate a few solutions and add monetisation?

orev 8y ago

As an IRC user since the early 90s (EFnet and freenode), I can say that it really feels like it is dying. There are still a few popular channels with helpful people, but the vast majority of channels are silent with no one but afk users logged into a seemingly forgotten ‘screen’ session. And of the channels that do have real people, those people often seem to be there for no reason other than to tell people to RTFM, play topic nazi to such an extreme level that apparently nothing is actually on topic, or just generally berate people for having the gall to say something in the channel. Ops are extremely touchy and seem willing to immediately kick people rather than have actual discussions about things that challenge any of their beliefs about a particular topic or how the channel is being run (any such challenge, no matter how genially presented, is perceived as combative and results in a swift kick). The heyday has past. People moved on, had families and other responsibilities, with no time to sit idly chatting anymore. The newer generations are on various messenger apps, Slack, or Discord. Though The Lounge looks pretty nice.

travbrack 8y ago
>those people often seem to be there for no reason other than to tell people to RTFM, play topic nazi to such an extreme level that apparently nothing is actually on topic, or just generally berate people for having the gall to say something in the channel. Ops are extremely touchy and seem willing to immediately kick people rather than have actual discussions about things that challenge any of their beliefs about a particular topic or how the channel is being run (any such challenge, no matter how genially presented, is perceived as combative and results in a swift kick). Funny, it's been my experience that IRC culture was always like this, especially in the late 90s when I started using it.
- bamboozled 8y ago
  Came to say the same, I can hardly remember participating in a constructive conversation over IRC within the last 10-15 years. Not saying they don’t happen, just my experience has been the same as the parent posters.
  - 8y ago

newscracker 8y ago

> We are not rolling our own. Whether we host it ourselves or pay for a service, we’re getting something off the shelf that best meets our needs. I sincerely hope it’s not Slack and some restricted search archive platform. Moving away from IRC to a newer system could provide long lived archives to users. But if privacy is very important, then a “no archive” option would be fine (similar to IRC). Anything in between, like “search the last 10000 messages”, would be a disaster for active channels with many members. > It needs to be accessible to the greater Mozilla community. We are evaluating products, not protocols. I’m sure whichever the chosen product is, it’s going to be based on HTTP to allow “schools, colleges or corporate networks” to be able to connect. It seems weird that we’re dumping everything on to HTTPS, and one day in the future there would be a world where only port 443 would be open and all the mess, and the holiness, would flow through it, and it alone. In the name of securing networks, we seem to have gone to an illusion of security by moving to one port for almost all communications. > We aren’t picking an outlier; whatever stack we choose needs to be a modern, proven service that seems to have a solid provenance and a good life ahead of it. We’re not moving from one idiosyncratic outlier stack to another idiosyncratic outlier stack. I still hope it doesn’t come down to Slack or Hipchat or some commercial offering. Maybe host a Matrix instance? Or Mattermost? Or Rocket.chat?

edoceo 8y ago
We put our FOSS community on Mattermost - it's awesome!
- garaetjjte 8y ago
  It lacks administration features - kicking, banning, etc.
  - edoceo 8y ago
    Has to self script, it's all packed in a PostgreSQL database - you can do anything you want!!
    - 8y ago

meribold 8y ago

I had a question for the Firefox UX team a few months ago and went to #ux on irc.mozilla.org. The channel was completely dead. Someone that wasn't from the UX team was still there and told me they all moved to a private Slack channel.

stupidthrottle 8y ago
> Someone that wasn't from the UX team was still there and told me they all moved to a private Slack channel. So private channel and closed platform. Excellent discoverability and excellent UX, eh?

superconformist 8y ago

Mozilla's talk: > Our mission is to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all. An Internet that truly puts people first, where individuals can shape their own experience and are empowered, safe and independent. Mozilla's walk: Fuck it, spin up a Slack room.

kibwen 8y ago
You could levy this complaint if they actually end up picking Slack (or something similarly proprietary like Discord), but that seems quite premature. I'll miss moznet as much as anyone, but there's no denying that IRC has been left in the dust this past decade or more.
- progval 8y ago
  Rust is moving to Discord https://blog.rust-lang.org/2019/04/26/Mozilla-IRC-Sunset-and-the-Rust-Channel.html https://blog.rust-lang.org/2019/04/26/Mozilla-IRC-Sunset-and...
  - floatingatoll 8y ago
    HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19761836 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19761836
- ori_b 8y ago
  It seems that by left in the dust, you mean "remained lightweight and simple". The popular alternatives so far don't seem to have any clients I find pleasant to use, and are rather strongly discouraging anyone from writing third party clients.
  - larkeith 8y ago
    I've not used it myself, but have you looked into Matrix?
    - 8y ago

okasaki 8y ago

Users seem to have given up on Mozilla a long time ago.

axaxs 8y ago
You're not wrong, even if it is an unpopular opinion. It's really sad to me as an early internet user. Their side projects have all seemed to fail, and Firefox has never been further behind. I don't see them as being solvent in as little as a few years.
- tannhaeuser 8y ago
  That's too harsh IMO. FF is working absolutely great on my desktops, phone, and as dev browser. And Rust seems extremely popular with a vocal minority on HN at least. But yeah, I'm concerned as well - Mozilla should focus on producing a good browser rather than pouring energy into side projects such as Rust and especially WASM which do not contribute to that goal.
  - axaxs 8y ago
    I want to believe that, and even tried to go all Firefox for the previous two weeks. I will say they have good Sync, which nobody outside of Chrome had achieved at all. The desktop browser is mostly OK, no real complaints. On mobile, however, Firefox is noticeably slower than any of the usual blink based browsers, and most importantly to me, uses way more battery life. I love PL things and am glad Rust exists, but from the outside it feels like a wasted effort, for now.
    - tannhaeuser 8y ago
      For me, speed and bandwith savings come from using uBlock in FF, especially on mobile.
      - axaxs 8y ago
        That's what I'd been trying. But I've found that Brave and even Opera (issues aside) do it better, and at a fraction of battery life. On my phone battery is king, so I really wish that part were fixed.

nwmcsween 8y ago

Irc unauthenticated? IRC has supported auth services since what 1995? There are also plenty of web irc gateways so I don't understand the reasoning to move to something more complicated for little gain, want history? Run ii in a tmux session and tail to a file, want to post images with a fancy GUI taking a gig or so of ram use slack.

incompatible 8y ago
They apparently want anyone to be able to easily connect and talk to developers, except for trolls, scammers, spammers etc. I'm not really sure what kind of authentication provides that, but they seem to have something in mind.
- maximilianburke 8y ago
  Perhaps something like being able to browse and search without registering, but if you want to chat you need to create an account?
  - behringer 8y ago
    So basically muting all unregistered users by default. Something IRC can do.
- nwmcsween 8y ago
  OK easy peasy have the auth services send a captcha that has to be entered to register.
- neiman 8y ago
  > I'm not really sure what kind of authentication provides that KYC combined with sms confirmation, CC details and a Google account. All "normal" people have and share that, what's wrong with you?! weirdo. Welcome to the web of 2019:-)

petre 8y ago

What are they replacing it with?

Sphax 8y ago
It's right there in the blog post: > Very soon, I’ll be setting up the evaluation process for a couple of candidate replacement stacks They don't know yet.

syntheticnature 8y ago

Reading the comments, it amuses me that those who support Linux fail to realize that IRC is the microkernel (i.e. Minix) approach in messaging. Want authentication/security/archiving/etc.? Layer things of variable quality on top, and hope there aren't any holes on them!

doomrobo 8y ago

I just want to say, for all it's worth, that the #rust channel on MozNet has been by far one of the most healthy and productive IRC channels that I've participated in. The channel is always active, and there is a constant presence of extremely qualified and patient folks in the chat (and often Rust core members as well). I hope that whatever they switch to will be able to foster a community as open and welcoming as their IRC.

floatingatoll 8y ago
Rust’s post about this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19761836 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19761836

Perceptes 8y ago

Please, Mozilla, choose Matrix. https://www.ruma.io/docs/matrix/why/ https://www.ruma.io/docs/matrix/why/

TheSwordsman 8y ago

As an admin helping out the Go Slack workspace, which is about to cross 39,500 registered users, they would be ill-advised to go with Slack if moderation is one of their goals. Full disclosure: our Workspakce does have some sort of agreement with Slack, so our space isn't a free space (we have full history), and even then we aren't able to get them to provide support around moderation of users. There is no mechanism to ignore a user, mute a user, or temporarily suspend a user if they need a timeout. The first two are completely impossible, while the latter today is manual / mostly possible using undocumented APIs and mechanizing of HTTP requests. Users reporting spam is done by them sending a message to an admin, or in the admin channel, and requires someone to manually intervene and moderate the message. So we effectively need to aim for follow-the-sun moderator coverage, which is a bit painful. In terms of usability and accessibility, some of the things Slack does (e.g., threads) are not super-inclusive or accessible to users who use screen readers. Today, based on feedback I've gotten, IRC is still superior for users who rely on screen readers due to some form of visual impairment. Whichever product they go with, it'd be nice if they provided an authenticated IRC gateway which would allow this class of user to have a better experience using the platform as they could use one of the text-based IRC clients that has served them well. For everyone who is saying they hope Slack isn't the choice, I'm fairly confident with these issues today they won't pursue Slack. If anyone from Mozilla, or any other org, would like to discuss some of the challenges we've had using Slack as an open community I'm more than happy to schedule time. I'd like to help you provide the best experience and community for your users.

pcwalton 8y ago
That experience report is valuable, thanks. I'll bring that up internally.
- carbocation 8y ago
  On the user side of things, I work at a large academic institution where I occasionally get unwanted contact (overly invasive, won’t stop messaging even when asked). I totally get that at an office workspace, the solution here is HR. But this is a loosely federated place, and even in my own opinion the conduct doesn’t merit such a response. I just want to be able to mute people.

unicornporn 8y ago

Only Matrix would make sense. Here's something worth paying for if they don't want to selfhost: https://www.modular.im/ https://www.modular.im/ https://medium.com/@RiotChat/introducing-modular-awesome-hosting-for-riot-matrix-665a7a0c616 https://medium.com/@RiotChat/introducing-modular-awesome-hos...

deanclatworthy 8y ago

I don't understand what moving to slack is going to give them, which is inevitably where this is going to lead (or a similar web-based chat). IRC has the same tools for banning users as Slack, if not more powerful as you can ban ranges etc. You can require people to register with an email in the same way slack does, although I'd argue being anonymous and being able to talk without an account is one of IRC's best features. I can't say I ever went on Mozilla's IRC, but I have spent almost 20 years on other IRCd's. Seeing it be replaced, just to be able to use rich messaging breaks my heart.

josteink 8y ago
> You can require people to register with an email in the same way slack does, although I'd argue being anonymous and being able to talk without an account is one of IRC's best features. As someone from the “old” and free internet I agree, but there seems to be a new generation of users who seem to have the ability to perform censorship as a core requirement (although they prefer to call it “governance”). It’s sad to see the direction they are pulling the internet, one of the few truly free platforms which has ever been created.
- laughinghan 8y ago
  How would you have them deal with harassment and spam, or do you not believe it is as much of a problem for them as they claim it is?
  - spamthrowaway 8y ago
    I wrote a short reply to this, and then HN for whatever reason flagged it as spam and wouldn’t allow me to post. I think that provides a great meta-comment supporting my stance on not allowing too much central control and censorship.
  - mrweasel 8y ago
    I seriously doubt that both harassment and spam is a much of a problem as Mozilla, or others make it out to be. That's not to say that it's not a huge issue for a subset of people and it should be dealt with, to some extend. If someone want to harass you online, they will find a way, regardless of what governance or censorship you put in place.

neilv 8y ago

Freenode works for other open source projects. Mozilla might even be able to direct a little resources and governance influence their way. (If Freenode didn't work out, it was worth a try, and an easy move from irc.mozilla.org.)

j_koreth 8y ago
Mozilla has some channels on freenode
Svoka 8y ago
Rust has unofficial channel on Freenode, and it's mentioned in Rust team announcement for moving away from IRC: https://blog.rust-lang.org/2019/04/26/Mozilla-IRC-Sunset-and-the-Rust-Channel.html https://blog.rust-lang.org/2019/04/26/Mozilla-IRC-Sunset-and... I am sure other products/teams have channels there too, they just won't be official go-to place to chat.

mschuster91 8y ago

As you are considering multiple alternative stacks, may I suggest Mattermost? Runs decently across all major client OSes, supports Slack-style hooks and thanks to multi-team capability can also be used to further the development of other OSS projects.

josteink 8y ago

> We are evaluating products, not protocols. So not using the open internet protocols Mozilla claims to champion. What a disappointment.

kentrado 8y ago
It is! This is one of the things where they can be principled instead of pragmatic because their browser share will not diminish due to this decision (unlike the inclusion of DRM).

neiman 8y ago

I use IRC quite heavily. Especially for cryptocurrencies and local hackerspace channels. They're all very active. But I agree with the post, "irc is not fine", and never was fine if you want to communicate with "regular" people. It doesn't have spam filters, easy GUI or easy registration process. You could build all of those on top of IRC, and I'm sure that some people did, but there's no "standard" and most people just can't be bothered. As the post said, often "IRC traffic isn’t allowed past institutional firewalls". Besides, when was there a time in the history of the internet that irc was used to communicate with laypersons? If that's Mozilla's goal, they're right to switch. That said, irc is fine, or even the best, for some communities. Especially communities of internet-savvy people. It's decentralized, open, easy to access and inclusive. Such communities rarely meet the need for spam filters, and each of their members possess a well-distilled taste for personalized tools for irc. That's why cryptocurrencies or hackerspaces channles are great on irc. That's why #rust channel is fantastic. I still didn't find any modern substitution as good as irc for those communities. And yes Matrix, I'm looking at you! You're just not there yet.

obhmt 8y ago
>But I agree with the post, "irc is not fine", and never was fine if you want to communicate with "regular" people. That's cool. I don't want to communicate with regular people, I want to communicate with hackers. If I wanted to communicate with regular people I would use Twitter.
- gtirloni 8y ago
  And you're not Mozilla (which does want to communicate with laypeople) so...
  - obhmt 8y ago
    If they wanted to communicate with laypeople they'd offer support over the channels laypeople expect support nowadays, namely Facebook. Instead they are going to choose some middle ground that will displease everybody; they will botch it, as they like to do. They are already working on botching it, since they've moved the Rust channel to a closed source alternative with no expectations of privacy: https://blog.rust-lang.org/2019/04/26/Mozilla-IRC-Sunset-and-the-Rust-Channel.html https://blog.rust-lang.org/2019/04/26/Mozilla-IRC-Sunset-and...

bayareanative 8y ago

The danger of giving up on IRC and going with a hosted corporate product is the chilling effects on free speech by being at the whims and mercurial mercy of corporate interests. They ought to stay with a self-hosted product that cannot be shutdown by whichever government or corporation decides to ban or restrict speech, thereby ceding what should've been public commons to being under the thumb of a particular government or corporation, and what they deem acceptable, not the community/community leaders deciding. I suggest hosting it somewhere like Iceland.

obhmt 8y ago

I sometimes feel bad about Mozilla dying, then I see all the stupid stuff they do and I realise it serves them right.

fulafel 8y ago

There's really a need for IM interop. These fragmented islands stall the network effect (Metcalfe's law) that is needed to sustain and grow communities. I guess the best thing for the current situatio would be a headless service that would connect to your IM identities, and buffer messages, from many different IM identities and protocols. You would then have intermittedly connected web or terminal or mobile apps as its clients. Does something like this exist?

ATsch 8y ago
sounds like matrix.org
- fulafel 8y ago
  I think bridges are not a good enough level of integration. You really need to have your personal connection to your IRC servers. (Unless the matrix IRC bridge connects to the IRC server with a server-to-server type connection and can thus address messages from/to virtual users on the IRC protocol level. But that would need a lot of coordination and authorizations from IRC server administrators, which brings in so much friction that it probably kills the idea.) edit: it seems possible that the matrix irc bridge will make a new client irc connection per bridged user, which sounds like a better idea. hard to make out from the docs though.
  - ATsch 8y ago
    This is precisely what happens. The matrix.org bridge has approximately 25k open client connections to freenode. It would probably be a good idea to switch it to server-server connections to save resources, but afaict nobody has experimented with that yet. If you've ever seen users with an [m] at the end of their names, that's the default name for bridged matrix users.
waz0wski 8y ago
this is what IRC ... does. The xmpp standard and ecosystem of clients/servers has also provided this for a decade plus. If something 'modern' is required, Matrix protocol and its ecosystem is a contender. Also look into the world of ActivityPub federated applications, which cover everything from replacing Twitter to blogging. My personal setup is to use bitlbee or libpurple to connect to every major chat network that exists today, bridged to my irc client via znc. This provides a consistent presence, status, and ui across desktop/mobile, push notifications, filtering, and behavior under my control, all with chat client that doesn't take up 1GB+ of memory with phone-home telemetry and useless emoji

andai 8y ago

If I'm reading this correctly, the main problems they have with IRC is that it's too "old"/obscure, and too open — simultaneously too difficult and too easy to access. Hard to control who gets in and what they say. I haven't seen much spam or harassment on IRC, but I haven't been to Mozilla's server. As for newbie accessibility, doesn't a web gateway solve that? You could change the font family from monospace to Lato and it's instantly 20 years more modern :)

andai 8y ago
> And when we’re talking about blind spots and invisible social access controls, of course, what we’re really talking about is privilege. “Working in the open”, in a world where computation was scarce and expensive, meant working in front of an audience that was lucky enough to go to university or college, whose parents could afford a computer at home, who lived somewhere with broadband or had one of the few jobs whose company opened low-numbered ports to the outside world; what it didn’t mean was doxxing, cyberstalking, botnets, gamergaters, weaponized social media tooling, carrier-grade targeted-harassment-as-a-service and state-actor psy-op/disinformation campaigns rolling by like bad weather. The relentless, grinding day-to-day malfeasance that’s the background noise of this grudgefuck of a zeitgeist we’re all stewing in just didn’t inform that worldview, because it didn’t exist. http://exple.tive.org/blarg/2018/11/09/the-evolution-of-open/ http://exple.tive.org/blarg/2018/11/09/the-evolution-of-open...
- saalweachter 8y ago
  Given ... everything ... about the internet, do you ever think we're at the "throw one away" point of the dev cycle?
  - andai 8y ago
    I'd like to take your argument and apply it to the human species. In both cases, I think the good outweighs the bad.
progval 8y ago
> As for newbie accessibility, doesn't a web gateway solve that? Until this week, Rust's Community page [1] linked to Mibbit, which allowed you to join IRC just by entering a username and pressing Enter. Now there's only the Discord button, which works the same (besides an extra click to accept the ToU), and you get a popup and a red banner asking you to register. [1]: https://www.rust-lang.org/community https://www.rust-lang.org/community

spystath 8y ago

It's a shame that IRC usage is dwindling especially in techie circles. However I can understand it if it doesn't work for them any more although in my opinion IRC has a lot of moderation tools available. In any case, the "problem", of sorts, is not abandoning IRC but what comes next. The web is choke full of proprietary communication protocols that cannot talk to each other and you have private entities acting as gateways to online communication. Instead on relying on protocols and let clients decide how they connect to the network you have users being herded into walled "communication" gardens. This goes beyond Slack or Discord or chat-app-of-the-month. Having a flagship open-source project behind a proprietary platform for communicating with the users and developers can't help but leave a sour taste in the mouth. Well, at least there is still Matrix to hope for.

josteink 8y ago
> This goes beyond Slack or Discord or chat-app-of-the-month. I can probably name up to 10 chat-networks and products which is existed in the 90s. None remain. IRC does though. Exactly because it wasn’t a product, but instead a protocol specification. Whatever rationale Mozilla has for this, it’s going to be proven short sighted.
- gtirloni 8y ago
  It depends. If they choose something open like Matrix or XMPP, it could work well in the long-term.
  - tazjin 8y ago
    The blog post says "We are evaluating products, not protocols". There are no XMPP frontends that can compete with the "shininess" of the modern, proprietary systems like Slack so that's out already. As for Matrix/Riot ... maybe, but I don't think it's likely that they'll go with that.
    - throwaway2048 8y ago
      I like how they came right out and rejected open systems out of hand, hats off mozilla.

eadmund 8y ago

> We’ve come to the conclusion that for all IRC’s utility, it’s irresponsible of us to ask our people – employees, volunteers, partners or anyone else – to work in an environment that we can’t make sure is healthy, safe and productive. I don't know about healthy or productive, but I am fairly certain that IRC is safe. What worries me is that 'safe' has become a bit of a euphemism to mean 'unchallenging,' and what this really means is that the organisation which booted Brendan Eich really wants to unperson anyone who blasphemes this week's orthodoxies.

IfOnlyYouKnew 8y ago
> ‘safe' has become a bit of a euphemism to mean 'unchallenging I doubt the concerns are about people discussing Rust vs C++. And, this being Mozilla’s semi-internal technical discussions, even the most intellectual, data-backed hot takes on the culture wars de jour are probably out of place: getting DMs like “here are twenty proven statistics girls are bad at math” because you happen to use a female handle is still harassment, even if (hypothetically) true.

acd 8y ago

Matrix and Riot is good open source replacements for IRC. With Matrix and Riot you get a modern interface yet can bridge out to IRC open source networks and channels! Here is links to Matrix and Riot. https://matrix.org/blog/index https://matrix.org/blog/index https://about.riot.im/ https://about.riot.im/ Please support open source projects! The Internet was built on open standards.

agustif 8y ago

Mozilla could be interested in the greatest new chat product from the getstream.io folks. It looks like not an outlier, being used by PH, unsplash, and other great websites. Maybe worth checking out! https://getstream.io/chat/ https://getstream.io/chat/

miki123211 8y ago

I know there were/are a few blind people working on Mozilla's stuff and the move to anything that is not open source will make it much harder for them. There was a person[1] who had done significant work on the Rust compiler and said that he would have a much harder time doing it now, since the move to Discord and that he might not be able to participate in the community after the switch[2]. Proprietary solutions are a little bit better for the 80% of people, but way worse and/or unusable for the 1 to 5 percent, depending on how techy the community is. We have to realize that those solutions have big gains, but they also have huge tradeoffs. IRC inconveniences some people. Discord excludes some completely. [1] http://camlorn.net/posts/April%202017/rust-struct-field-reordering.html http://camlorn.net/posts/April%202017/rust-struct-field-reor... [2] This thread https://twitter.com/camlorn38/status/1121879891035602945 https://twitter.com/camlorn38/status/1121879891035602945

ohithereyou 8y ago
It's really frustrating to me how inaccessible Discord is. At its heart, Discord is text and voice chat, which you would think would be the easiest forms of communication to make accessible. Due to a genetic condition I have that predisposes me to blindness I have preemptively installed NVDA on Windows and Orca on Linux, and the inability of either of these tools to deal with Discord the last time I tried is shameful.
spicytunacone 8y ago
Bryan Smart's reply to that Twitter thread depresses me. >Don’t worry. They’ll totally fix Slack and Discord around the time everyone is using VRChat and VisualTeam. It’s always been this way. Accessibility is catchup work. The next big thing always destroys our gains. The language at the end of the blog post "We are evaluating products, not protocols" and "We aren’t picking an outlier" almost guarantees we're looking at solutions as heavy as Slack and Discord which I would not have been able to run on my laptop back when I was involved in the switch to Firefox Quantum. It's challenging enough having to advocate for "niche" (my words) features and work out their implementations, but IRC was also necessary to keep track of which builds on what dates would introduce which breaking changes, since this information was published nowhere else, and also to minimally participate in decision meetings that ended up in video chats anyway. If they do move to a heavier, but closed, solution, I hope they also find ways to make contribution less reliant on chat. For what it's worth, I thought Mozilla had a fairly decent wiki page for IRC[0]. I always believed a streamlined quickstart section, suggesting one or two clients at most, walking through steps to registration and configuring authentication with ghost killing, and how to get activity from when you were offline either via bouncer or just logs[1] would more than adequately address ease-of-use without rolling out a newer, modernized client. Even working from libraries wasn't an issue for me using web-based clients like Kiwi IRC. [0]: https://wiki.mozilla.org/IRC https://wiki.mozilla.org/IRC [1]: https://mozilla.logbot.info/ https://mozilla.logbot.info/

norswap 8y ago

I never see addressed the biggest reason (according to me) why IRC loses, so let's spell it out. IRC isn't persistent (i.e. you can't read messages delivered while you were offline) unless you setup an IRC shell. This is technically difficult (much more so than dicking with nickservs and so, which is already a pain point). Hosting it is also not free. Count 5$/month on CloudOcean or some such. https://www.irccloud.com/ https://www.irccloud.com/ is a great service that alleviates the pain, but now you're paying 5$/month and you just have IRC — you can't run other services on your server. If you value 5$ or your time more than the idea of "fighting for freedom by using IRC", you just don't use IRC unless you're forced to. This is not unreasonable, so many people do that, and consequently, communities miss out on these people. You want to save IRC? Make a free (as in free beer) clone of IRCCloud. Easy.

swalladge 8y ago
I wonder how much work it would be to extend the IRC protocol and popular implementations to include some sort of persistence. It's such a shame that a simple, open, accessible protocol for communication is being lost simply because of this and that it's "too difficult".
- the8472 8y ago
  IRCv3 has history replay message types. It's there in the protocol. But it's only useful if both clients and server or proxy support it.
- theclaw 8y ago
  Very simple - the server can push to the client when joining a channel. This would require the channel to be logged server-side and that the user authenticates with nickserv before joining channels. It does not need client-side changes so you could still use any client.
mirkules 8y ago
Once all the chat systems without persistence have disappeared, some new hip company will come along touting “no persistence” as a feature, maybe even a privacy feature. But seriously, I don’t understand why persistence is such a huge deal to people. Chat is for transient chat - it is meant to be non-persistent just like verbal communication. There are so many mechanisms for persistent messaging (forums, text messages, emaills, and everything in between), I don’t understand how an entire industry spawned from a concept we already had?

bdayx 8y ago

No surprise here. The popular people have taken over software "development", which means that in a group of 40 people 36 talk and 4 work. The talkers need things like GitHub and Slack in order to appear productive. The more bureaucracy and distractions the better.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

bastawhiz 8y ago

When I worked at Mozilla, "talking to a room full of bouncers" was a common joke on my team. In a fully distributed team (we were spread out across the northern hemisphere) this is a terrible way to work. You don't know who is online or whether you can contact them. There's no guarantee they'll get your message if you send them something urgent. Everything that's not "typing text in real time" is harder and worse (search, sharing files, sending long messages, mobile support, etc.) and everyone has to scrounge for their own tools to work around these insufficiencies. In a work environment, using a tool that only does part of what you need it to do is a crazy irresponsible use of resources. IRC might be useful in some circumstances, but supporting team communication—especially for remote teams—is not one of those circumstances.

izacus 8y ago
How is that different from Slack though? Did people use bouncers that don't set /away ?
- bastawhiz 8y ago
  On slack it shows whether someone is active or away. It also guarantees they'll get the message. You're not praying that you picked the right bouncer to direct your message at and that it's configured to let them know when they get back.
  - dijit 8y ago
    You can easily see if someone is active or not. Most clients even tell you that the user is away. The other problem you describe is related to it being an open standard. If you had a custom slack client or server you also would not be able to make assumptions about how it works on the remote end.
    - bastawhiz 8y ago
      If you're an organization like Mozilla that uses IRC for company business, you can just tell employees what they must support (with an or closed product).

itchyjunk 8y ago

Looks like I am too late to this party. I just recently started visiting the mozilla ircd. There are lots of channels and very little way of navigating around. I was trying to figure out who to talk to about network support or if such a channel existed and no one had an answer. People come in asking support questions but no one has an idea of which channels to best ask in. #firefox, #introduction and #newbie are 3 channels doing the same thing and the questions just get split off. If they can't maintain their ircd, maybe just register a project on freenode who seems to be able to handle roughly 80k people just fine. Edit: Just checked, freenode has a #firefox, not sure how official or how maintained it is.

pojntfx 8y ago

Please use Matrix. Please.

lenkite 8y ago

Please Mozilla! Use an open alternative like Matrix/Riot or even better - BUILD one of your own if you think Matrix doesn't cut it. A foundational OSS company depending on a closed source product and closed protocol for such a fundamental need such as communication is simply wrong.

ParadisoShlee 8y ago

This is a good watershed moment for FOSS as a whole and I hope Mozilla decide to fork Mattermost or something similar and expand it to suit their needs over using Slack if that's the direction they head. Something federated and encrypted like Matrix/Riot would be fun. Having something that's federated would be lovely to see other members of the FOSS community start to come together over time. but there is a lot of problems with those rich text/react/Electron thick apps can be "painful" tho

swiftcoder 8y ago

Off of the main topic, but this blog is basically unreadable to my form of colour-blindness. The link colour is unreadable against the page background, and the right nav is so low in contrast I can't read any of it without using text selection to artificially improve the contrast.

zgramana 8y ago

I’m more than a little surprised nobody has chimed in advocating Openfire, which is Apache 2.0, standards based (XMPP et. al.), extensible, and also has some pretty nice browser clients out there (e.g. conversejs).

j--r 8y ago
There are way better XMPP Servers now ;)

agentultra 8y ago

That's too bad. Personally I dislike this trend towards a plurality of chat "services" and "apps." Now each project I interact with has their own chat service. I have to maintain accounts on all of them and install several applications to interact with each. It's a pain to manage. Not to mention that most of these services use Electron-based chat clients which exclude a bunch of people who cannot afford the kinds of machines required to use them or they have to suffer a poor experience on lower-end hardware. It also excludes people who use accessibility software or automation that doesn't integrate with web-based clients. The user experience on IRC scales better. Anyone can write a rich, easy-to-use client or server. If you happen to be a programmer you can write your own tools to manage your own user experience. The drift from casual user to power user isn't stopped by a walled garden of a tightly-controlled user experience that doesn't integrate with anything.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

car12 8y ago

I hope they move on to using Matrix. I think the successor to IRC ought to be not slack or any other closed source chat app but an open source one.

peterwwillis 8y ago

Are Riot and Matrix compatible with irc clients? If so, wouldn't that mostly solve the problem? You have a way to phase out legacy clients and time to work the kinks out of an open solution.

zzo38computer 8y ago

Many things mention about other services are still possible with IRC; in some cases by the client side and in some cases by the server side. Server side logging is possible (and I have implemented this once) with IRC. Still, you can make it available with multiple protocols, and you can alter an implementation of a IRC server even if you do not have it available with other protocols too. IRC is also easy to use without any special software. I currently have a NNTP server set up, but not IRC or any other kind of chat system (but if I do set one up, it will almost certainly be IRC).

ivank 8y ago

Discord is blocked in China, and a large number of people in China are not willing to use VPNs. Discord uses themes that do not meet minimum contrast guidelines (#747F8D on #FFFFFF is 4.06:1, failing WCAG AA for normal text). Discord says third-party clients[1] and even client-side CSS modifications violate their ToS https://twitter.com/discordapp/status/983359562458849280 https://twitter.com/discordapp/status/983359562458849280 [1] https://old.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/8tukek/ripcord_unofficial_native_discord_client_no/e1adbu5/ https://old.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/8tukek/ripcord_...

mcguire 8y ago

Whatever happened to XMPP?