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Mozilla's Matrix numbers disagree. Riot/Matrix is much more accessible than IRC. "The number of participants in our primary development channels [on Matrix] ha

Mozilla's Matrix numbers disagree. Riot/Matrix is much more accessible than IRC. "The number of participants in our primary development channels [on Matrix] has already exceeded their counterparts on IRC at their most active, and there’s no sign that’s slowing down." https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/synchronous-messaging-at-mozilla-were-live/54424 https://discourse.mozilla.org/t/synchronous-messaging-at-moz...

bsagdiyev 7y ago
Keeping in mind that generally technical people will join this server and may have a vested interest in the move from IRC? The issue around IRC is not a problem that can't be solved and really has been solved with the Web UI clients, for an every day user, to clients that make it simple otherwise. See my other comment in this thread if you disagree but this is making something unnecessarily complicated because... reasons?
- buzzkillington 7y ago
  The bureaucracy expanded to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.
- AlexMax 7y ago
  > Keeping in mind that generally technical people will join this server and may have a vested interest in the move from IRC? I'm not sure what the implication is here. > The issue around IRC is not a problem that can't be solved and really has been solved with the Web UI clients, for an every day user, to clients that make it simple otherwise. The issues surrounding IRC are partly because of inconsistent client implementation of features, but I think an even bigger problem is the inconsistent feature set of servers, which end-users have no control over. Sometimes it's because the server simply hasn't implemented a particular feature, other times it's because there is no feature - and if you're lucky, you'll even be told condescendingly that you don't actually need that feature in the first place. And of course, there's also the stuff that is implemented, but only accessible through bot interfaces that are incompatible between servers. Or the problems that are technically possible but require using a bouncer, and even still, that has inconvenient warts like having to grep through logs to search for stuff that isn't in your backlog, and the seemingly impossible-to-solve issue of persisting private messages across reconnects in a way that's useful in all situations. In any case, Mozilla has mentioned their intent to make their Matrix server accessible from an IRC bridge in the future, so it really does seem like the best of both worlds - giving Matrix uses the advantages of the platform like editing chats and easy offline channel history, while allowing IRC users to continue using their comfy client. Personally, for me, it's the other way around - Matrix has almost completely supplanted the use of my self-hosted IRC bouncer, and I'm looking forward to the day when I can shut it off for good.
progval 7y ago
IRC and Matrix don't count users the same way. With Matrix, if you just create an account, join a room, and completely forget about it, you're still counted. There must be a bunch of Matrix channels that count me at least three times because of the different accounts/homeservers I used when trying to make something work. Meanwhile on IRC you (or someone else) needs to have a client running somewhere to be counted.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
rhn_mk1 7y ago
There's no info on how the numbers were compared, but Matrix and IRC have a different approach to counting "present" users. On IRC, a user closing the client gets subtracted from active users count, on Matrix they don't. Thay may never even come back to Matrix ever again, but they will still bloat the number of users. In this light, the number of users in a Matrix channel hardly ever decreases and is not representative of channel's popularity.
- hombre_fatal 7y ago
  This may be true, but you can also just sit in the room and compare actual activity levels. Every project I've seen that's opened up a Slack/Discord/<something like those> alternative to their IRC channel has had much more participation on the Slack/Discord. Elm's Slack is completely bustling. This is something to take seriously when the goal is to actually build a community instead of hand-wring about IRC technical superiority.
Aengeuad 7y ago
More numbers doesn't necessarily mean that it's more accessible though. I'm not trying to say that IRC is the most user friendly or accessible and I have no doubts Matrix wins on this front, but consider that the IRC server was just sitting there for years not getting that much attention, I only learned of its existence through Rust for instance. The switch to Matrix caused huge amounts of advertising for both the IRC server and the upcoming replacement and I saw articles and discussions on this way outside the normal Rust/Firefox/Mozilla circles, and it didn't just come at once either, as once Mozilla decided on Matrix as a replacement there was another set of articles hitting the rounds. P.S. that post mentions internal engineering/ops teams switching from Slack to Matrix, that'd boost Matrix numbers if they weren't using IRC already. Perhaps that's an accessibility issue if Matrix was offering features that Slack had and IRC was missing.

bsagdiyev 7y ago

Keeping in mind that generally technical people will join this server and may have a vested interest in the move from IRC? The issue around IRC is not a problem that can't be solved and really has been solved with the Web UI clients, for an every day user, to clients that make it simple otherwise. See my other comment in this thread if you disagree but this is making something unnecessarily complicated because... reasons?

buzzkillington 7y ago
The bureaucracy expanded to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.
AlexMax 7y ago
> Keeping in mind that generally technical people will join this server and may have a vested interest in the move from IRC? I'm not sure what the implication is here. > The issue around IRC is not a problem that can't be solved and really has been solved with the Web UI clients, for an every day user, to clients that make it simple otherwise. The issues surrounding IRC are partly because of inconsistent client implementation of features, but I think an even bigger problem is the inconsistent feature set of servers, which end-users have no control over. Sometimes it's because the server simply hasn't implemented a particular feature, other times it's because there is no feature - and if you're lucky, you'll even be told condescendingly that you don't actually need that feature in the first place. And of course, there's also the stuff that is implemented, but only accessible through bot interfaces that are incompatible between servers. Or the problems that are technically possible but require using a bouncer, and even still, that has inconvenient warts like having to grep through logs to search for stuff that isn't in your backlog, and the seemingly impossible-to-solve issue of persisting private messages across reconnects in a way that's useful in all situations. In any case, Mozilla has mentioned their intent to make their Matrix server accessible from an IRC bridge in the future, so it really does seem like the best of both worlds - giving Matrix uses the advantages of the platform like editing chats and easy offline channel history, while allowing IRC users to continue using their comfy client. Personally, for me, it's the other way around - Matrix has almost completely supplanted the use of my self-hosted IRC bouncer, and I'm looking forward to the day when I can shut it off for good.

progval 7y ago

IRC and Matrix don't count users the same way. With Matrix, if you just create an account, join a room, and completely forget about it, you're still counted. There must be a bunch of Matrix channels that count me at least three times because of the different accounts/homeservers I used when trying to make something work. Meanwhile on IRC you (or someone else) needs to have a client running somewhere to be counted.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

rhn_mk1 7y ago

There's no info on how the numbers were compared, but Matrix and IRC have a different approach to counting "present" users. On IRC, a user closing the client gets subtracted from active users count, on Matrix they don't. Thay may never even come back to Matrix ever again, but they will still bloat the number of users. In this light, the number of users in a Matrix channel hardly ever decreases and is not representative of channel's popularity.

hombre_fatal 7y ago
This may be true, but you can also just sit in the room and compare actual activity levels. Every project I've seen that's opened up a Slack/Discord/<something like those> alternative to their IRC channel has had much more participation on the Slack/Discord. Elm's Slack is completely bustling. This is something to take seriously when the goal is to actually build a community instead of hand-wring about IRC technical superiority.

Aengeuad 7y ago

More numbers doesn't necessarily mean that it's more accessible though. I'm not trying to say that IRC is the most user friendly or accessible and I have no doubts Matrix wins on this front, but consider that the IRC server was just sitting there for years not getting that much attention, I only learned of its existence through Rust for instance. The switch to Matrix caused huge amounts of advertising for both the IRC server and the upcoming replacement and I saw articles and discussions on this way outside the normal Rust/Firefox/Mozilla circles, and it didn't just come at once either, as once Mozilla decided on Matrix as a replacement there was another set of articles hitting the rounds. P.S. that post mentions internal engineering/ops teams switching from Slack to Matrix, that'd boost Matrix numbers if they weren't using IRC already. Perhaps that's an accessibility issue if Matrix was offering features that Slack had and IRC was missing.