14 ms·

Moznet IRC is dead; long live Mozilla Matrix

246 points by Arathorn 7y ago

superkuh 7y ago
Goodbye Mozilla. Does anyone know if they have an IRC bridge set up? The matrix-ircd is good but it doesn't seem to be implemented yet.
- apeace 7y ago
  From the article: > Finally, it's worth noting that the matrix-ircd project is seeing some commits again, many thanks to jplatte from the Ruma project - so if you are currently despairing the demise of moznet, never fear: you may yet be able to connect to the Mozilla matrix server via IRC (authing via Mozilla IAM, of course) and pretend that none of this newfangled Matrix stuff exists :D
  - josteink 7y ago
    > you may yet be able to connect to the Mozilla matrix server via IRC (authing via Mozilla IAM, of course) and pretend that none of this newfangled Matrix stuff exists :D That sounds good. I’ll keep my irc-client then.
ghostpepper 7y ago
Is there a way to join the hosted version without having to sign in?
- detaro 7y ago
  If I remember the documentation around the decision to switch correctly, having enforced sign-in for moderation was on the requirements list. EDIT found it: > While we’re investigating options for semi-anonymous or pseudonymous connections, we will require authentication, because: > The Mozilla Community Participation Guidelines will apply, and they’ll be enforced. http://exple.tive.org/blarg/2019/04/26/synchronous-text/ http://exple.tive.org/blarg/2019/04/26/synchronous-text/ (Don't ask me why the article seems to pretend IRC has to be unauthenticated)
  - ghostpepper 7y ago
    So I guess this is more for internal Mozilla discussions and not for random users to ask questions. Presumably IRC is still the place for that?
    - detaro 7y ago
      As the post says, Mozilla IRC has been shut down. Presumably users are expected to create an account.
    - sfink 7y ago
      No. There's an internal Slack for that, which I avoid as much as I can. (Mozilla dev here.) Matrix just requires you to create an account, not be part of Mozilla somehow. Besides, you already are a part of Mozilla. Or you can be: check out the bug database, submit a patch, and we'll happily land it. :-) Until you've been around long enough to land it yourself; commit privileges are not tied to employment.
      - ghostpepper 7y ago
        Can I sign into matrix with my Mozilla bug tracker account? I don't really want to link my gmail / github /etc
        Aaronn 7y ago
        Bugzilla isn't an option. You can just use an email address, you don't have to link it to another account.
kgraves 7y ago
Finally, this is going to be more accessible to more users to Mozilla since now they are using Matrix. Well done to the Matrix team, The future is here!
- josteink 7y ago
  I dunno. As someone who gets IRC and consider it proper mature, and thinks Matrix sounds like a mess I’d rather not have to look into, it probably means Mozilla will be less accessible to me. Unless they keep a IRC-bridge around and then I will be happy, because then Mozilla is still on IRC and whatever overly complex Matrix-based IRC-backend they have, that’s not really my problem.
  - viraptor 7y ago
    There's a lot of bias here. You consider something you use mature. On the other hand what you don't use only "sounds like a mess". You may want to give it a try before criticising it as probably less accessible.
    - karatestomp 7y ago
      You can semi-productively talk to IRC over Telnet and it's been around basically forever in Internet time. Anything's going to be an immature mess by comparison—whether the mess is justified by improved functionality, and whether the new kid'll be around long enough to care about (say, is it likely to still be alive and kickin' in 20 years), are the important questions.
      - Arathorn 7y ago
        You can semi-productively talk to Matrix over a few lines of bash & curl fwiw, as per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20949477 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20949477
    - josteink 7y ago
      > There's a lot of bias here. Sure. I've been on IRC since the 90s. It's a tool I know and love. > You may want to give it a try before criticising it as probably less accessible. OK. What good terminal clients exists which I can run in a screen session on my home server? Are there any which acts more or less like irssi or weechat, which I've developed deep habbits for the last 20+ years? And are any of these packaged by Debian or Ubuntu? If it's mature tech, like you say, there should be lots of clients and finding one which fits my niche should be simple, right?
dang 7y ago
Related from a couple months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21835749 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21835749
FreeHugs 7y ago
So how do you sign in / sign up without installing additional software on your machine?
- yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
  How is installing a matrix client any different than installing an IRC client?
  - josteink 7y ago
    Can I "apt install" a terminal Matrix-client, like I can probably apt install more IRC-clients than I can count?
  - karatestomp 7y ago
    It's unclear to me whether any command-line based Matrix clients are in major package managers, for one thing. Going by Github the only one that looks like it's active is written in Python. Other, non-CLI desktop clients look variously half-finished or abandoned. Looks like mobile and web get all the attention.
    - Arathorn 7y ago
      weechat-matrix gets a lot of attention, works really well, has full E2EE support, and weechat at least is in major package managers. Matrix is evolving pretty fast though, so you'll probably have to install your own matrix plugin from https://github.com/poljar/weechat-matrix https://github.com/poljar/weechat-matrix. Meanwhile gomuks also exists and is usable and not abandoned. On GUI Desktop, various clients are in active dev - e.g. Fractal for GTK/Rust, Quaternion for Qt/C++, Nheko for Qt/QML, etc. They are not as complete as Riot yet, but I'm sure PRs are welcome...
      - iggldiggl 7y ago
        > On GUI Desktop, various clients are in active dev ... although if I'm not mistaken, unfortunately none of them supports Single Sign-On yet, which is required for joining the Mozilla instance.
kzrdude 7y ago
is matrix persistent, like, will the server send backlog when you come back online? And are there good android apps for it
- feanaro 7y ago
  > is matrix persistent, like, will the server send backlog when you come back online? Yes, that's one of the most important aspects of Matrix. > And are there good android apps for it Riot for Android is usable, but has some deficiencies and is in the process of being replaced. RiotX is the slated replacement (a total rewrite in Kotlin), but it's only available in Early Access right now. It's already usable and works nicely, though.
  - Arathorn 7y ago
    RiotX is approaching 1.0 in the coming weeks and is highly recommended over Riot/Android at this point.
    - shmerl 7y ago
      Except it doesn't have calls yet. Hopefully it won't take long.
shmerl 7y ago
Nice to see Mozilla choosing Matrix. Rust project should do the same instead of Discord.
- chrysoprace 7y ago
  Until such a time there's a community-run Rust room on #rust:matrix.org.
  - rhn_mk1 7y ago
    And ##rust on Freenode.
    - Arathorn 7y ago
      which is #freenode_##rust:matrix.org on Matrix (although it's a mahoosive room, so don't join it if your server is underpowered)
      - ohyeshedid 7y ago
        Server meaning my own matrix server? How much power is needed to comfortably join a massive room? Is it just the initial sync load or is there constant heavy load for massive rooms?
        progval 7y ago
        > How much power is needed to comfortably join a massive room? "At least 1GB of free RAM if you want to join large public rooms like #matrix:matrix.org" https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/blob/master/INSTALL.md#installing-from-source https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/blob/master/INSTALL.md...
        Arathorn 7y ago
        Server meaning the one your client connects to. The resource requirements of joining a busy room with lots of members is mainly RAM, and it spikes at join and initial sync, but does then occupy room in memory and the DB to maintain state for all the activity in that room. For something like ##rust you should expect to see an initial spike of a few hundred MB of RAM which then dies down again. This can be optimised massively, but we haven't got to it in Synapse yet. (Dendrite is looking way better though).
acd 7y ago
Way to go Mozilla! Thanks for showing the way on how to do open chat in open source projects.
chrysoprace 7y ago
While I commend Mozilla for embracing Matrix, I do think it would've been worthwhile to set up an IRC bridge (I don't use IRC personally) before deprecating their IRC server.
- DeepYogurt 7y ago
  I disagree. It's just more infrastructure to maintain and would allow for anonymous harassment which is what caused mozilla to move away from IRC to begin with.
  - dijit 7y ago
    Ironic; as one of the primary reasons I haven't set up a matrix bridge to my IRC network is that the moderation tools are very lacking. :\
    - Arathorn 7y ago
      hm, this may be stale info - we've worked loads on moderation recently: https://matrix.org/docs/guides/moderation/ https://matrix.org/docs/guides/moderation/ etc. If there's stuff missing for your use cases please let us know (perhaps to security@matrix.org)
  - detaro 7y ago
    You can require accounts for IRC access though. I think today it's fair to require clients to support SASL.
airstrike 7y ago
Based on cursory research, it seems like weechat-matrix[0] is the smoothest path to transition from IRC to Matrix... Would others care to weigh in? [0] https://matrix.org/docs/projects/client/weechat-matrix https://matrix.org/docs/projects/client/weechat-matrix
- klardotsh 7y ago
  This (and previously, https://github.com/torhve/weechat-matrix-protocol-script https://github.com/torhve/weechat-matrix-protocol-script) has been my primary way of accessing Matrix for well over a year on PC-esque setups. It's amazing as long as you don't care about the video/call functionality. Much, much lighter than Riot yet more feature-full than most of the native GUI clients (nheko, fractal, etc.) IMO.
badrabbit 7y ago
Congrats Matrix, excellent choice by Mozilla.
synapse1 7y ago
Wow. chat.mozila.org took 20 seconds to load. It's i18n is horrible, it requires me to sign up, and then boom! "Registration has been disabled on this homeserver." What?? I have one thing and one thing only to say. Fuck you mozila. Fuck you.
esjeon 7y ago
Just out of curiosity: there was a thread on Matrix, started by a dev of an alternate homeserver implementation[1] (also covered later by [2]). He pointed out (1) incomplete spec preventing 3rd party implementations, and forces reverse-enginerring of the reference (2) project/spec ownership problem. I think (2) is already ironed out, but not sure how the protocol spec(1) is doing. How are community-based servers doing? I heard Matrix is intentionally putting implementation ahead of spec, which isn't exactly nice... [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19365968 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19365968 [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19417791 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19417791
- Arathorn 7y ago
  Speaking as project lead for Matrix, we of course encourage as many implementations as possible of all parts of the ecosystem, including servers. The issues raised by that developer are entirely due to their destructive behaviour rather than any illwill towards community developers, as per the thread at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19418111 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19418111. In terms of the spec being incomplete a year ago... yes, it was still a WIP and in beta. We exited beta with a complete spec in June 2019, as per https://matrix.org/blog/2019/06/11/introducing-matrix-1-0-and-the-matrix-org-foundation https://matrix.org/blog/2019/06/11/introducing-matrix-1-0-an.... Since then, on the server side, development on Dendrite has resumed in earnest - and there is zero overlap between those working on it and the Synapse developers & team. Other community servers are making slower progress, but this is not due to antagonism towards the community, but because it's quite a lot of work. I suspect folks have also been scared off by fear & uncertainty from the kind of threads you linked. Finally, "intentionally putting implementation ahead of spec" is absolutely critical for Matrix. We draft proposals, we implement them, and only if they are shown to work in the field do we merge them into the spec. We believe this is something that XMPP and others got monumentally wrong, and a very desirable and nice property indeed.
  - esjeon 7y ago
    Thanks for the reply, and sorry if I reminded you of bad memories. But now I can wholeheartedly say I support Matrix. I’m also glad to hear that there’s the diversity sprouting, since I believe it is the best way to put the specification on test. And I didn’t realized there are proposals openly being worked on[1]. I think I missed it while browsing through the site. Anyways, thanks for all your hard work. Matrix will surely help a lot of people, including the open source community. [1]: https://matrix.org/docs/spec/proposals#work-in-progress https://matrix.org/docs/spec/proposals#work-in-progress
trynewideas 7y ago
"Registration has been disabled on this homeserver." :(
- Aaronn 7y ago
  It actually is enabled, just a bug with the single sign-on which should be worked out soon. For now, click on Sign in and then you will be able to create an account.
  - trynewideas 7y ago
    > click on Sign in You mean "Sign in with single sign-on"? Because right now the flow is - Go to https://chat.mozilla.org/#/welcome https://chat.mozilla.org/#/welcome - Click on "Sign in" - Options are "Sign in with single sign-on" or "Create account" - "Create account" fails with "Registration has been disabled on this homeserver." So if I "Sign in with single sign-on", I create an account, but if I "Create account" I can't?

246 points by Arathorn 7y ago

Goodbye Mozilla. Does anyone know if they have an IRC bridge set up? The matrix-ircd is good but it doesn't seem to be implemented yet.

apeace 7y ago
From the article: > Finally, it's worth noting that the matrix-ircd project is seeing some commits again, many thanks to jplatte from the Ruma project - so if you are currently despairing the demise of moznet, never fear: you may yet be able to connect to the Mozilla matrix server via IRC (authing via Mozilla IAM, of course) and pretend that none of this newfangled Matrix stuff exists :D
- josteink 7y ago
  > you may yet be able to connect to the Mozilla matrix server via IRC (authing via Mozilla IAM, of course) and pretend that none of this newfangled Matrix stuff exists :D That sounds good. I’ll keep my irc-client then.

ghostpepper 7y ago

Is there a way to join the hosted version without having to sign in?

detaro 7y ago
If I remember the documentation around the decision to switch correctly, having enforced sign-in for moderation was on the requirements list. EDIT found it: > While we’re investigating options for semi-anonymous or pseudonymous connections, we will require authentication, because: > The Mozilla Community Participation Guidelines will apply, and they’ll be enforced. http://exple.tive.org/blarg/2019/04/26/synchronous-text/ http://exple.tive.org/blarg/2019/04/26/synchronous-text/ (Don't ask me why the article seems to pretend IRC has to be unauthenticated)
- ghostpepper 7y ago
  So I guess this is more for internal Mozilla discussions and not for random users to ask questions. Presumably IRC is still the place for that?
  - detaro 7y ago
    As the post says, Mozilla IRC has been shut down. Presumably users are expected to create an account.
  - sfink 7y ago
    No. There's an internal Slack for that, which I avoid as much as I can. (Mozilla dev here.) Matrix just requires you to create an account, not be part of Mozilla somehow. Besides, you already are a part of Mozilla. Or you can be: check out the bug database, submit a patch, and we'll happily land it. :-) Until you've been around long enough to land it yourself; commit privileges are not tied to employment.
    - ghostpepper 7y ago
      Can I sign into matrix with my Mozilla bug tracker account? I don't really want to link my gmail / github /etc
      - Aaronn 7y ago
        Bugzilla isn't an option. You can just use an email address, you don't have to link it to another account.

kgraves 7y ago

Finally, this is going to be more accessible to more users to Mozilla since now they are using Matrix. Well done to the Matrix team, The future is here!

josteink 7y ago
I dunno. As someone who gets IRC and consider it proper mature, and thinks Matrix sounds like a mess I’d rather not have to look into, it probably means Mozilla will be less accessible to me. Unless they keep a IRC-bridge around and then I will be happy, because then Mozilla is still on IRC and whatever overly complex Matrix-based IRC-backend they have, that’s not really my problem.
- viraptor 7y ago
  There's a lot of bias here. You consider something you use mature. On the other hand what you don't use only "sounds like a mess". You may want to give it a try before criticising it as probably less accessible.
  - karatestomp 7y ago
    You can semi-productively talk to IRC over Telnet and it's been around basically forever in Internet time. Anything's going to be an immature mess by comparison—whether the mess is justified by improved functionality, and whether the new kid'll be around long enough to care about (say, is it likely to still be alive and kickin' in 20 years), are the important questions.
    - Arathorn 7y ago
      You can semi-productively talk to Matrix over a few lines of bash & curl fwiw, as per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20949477 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20949477
  - josteink 7y ago
    > There's a lot of bias here. Sure. I've been on IRC since the 90s. It's a tool I know and love. > You may want to give it a try before criticising it as probably less accessible. OK. What good terminal clients exists which I can run in a screen session on my home server? Are there any which acts more or less like irssi or weechat, which I've developed deep habbits for the last 20+ years? And are any of these packaged by Debian or Ubuntu? If it's mature tech, like you say, there should be lots of clients and finding one which fits my niche should be simple, right?

dang 7y ago

Related from a couple months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21835749 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21835749

FreeHugs 7y ago

So how do you sign in / sign up without installing additional software on your machine?

yjftsjthsd-h 7y ago
How is installing a matrix client any different than installing an IRC client?
- josteink 7y ago
  Can I "apt install" a terminal Matrix-client, like I can probably apt install more IRC-clients than I can count?
- karatestomp 7y ago
  It's unclear to me whether any command-line based Matrix clients are in major package managers, for one thing. Going by Github the only one that looks like it's active is written in Python. Other, non-CLI desktop clients look variously half-finished or abandoned. Looks like mobile and web get all the attention.
  - Arathorn 7y ago
    weechat-matrix gets a lot of attention, works really well, has full E2EE support, and weechat at least is in major package managers. Matrix is evolving pretty fast though, so you'll probably have to install your own matrix plugin from https://github.com/poljar/weechat-matrix https://github.com/poljar/weechat-matrix. Meanwhile gomuks also exists and is usable and not abandoned. On GUI Desktop, various clients are in active dev - e.g. Fractal for GTK/Rust, Quaternion for Qt/C++, Nheko for Qt/QML, etc. They are not as complete as Riot yet, but I'm sure PRs are welcome...
    - iggldiggl 7y ago
      > On GUI Desktop, various clients are in active dev ... although if I'm not mistaken, unfortunately none of them supports Single Sign-On yet, which is required for joining the Mozilla instance.

kzrdude 7y ago

is matrix persistent, like, will the server send backlog when you come back online? And are there good android apps for it

feanaro 7y ago
> is matrix persistent, like, will the server send backlog when you come back online? Yes, that's one of the most important aspects of Matrix. > And are there good android apps for it Riot for Android is usable, but has some deficiencies and is in the process of being replaced. RiotX is the slated replacement (a total rewrite in Kotlin), but it's only available in Early Access right now. It's already usable and works nicely, though.
- Arathorn 7y ago
  RiotX is approaching 1.0 in the coming weeks and is highly recommended over Riot/Android at this point.
  - shmerl 7y ago
    Except it doesn't have calls yet. Hopefully it won't take long.

shmerl 7y ago

Nice to see Mozilla choosing Matrix. Rust project should do the same instead of Discord.

chrysoprace 7y ago
Until such a time there's a community-run Rust room on #rust:matrix.org.
- rhn_mk1 7y ago
  And ##rust on Freenode.
  - Arathorn 7y ago
    which is #freenode_##rust:matrix.org on Matrix (although it's a mahoosive room, so don't join it if your server is underpowered)
    - ohyeshedid 7y ago
      Server meaning my own matrix server? How much power is needed to comfortably join a massive room? Is it just the initial sync load or is there constant heavy load for massive rooms?
      - progval 7y ago
        > How much power is needed to comfortably join a massive room? "At least 1GB of free RAM if you want to join large public rooms like #matrix:matrix.org" https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/blob/master/INSTALL.md#installing-from-source https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/blob/master/INSTALL.md...
      - Arathorn 7y ago
        Server meaning the one your client connects to. The resource requirements of joining a busy room with lots of members is mainly RAM, and it spikes at join and initial sync, but does then occupy room in memory and the DB to maintain state for all the activity in that room. For something like ##rust you should expect to see an initial spike of a few hundred MB of RAM which then dies down again. This can be optimised massively, but we haven't got to it in Synapse yet. (Dendrite is looking way better though).

acd 7y ago

Way to go Mozilla! Thanks for showing the way on how to do open chat in open source projects.

chrysoprace 7y ago

While I commend Mozilla for embracing Matrix, I do think it would've been worthwhile to set up an IRC bridge (I don't use IRC personally) before deprecating their IRC server.

DeepYogurt 7y ago
I disagree. It's just more infrastructure to maintain and would allow for anonymous harassment which is what caused mozilla to move away from IRC to begin with.
- dijit 7y ago
  Ironic; as one of the primary reasons I haven't set up a matrix bridge to my IRC network is that the moderation tools are very lacking. :\
  - Arathorn 7y ago
    hm, this may be stale info - we've worked loads on moderation recently: https://matrix.org/docs/guides/moderation/ https://matrix.org/docs/guides/moderation/ etc. If there's stuff missing for your use cases please let us know (perhaps to security@matrix.org)
- detaro 7y ago
  You can require accounts for IRC access though. I think today it's fair to require clients to support SASL.

airstrike 7y ago

Based on cursory research, it seems like weechat-matrix[0] is the smoothest path to transition from IRC to Matrix... Would others care to weigh in? [0] https://matrix.org/docs/projects/client/weechat-matrix https://matrix.org/docs/projects/client/weechat-matrix

klardotsh 7y ago
This (and previously, https://github.com/torhve/weechat-matrix-protocol-script https://github.com/torhve/weechat-matrix-protocol-script) has been my primary way of accessing Matrix for well over a year on PC-esque setups. It's amazing as long as you don't care about the video/call functionality. Much, much lighter than Riot yet more feature-full than most of the native GUI clients (nheko, fractal, etc.) IMO.

badrabbit 7y ago

Congrats Matrix, excellent choice by Mozilla.

synapse1 7y ago

Wow. chat.mozila.org took 20 seconds to load. It's i18n is horrible, it requires me to sign up, and then boom! "Registration has been disabled on this homeserver." What?? I have one thing and one thing only to say. Fuck you mozila. Fuck you.

esjeon 7y ago

Just out of curiosity: there was a thread on Matrix, started by a dev of an alternate homeserver implementation[1] (also covered later by [2]). He pointed out (1) incomplete spec preventing 3rd party implementations, and forces reverse-enginerring of the reference (2) project/spec ownership problem. I think (2) is already ironed out, but not sure how the protocol spec(1) is doing. How are community-based servers doing? I heard Matrix is intentionally putting implementation ahead of spec, which isn't exactly nice... [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19365968 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19365968 [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19417791 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19417791

Arathorn 7y ago
Speaking as project lead for Matrix, we of course encourage as many implementations as possible of all parts of the ecosystem, including servers. The issues raised by that developer are entirely due to their destructive behaviour rather than any illwill towards community developers, as per the thread at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19418111 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19418111. In terms of the spec being incomplete a year ago... yes, it was still a WIP and in beta. We exited beta with a complete spec in June 2019, as per https://matrix.org/blog/2019/06/11/introducing-matrix-1-0-and-the-matrix-org-foundation https://matrix.org/blog/2019/06/11/introducing-matrix-1-0-an.... Since then, on the server side, development on Dendrite has resumed in earnest - and there is zero overlap between those working on it and the Synapse developers & team. Other community servers are making slower progress, but this is not due to antagonism towards the community, but because it's quite a lot of work. I suspect folks have also been scared off by fear & uncertainty from the kind of threads you linked. Finally, "intentionally putting implementation ahead of spec" is absolutely critical for Matrix. We draft proposals, we implement them, and only if they are shown to work in the field do we merge them into the spec. We believe this is something that XMPP and others got monumentally wrong, and a very desirable and nice property indeed.
- esjeon 7y ago
  Thanks for the reply, and sorry if I reminded you of bad memories. But now I can wholeheartedly say I support Matrix. I’m also glad to hear that there’s the diversity sprouting, since I believe it is the best way to put the specification on test. And I didn’t realized there are proposals openly being worked on[1]. I think I missed it while browsing through the site. Anyways, thanks for all your hard work. Matrix will surely help a lot of people, including the open source community. [1]: https://matrix.org/docs/spec/proposals#work-in-progress https://matrix.org/docs/spec/proposals#work-in-progress

trynewideas 7y ago

"Registration has been disabled on this homeserver." :(

Aaronn 7y ago
It actually is enabled, just a bug with the single sign-on which should be worked out soon. For now, click on Sign in and then you will be able to create an account.
- trynewideas 7y ago
  > click on Sign in You mean "Sign in with single sign-on"? Because right now the flow is - Go to https://chat.mozilla.org/#/welcome https://chat.mozilla.org/#/welcome - Click on "Sign in" - Options are "Sign in with single sign-on" or "Create account" - "Create account" fails with "Registration has been disabled on this homeserver." So if I "Sign in with single sign-on", I create an account, but if I "Create account" I can't?