6 ms·

> Because they don't give a rat's ass about the freedom aspect of free software. It's attitudes like this that make people really not care about FOSS. Yelling

> Because they don't give a rat's ass about the freedom aspect of free software. It's attitudes like this that make people really not care about FOSS. Yelling at people because they're not using IRC instead of slack isn't a good way to convince anyone.

kuschku 7y ago
When IRC looks like this https://quasseldroid.info/assets/images/phone.png https://quasseldroid.info/assets/images/phone.png or this https://blog.irccloud.com/static/2018-05-14-slack-integration/sidebyside-irccloud.png https://blog.irccloud.com/static/2018-05-14-slack-integratio... and people still complain about IRC’s UI or usability, then what more can we IRC devs do?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- jamesgeck0 7y ago
  IRCCloud is okay, but the UX/UI isn't anywhere near as nice as Slack.
  - kuschku 7y ago
    That may be true, but it's good enough that it should be easily usable by developers. And I'm personally working on Quasseldroid, improving its UI to make it much more usable. If you have suggestions on how to make Quasseldroid usable for the people that refuse to use IRC, I'd love to hear them :)
    - jamesgeck0 7y ago
      > it's good enough that it should be easily usable by developers. Sure, but the reason all the developers at my workplace use Slack is because we have to communicate with a lot of people who aren't developers. Slack's good UX extends beyond the basic chat interface to configuration, administration, and initial signup. It's significantly easier for someone nontechnical to toss money at Slack to get a new private space than it is with IRC. The first page of "IRC hosting" search results on Google for me are mostly shell accounts; nothing turnkey and professional looking that a business person could/would use.
  - jeena 7y ago
    Why would you need to use Slack (or IRC) when there is https://rocket.chat/ https://zulipchat.com/ https://matrix.org/ https://mattermost.com/
    - Crinus 7y ago
      Probably because the few people who want to use alternatives to Slack are spread among these four alternatives instead of using one and sticking with it. And honestly, of all the alternatives, IRC is by far the most popular one (and the other alternatives have IRC bridges) hence the most likely to stay around the longest. Also the simplest to implement, which helps a lot too.
- komali2 7y ago
  For me the issue with IRC protocol (not that I know much about it outside my interaction with UIs built around it) was authentication, and connectivity. So I had an android IRC app for a bit, some top paid one, and get booted from a bunch of my favorite channels because apparently it was just sat in my pocket cycling my connection and flooding the channel with join/unjoins. That, plus the weird way to authenticate doing /msg Nickserv identify. That might be just how the server I was connecting to was implemented, but it felt fucky.
  - kuschku 7y ago
    > That, plus the weird way to authenticate doing /msg Nickserv identify. That might be just how the server I was connecting to was implemented, but it felt fucky. That's what SASL has been for for over a decade nowadays :) https://i.k8r.eu/Jr-NBg.png https://i.k8r.eu/Jr-NBg.png
  - mjevans 7y ago
    That's more an issue with your connection. Mobile devices have really bad connections. IRC was //never// designed with them in mind; they literally didn't exist and were not likely to exist for decades (which it has been). IRC was designed, mostly, for two types of users: A) Large institution users who had a fixed link to the internet and ran in their shell on a mainframe. B) Dial-in users, who's devices mostly stayed connected, and when they disconnected, usually required manual intervention to get back on. Anyone, and I mean ANYONE using a mobile phone SHOULD be using a 'bouncer' or other gateway to access a live communications environment. This would be more like use case A where someone has a small agent on a slice of a server they 'trust' and that maintains state (for their client) and stateful connection (for links to other servers and users). IIRC, Quassel IRC has such a client/server model for the client, there are probably others too.
    - zapzupnz 7y ago
      I guess that's the thing, though. Yes, mobile users should be using a bouncer — but who's going to set it up for them, who's going to host it for free and in a manner that it has guaranteed next-to-no-downtime? It occurs to me that if IRC networks hosted their own bouncers, but that these bouncers were written efficiently to exchange data directly with the IRC servers' and their database rather than keep individual logs and so on, we might have something close to the "open-the-app-and-see-past-messages-without-needing-to-be-permanently-connected" quality that people have come to expect from instant messengers, Slack, Discord, etc. (but then you might as well just write such functionality directly into the IRCd)
- malvosenior 7y ago
  Neither of those look as good as Slack imho. Regardless, there's a bunch of stuff you can do with Slack that you can't with IRC. Emoji reactions, voice/video/screenshare, easily post files and images... Plus there's a unified experience for all users that's not client dependent, no burdensome technical or protocol jargon, no federated servers (or servers to think about at all)... I've used IRC quite a bit but Slack is light years beyond in terms of the UX of even the nicest IRC clients. I think Discord is probably even better than Slack though.
  - kuschku 7y ago
    Emoji reactions are actually a thing nowadays thanks to IRCv3 :) And personally I consider the slack UI, especially due to the different workspaces, relatively unintuitive.
  - floatboth 7y ago
    Forget IRC. You can do everything with Matrix :)
    - subway 7y ago
      Kinda-sorta? Matrix is an incredibly centralized service masquerading as an easily self-hosted distributed service. The moment you try to get a non-technical user connected to a homeserver other than matrix.org, all hell starts to break loose. It's bad enough that both France (tchap) and Purism have created their own client forks to make on-boarding somewhat tolerable at the expense of really painful rebases against upstream Riot, while Riot tries to get it's shit together on the non-matrix.org user story. Mattermost has a slightly less painful situation -- they provide a relatively easy to brand/preconfigure client (and fantastic docs on how to do so: https://docs.mattermost.com/mobile/mobile-compile-yourself.html https://docs.mattermost.com/mobile/mobile-compile-yourself.h... ), but you lose out on federation and self-service sign-up, leaving your community isolated (sometimes a pro, sometimes a con).
      - Arathorn 7y ago
        This is pretty disingenuous - we have spent loads of time making Riot work well with self-hosted servers (c.f. the current login & registration flows, which explicitly prompt you to select a server), and around 50% of the network are running their own servers. Our intention is to turn off the original matrix.org server once we have decentralised accounts and the network is healthy enough.
- ummonk 7y ago
  I know plenty who use IRCCloud. There is nothing FOSS about it, though.
- jcastro 7y ago
  Maybe consider the UX that Slack gives users instead of just cloning the UI on top of IRC and expect it to work out?
  - kuschku 7y ago
    That's a major part of what I've done recently, trying to significantly reduce complexity, and contribute to clients to make them more discoverable and require less knowledge to fully utilize them. The goal is to get rid of the historic interfaces which required a lot of RTFM, and instead to allow users to discover functionality through the UI easily. If you have any suggestions on what to improve regarding UX of Quasseldroid (my main project), I'd love to hear suggestions, as I'm always interested in improving its UX and learning more about UX design. After all, I, as quasseldroid maintainer, am just one student, not a team of highly paid UX designers. (And personally, I'm a huge fan of tools like Zulip, Mattermost and Matrix as well — we're all fighting on the same side, after all :)
- pixelrevision 7y ago
  IRC had its problems but I’d still rather be able to control my ui rather than have a bloated web browser running all day.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

kuschku 7y ago

When IRC looks like this https://quasseldroid.info/assets/images/phone.png https://quasseldroid.info/assets/images/phone.png or this https://blog.irccloud.com/static/2018-05-14-slack-integration/sidebyside-irccloud.png https://blog.irccloud.com/static/2018-05-14-slack-integratio... and people still complain about IRC’s UI or usability, then what more can we IRC devs do?

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
jamesgeck0 7y ago
IRCCloud is okay, but the UX/UI isn't anywhere near as nice as Slack.
- kuschku 7y ago
  That may be true, but it's good enough that it should be easily usable by developers. And I'm personally working on Quasseldroid, improving its UI to make it much more usable. If you have suggestions on how to make Quasseldroid usable for the people that refuse to use IRC, I'd love to hear them :)
  - jamesgeck0 7y ago
    > it's good enough that it should be easily usable by developers. Sure, but the reason all the developers at my workplace use Slack is because we have to communicate with a lot of people who aren't developers. Slack's good UX extends beyond the basic chat interface to configuration, administration, and initial signup. It's significantly easier for someone nontechnical to toss money at Slack to get a new private space than it is with IRC. The first page of "IRC hosting" search results on Google for me are mostly shell accounts; nothing turnkey and professional looking that a business person could/would use.
- jeena 7y ago
  Why would you need to use Slack (or IRC) when there is https://rocket.chat/ https://zulipchat.com/ https://matrix.org/ https://mattermost.com/
  - Crinus 7y ago
    Probably because the few people who want to use alternatives to Slack are spread among these four alternatives instead of using one and sticking with it. And honestly, of all the alternatives, IRC is by far the most popular one (and the other alternatives have IRC bridges) hence the most likely to stay around the longest. Also the simplest to implement, which helps a lot too.
komali2 7y ago
For me the issue with IRC protocol (not that I know much about it outside my interaction with UIs built around it) was authentication, and connectivity. So I had an android IRC app for a bit, some top paid one, and get booted from a bunch of my favorite channels because apparently it was just sat in my pocket cycling my connection and flooding the channel with join/unjoins. That, plus the weird way to authenticate doing /msg Nickserv identify. That might be just how the server I was connecting to was implemented, but it felt fucky.
- kuschku 7y ago
  > That, plus the weird way to authenticate doing /msg Nickserv identify. That might be just how the server I was connecting to was implemented, but it felt fucky. That's what SASL has been for for over a decade nowadays :) https://i.k8r.eu/Jr-NBg.png https://i.k8r.eu/Jr-NBg.png
- mjevans 7y ago
  That's more an issue with your connection. Mobile devices have really bad connections. IRC was //never// designed with them in mind; they literally didn't exist and were not likely to exist for decades (which it has been). IRC was designed, mostly, for two types of users: A) Large institution users who had a fixed link to the internet and ran in their shell on a mainframe. B) Dial-in users, who's devices mostly stayed connected, and when they disconnected, usually required manual intervention to get back on. Anyone, and I mean ANYONE using a mobile phone SHOULD be using a 'bouncer' or other gateway to access a live communications environment. This would be more like use case A where someone has a small agent on a slice of a server they 'trust' and that maintains state (for their client) and stateful connection (for links to other servers and users). IIRC, Quassel IRC has such a client/server model for the client, there are probably others too.
  - zapzupnz 7y ago
    I guess that's the thing, though. Yes, mobile users should be using a bouncer — but who's going to set it up for them, who's going to host it for free and in a manner that it has guaranteed next-to-no-downtime? It occurs to me that if IRC networks hosted their own bouncers, but that these bouncers were written efficiently to exchange data directly with the IRC servers' and their database rather than keep individual logs and so on, we might have something close to the "open-the-app-and-see-past-messages-without-needing-to-be-permanently-connected" quality that people have come to expect from instant messengers, Slack, Discord, etc. (but then you might as well just write such functionality directly into the IRCd)
malvosenior 7y ago
Neither of those look as good as Slack imho. Regardless, there's a bunch of stuff you can do with Slack that you can't with IRC. Emoji reactions, voice/video/screenshare, easily post files and images... Plus there's a unified experience for all users that's not client dependent, no burdensome technical or protocol jargon, no federated servers (or servers to think about at all)... I've used IRC quite a bit but Slack is light years beyond in terms of the UX of even the nicest IRC clients. I think Discord is probably even better than Slack though.
- kuschku 7y ago
  Emoji reactions are actually a thing nowadays thanks to IRCv3 :) And personally I consider the slack UI, especially due to the different workspaces, relatively unintuitive.
- floatboth 7y ago
  Forget IRC. You can do everything with Matrix :)
  - subway 7y ago
    Kinda-sorta? Matrix is an incredibly centralized service masquerading as an easily self-hosted distributed service. The moment you try to get a non-technical user connected to a homeserver other than matrix.org, all hell starts to break loose. It's bad enough that both France (tchap) and Purism have created their own client forks to make on-boarding somewhat tolerable at the expense of really painful rebases against upstream Riot, while Riot tries to get it's shit together on the non-matrix.org user story. Mattermost has a slightly less painful situation -- they provide a relatively easy to brand/preconfigure client (and fantastic docs on how to do so: https://docs.mattermost.com/mobile/mobile-compile-yourself.html https://docs.mattermost.com/mobile/mobile-compile-yourself.h... ), but you lose out on federation and self-service sign-up, leaving your community isolated (sometimes a pro, sometimes a con).
    - Arathorn 7y ago
      This is pretty disingenuous - we have spent loads of time making Riot work well with self-hosted servers (c.f. the current login & registration flows, which explicitly prompt you to select a server), and around 50% of the network are running their own servers. Our intention is to turn off the original matrix.org server once we have decentralised accounts and the network is healthy enough.
ummonk 7y ago
I know plenty who use IRCCloud. There is nothing FOSS about it, though.
jcastro 7y ago
Maybe consider the UX that Slack gives users instead of just cloning the UI on top of IRC and expect it to work out?
- kuschku 7y ago
  That's a major part of what I've done recently, trying to significantly reduce complexity, and contribute to clients to make them more discoverable and require less knowledge to fully utilize them. The goal is to get rid of the historic interfaces which required a lot of RTFM, and instead to allow users to discover functionality through the UI easily. If you have any suggestions on what to improve regarding UX of Quasseldroid (my main project), I'd love to hear suggestions, as I'm always interested in improving its UX and learning more about UX design. After all, I, as quasseldroid maintainer, am just one student, not a team of highly paid UX designers. (And personally, I'm a huge fan of tools like Zulip, Mattermost and Matrix as well — we're all fighting on the same side, after all :)
pixelrevision 7y ago
IRC had its problems but I’d still rather be able to control my ui rather than have a bloated web browser running all day.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]