4 ms·

Message persistence is provided by irc log services.

by gowld 5y ago

Zak 5y ago
Kids these days, who should get off our lawns, do not like that user experience. If I was starting a new chat channel for a project, I'd use Matrix, not IRC. Matrix is more decentralized than IRC due to federation, and Element offers a user experience that should be familiar and comfortable to users of Slack and Discord.
- welterde 5y ago
  Maybe I am alone in this, but not everyone likes the UX of slack or discord and might prefer a more information focused/less distracting desktop application and prefer a native desktop application over something electron/browser based. And for those people the current options for Matrix are all very much a work in progress to put it mildly.
  - Zak 5y ago
    I've been using nheko (well, the fork of it that's actually maintained). There are a couple areas in which it's a bit of a WIP, but it's a pretty good experience so far.
    - welterde 5y ago
      Giving Nheko a spin right now and while it is somewhat better than some of the other matrix clients I have tried, the UI is still much too close to discord/slack for my taste. And doesn't have enough knobs to disable features I don't want(*) (hopefully that will change over time). It feels quite a lot snappier than the other clients, which is good. It wastes quite a bit of vertical space per message, but it's still somehow hard to see for me which lines were said by which person. Something with relative placement of avatar, nick and message is throwing me off. (*) Granted, it may be a bit odd that I simply want to disable _all_ matrix features (avatars, replies, displaying images, honoring redactions, large multiline messages/embedded texts, typing notifications, etc.).
      - Zak 5y ago
        There's more than one way to do it, and I definitely look forward to clients becoming more varied and configurable as Matrix (I hope) grows in popularity.
        welterde 5y ago
        Totally agree that not everyone wants the same UX. And same applies to IRC as well, there are clients that go more in the slack/discord direction (which I also won't touch), but it's great to have options, so everyone can be happy in the end :)
- ValentineC 5y ago
  > If I was starting a new chat channel for a project, I'd use Matrix, not IRC. Matrix is more decentralized than IRC due to federation, and Element offers a user experience that should be familiar and comfortable to users of Slack and Discord. I've been trying Matrix on-and-off, and found it ridiculously complicated to figure out bridging (which is probably Matrix's top selling point, and was important for my communities) on the "official" servers.
  - Zak 5y ago
    Bridging seems like a big selling point if you're migrating an existing chat channel to Matrix. It seems less compelling if you're starting a new one.
    - ValentineC 5y ago
      Given how some (open-source-esque) communities work, there'll be people who prefer using their preferred platform (e.g. IRC, Discord, Telegram) even if it doesn't have first class support.
- goodpoint 5y ago
  Matrix's architecture has significant privacy issues. It leaks metadata on users activities in channels and their read receipts. The data is published to the whole Internet.
hnlmorg 5y ago
That only solves half the problem. There's no easy (read: 1 click) way of quoting an older message. No easy way of handling notifications (read: not PMs but when someone mentions you in a channel like @handle in other chat services), no easy way of handling roaming, etc. Yes, ZNCs solve some of these problems, but they're not easy to set up, the channel mentions isn't even remotely as intuitive as that in Slack et al and the playback history isn't as user friendly as the history in other chat services because it replays _n_ messages irrespective of whether you saw them or missed them while DCed. Which can make roaming a PITA at times. I say all this as a someone who loves IRC. I've built IRC clients in the 90s, numerous IRC bots, ran ZNC services and even use IRC as my primary IM back in the early days of Android (and thus seen first hand the frustrations of using IRC on the train and getting frequent disconnects to my bounce). IRC as a concept is amazing however IRC as a protocol sucks by modern day standards and while all the little workarounds are fun to hack together, ultimately they still fall short of what products like Slack and Discord are doing. So I can totally see why some people don't bother with IRC any more. I've not (yet) played with Matrix. Maybe that's the spiritual successor to IRC. It sure as hell can't be any worse than XMMP (I _really_ wanted to like XMMP but just couldn't get past how unnecessarily over-engineered it was)
- tffgg 5y ago
  Could you expand on XMPP being over engineered? (Just curious) Thanks
  - hnlmorg 5y ago
    Sorry just seen this. It's been a long time since I've touch XMPP so I might get some of the specifics wrong, but IIRC it was XML heavy. Everything was an XML file. Every message. I know XML will have it's fans but for an instant messaging app that create a hell of a lot of overhead. But in fairness to XMPP, it was created in the era when XML was basically the go to if you needed a strict schema. Joining to servers was a pain as well. XMPP was intended to be federated but in practice it didn't really work well. A large part of that reason was because XMPP described a base protocol but then different servers could support different extensions off that and if your server didn't support the same extensions then you couldn't join. These extensions could vary from the "well that should have been part of the base standard to begin with" to the absurd. There was also a lack of decent clients for XMPP. To be fair, this isn't XMPP's fault but rather the lack of adoption. But because XMPP was something that Google or others would use as a base to build their own IM network from, all of the good XMPP clients were locked into specific networks rather than like with IRC or Matrix clients that are designed to run on any network. A lot of the tooling for XMPP wasn't particularly noob friendly either. It was very much built by engineers for engineers rather than intended for your average nerd to set up a private servers. I remember one XMPP daemon was written in Haskell and all the config was hardcoded so you had to edit Haskell source to bring the server up. Which isn't the easiest thing to do given how alien Haskell looks to non-Haskell developers.

Message persistence is provided by irc log services.

by gowld 5y ago

Message persistence is provided by irc log services.

Zak 5y ago

Kids these days, who should get off our lawns, do not like that user experience. If I was starting a new chat channel for a project, I'd use Matrix, not IRC. Matrix is more decentralized than IRC due to federation, and Element offers a user experience that should be familiar and comfortable to users of Slack and Discord.

welterde 5y ago
Maybe I am alone in this, but not everyone likes the UX of slack or discord and might prefer a more information focused/less distracting desktop application and prefer a native desktop application over something electron/browser based. And for those people the current options for Matrix are all very much a work in progress to put it mildly.
- Zak 5y ago
  I've been using nheko (well, the fork of it that's actually maintained). There are a couple areas in which it's a bit of a WIP, but it's a pretty good experience so far.
  - welterde 5y ago
    Giving Nheko a spin right now and while it is somewhat better than some of the other matrix clients I have tried, the UI is still much too close to discord/slack for my taste. And doesn't have enough knobs to disable features I don't want(*) (hopefully that will change over time). It feels quite a lot snappier than the other clients, which is good. It wastes quite a bit of vertical space per message, but it's still somehow hard to see for me which lines were said by which person. Something with relative placement of avatar, nick and message is throwing me off. (*) Granted, it may be a bit odd that I simply want to disable _all_ matrix features (avatars, replies, displaying images, honoring redactions, large multiline messages/embedded texts, typing notifications, etc.).
    - Zak 5y ago
      There's more than one way to do it, and I definitely look forward to clients becoming more varied and configurable as Matrix (I hope) grows in popularity.
      - welterde 5y ago
        Totally agree that not everyone wants the same UX. And same applies to IRC as well, there are clients that go more in the slack/discord direction (which I also won't touch), but it's great to have options, so everyone can be happy in the end :)
ValentineC 5y ago
> If I was starting a new chat channel for a project, I'd use Matrix, not IRC. Matrix is more decentralized than IRC due to federation, and Element offers a user experience that should be familiar and comfortable to users of Slack and Discord. I've been trying Matrix on-and-off, and found it ridiculously complicated to figure out bridging (which is probably Matrix's top selling point, and was important for my communities) on the "official" servers.
- Zak 5y ago
  Bridging seems like a big selling point if you're migrating an existing chat channel to Matrix. It seems less compelling if you're starting a new one.
  - ValentineC 5y ago
    Given how some (open-source-esque) communities work, there'll be people who prefer using their preferred platform (e.g. IRC, Discord, Telegram) even if it doesn't have first class support.
goodpoint 5y ago
Matrix's architecture has significant privacy issues. It leaks metadata on users activities in channels and their read receipts. The data is published to the whole Internet.

hnlmorg 5y ago

That only solves half the problem. There's no easy (read: 1 click) way of quoting an older message. No easy way of handling notifications (read: not PMs but when someone mentions you in a channel like @handle in other chat services), no easy way of handling roaming, etc. Yes, ZNCs solve some of these problems, but they're not easy to set up, the channel mentions isn't even remotely as intuitive as that in Slack et al and the playback history isn't as user friendly as the history in other chat services because it replays _n_ messages irrespective of whether you saw them or missed them while DCed. Which can make roaming a PITA at times. I say all this as a someone who loves IRC. I've built IRC clients in the 90s, numerous IRC bots, ran ZNC services and even use IRC as my primary IM back in the early days of Android (and thus seen first hand the frustrations of using IRC on the train and getting frequent disconnects to my bounce). IRC as a concept is amazing however IRC as a protocol sucks by modern day standards and while all the little workarounds are fun to hack together, ultimately they still fall short of what products like Slack and Discord are doing. So I can totally see why some people don't bother with IRC any more. I've not (yet) played with Matrix. Maybe that's the spiritual successor to IRC. It sure as hell can't be any worse than XMMP (I _really_ wanted to like XMMP but just couldn't get past how unnecessarily over-engineered it was)

tffgg 5y ago
Could you expand on XMPP being over engineered? (Just curious) Thanks
- hnlmorg 5y ago
  Sorry just seen this. It's been a long time since I've touch XMPP so I might get some of the specifics wrong, but IIRC it was XML heavy. Everything was an XML file. Every message. I know XML will have it's fans but for an instant messaging app that create a hell of a lot of overhead. But in fairness to XMPP, it was created in the era when XML was basically the go to if you needed a strict schema. Joining to servers was a pain as well. XMPP was intended to be federated but in practice it didn't really work well. A large part of that reason was because XMPP described a base protocol but then different servers could support different extensions off that and if your server didn't support the same extensions then you couldn't join. These extensions could vary from the "well that should have been part of the base standard to begin with" to the absurd. There was also a lack of decent clients for XMPP. To be fair, this isn't XMPP's fault but rather the lack of adoption. But because XMPP was something that Google or others would use as a base to build their own IM network from, all of the good XMPP clients were locked into specific networks rather than like with IRC or Matrix clients that are designed to run on any network. A lot of the tooling for XMPP wasn't particularly noob friendly either. It was very much built by engineers for engineers rather than intended for your average nerd to set up a private servers. I remember one XMPP daemon was written in Haskell and all the config was hardcoded so you had to edit Haskell source to bring the server up. Which isn't the easiest thing to do given how alien Haskell looks to non-Haskell developers.