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I'm curious, what's wrong with IRC? Is it too old? Too difficult to monitor and moderate? Too easy to spam? I don't understand. I've never really understood wh

by jokoon 7y ago

I'm curious, what's wrong with IRC? Is it too old? Too difficult to monitor and moderate? Too easy to spam? I don't understand. I've never really understood why mozilla chose their own servers and not freenode. I've never really grasped the whole history of enet vs freenode either.

jeltz 7y ago
Mozilla has said they thought it was too difficult to monitor and moderate. Could that have been solved by moving to Freenode? Probably, but there are other issues with IRC. Having to run your own IRC bouncer increases the barrier of entry, as does nickserv based auth. Modern people also expect to be able to seamlessly post images, large code examples, files, etc. Some people also want support for threaded conversations. None of this is offered by the typical IRC setup which Mozilla probably thinks that it scares away users. I do not think Matrix solves all of these yet, but it solves some of them.
stjohnswarts 7y ago
A lot of younger developers consider IRC limited and crusty. They are more easily attracted to platforms they've grown used to that behave similar to discord, teams, and slack.
steveklabnik 7y ago
http://exple.tive.org/blarg/2019/04/26/synchronous-text/ http://exple.tive.org/blarg/2019/04/26/synchronous-text/
alkonaut 7y ago
How is the feature parity with newer alternatives? Can I share my screen with someone easily? Can I post a screenshot? Can I be sure every client shows the screenshot properly? Will it handle an animated screenshot? I wouldn’t want to use one tool for typing text and another for calling a third for sharing files and a fourth for sharing a screen and so on. For example: Sharing an image as a link isn’t really an acceptable UX these days I think.
bsder 7y ago
> I'm curious, what's wrong with IRC? It seems that the most significant complaint is bad mobile experience.

by jokoon 7y ago

jeltz 7y ago

Mozilla has said they thought it was too difficult to monitor and moderate. Could that have been solved by moving to Freenode? Probably, but there are other issues with IRC. Having to run your own IRC bouncer increases the barrier of entry, as does nickserv based auth. Modern people also expect to be able to seamlessly post images, large code examples, files, etc. Some people also want support for threaded conversations. None of this is offered by the typical IRC setup which Mozilla probably thinks that it scares away users. I do not think Matrix solves all of these yet, but it solves some of them.

stjohnswarts 7y ago

A lot of younger developers consider IRC limited and crusty. They are more easily attracted to platforms they've grown used to that behave similar to discord, teams, and slack.

steveklabnik 7y ago

http://exple.tive.org/blarg/2019/04/26/synchronous-text/ http://exple.tive.org/blarg/2019/04/26/synchronous-text/

alkonaut 7y ago

How is the feature parity with newer alternatives? Can I share my screen with someone easily? Can I post a screenshot? Can I be sure every client shows the screenshot properly? Will it handle an animated screenshot? I wouldn’t want to use one tool for typing text and another for calling a third for sharing files and a fourth for sharing a screen and so on. For example: Sharing an image as a link isn’t really an acceptable UX these days I think.

bsder 7y ago

> I'm curious, what's wrong with IRC? It seems that the most significant complaint is bad mobile experience.