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Mozilla is giving up on their IRC server

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Re: Mozilla is giving up on their IRC server

#241

Post by nonbirithm »

hanniabu wrote: post #191
TheSwordsman wrote: post #33

As an admin helping out the Go Slack workspace, which is about to cross 39,500 registered users, they would be ill-advised to go with Slack if moderation is one of their goals. Full disclosure: our Workspakce does have some sort of agreement with Slack, so our space isn't a free space (we have full history), and even then we aren't able to get them to provide support around moderation of users. There is no mechanism…

Have you tried Discord? I seems like it would meet all these desires. We switched to it a year ago and it's been great.

Discord works okay. For me, the only issue is not being allowed to use third party clients without being banned. I was hoping I could integrate it with tmux or Emacs like I was used to doing with IRC.

Re: Mozilla is giving up on their IRC server

#242

Post by jtolmar »

llao wrote: post #171
bwoodward wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>And then everything ends up like the 'defaults', with memes and easy to vote up pictures utterly dominating. I mod a good-sized sub all by myself, and I'm fairly militant about what gets through. The guidelines are clear and automod picks up a lot of the 'defaults' stuff -- but every so often something slips through and it gets so much karma. A while ago I figured I'd just allow memes and stuff, assuming that this w…

Thank you! I wonder if there is a way to see the % of votes from subreddit members vs others. Memes and similar sh*tposts can really ruin a subreddit in weeks.

It's probably the regulars upvoting it.

The occasional memey or off-topic post is a lot of fun and key to having a community with its own culture instead of an interest group with the personality of a dictionary entry. The problem is that people see that was fun and naturally try to do more of it, but it's only fun in the first place because of the contrast, and the off-topic stuff is usually easier to produce so it can easily drown out the on-topic posts, killing the forum.

The "delete most memes" policy is weird, but works well where I've seen it.

Re: Mozilla is giving up on their IRC server

#243

Post by TheRealPomax »

norswap wrote: post #140

I never see addressed the biggest reason (according to me) why IRC loses, so let's spell it out. IRC isn't persistent (i.e. you can't read messages delivered while you were offline) unless you setup an IRC shell. This is technically difficult (much more so than dicking with nickservs and so, which is already a pain point). Hosting it is also not free . Count 5$/month on CloudOcean or some such. https://www.irccloud.c…

Yep. Easy. So I assume you already did this, what's the frontend website for us to start using?

(As a long time IRC user, I'd love a free irccloud with all the features of Slack and the freedom of IRC. However, setting that up scaled for "thousands of concurrent users" with normal, modern, administrator interfaces for all those tasks that the IRC RFC themselves left up to individual implementations is REALLY EFFING HARD, so no one has actually set up a service like that, to date)

Re: Mozilla is giving up on their IRC server

#244

Post by andai »

josteink wrote: post #233
intertextuality wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least for me, I participate in a lot of programming channels. I've saved a lot of stuff for later, that would otherwise be a pain to ask someone to answer it again. I log basically all of my irc chats because 1. storage is cheap 2. you never know when something could be useful later Let's not pretend individual nerds in IRC chat recording history is anything remotely close to what google is doing.

Thats individual logical logging. Making persistent server-logs and putting them on the web, makes them Google-creepy by default.

Makes me wonder if googlebot knows how to login to Discord.

Re: Mozilla is giving up on their IRC server

#245

Post by TheRealPomax »

mirkules wrote: post #146
norswap wrote: post #140

I never see addressed the biggest reason (according to me) why IRC loses, so let's spell it out. IRC isn't persistent (i.e. you can't read messages delivered while you were offline) unless you setup an IRC shell. This is technically difficult (much more so than dicking with nickservs and so, which is already a pain point). Hosting it is also not free . Count 5$/month on CloudOcean or some such. https://www.irccloud.c…

Once all the chat systems without persistence have disappeared, some new hip company will come along touting “no persistence” as a feature, maybe even a privacy feature. But seriously, I don’t understand why persistence is such a huge deal to people. Chat is for transient chat - it is meant to be non-persistent just like verbal communication. There are so many mechanisms for persistent messaging (forums, text message…

Then presumably you never did work over IRC. The fact that you can have discussions in asynchronous real time out in the open makes (made?) for a far superior developer experience compared to forums, text messages, emails, and everything in between, because everyone could _passively_ follow the conversations that were happening. IRC is the ship's "always on" walkie talkie: do you need it? No. Does it provide a layer of common knowledge that you never even stopped to think about made everyone feel like they knew what was going on even when they couldn't tell you what was going on, thus making everything run impressively smoothly? Absolutely.

And remember that IRC has been around since 1995, when the idea of separate protocols to do different things was common place. IRC has been dying a very, very slow death.

(and despite nostalgia: IRC was never big. Even the largest of IRC servers only had around a hundred thousand users. That might sound like a lot, but we're talking globally: the most popular IRC server had a fraction of the users that CompuServe did, and CompuServe was decidedly worse at being a chat system, even though that was the main reason you'd use it)

Re: Mozilla is giving up on their IRC server

#246

Post by TheSwordsman »

giovannibajo1 wrote: post #234
TheSwordsman wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I understand it, to support things like timed bans your only options are undocumented APIs which can change at any point in time. So while some things are documented and possible, not everything is and that's not the level of support we need.

Still, installing those open source tools in the Go Slack and collaborating with Kubernetes over them seems better that just live with whatever Slack offers today.

Downside is that it's additional infrastructure that someone now needs to be on-call to support and pay for.

This is the main reason we aren't considering leaving Slack.

Re: Mozilla is giving up on their IRC server

#247

Post by voltagex_ »

Moter8 wrote: post #217
caltelt wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know I hate it when I join IRC channels and have no context as to what anybody has been talking about, as there is no history to quickly go over. Even just having the past days history would help in this regard, at least for more active channels. It's the same as just barging into a conversation a group of people are having. You don't want to just join and start talking about a completely different topic. So you jo…

On snoonet at least there is a channel option frequently used, that makes the channel send the last x messages to the recently joined user. It exists.

What ircd are they using?

Re: Mozilla is giving up on their IRC server

#248

Post by TheSwordsman »

snazz wrote: post #182
lewisl9029 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to think Discord was the clear winner in this space, providing good moderation tools (being a platform designed originally for gaming), with better scaling characteristics than Slack and having unlimited history, but the Apollo team's recent post on why they chose Spectrum changed my mind: https://blog.apollographql.com/goodbye-slack-hello-spectrum-... TL;DR: being able to have posts & chats indexed by search…

I feel like search engine indexing is a feature that should be covered by mailing lists or a forum, not chat. I don’t think that finding a years-old chat log provides nearly as much useful context for solving an issue as longer-form communication.

If the full conversation is retained what's the functional difference?

Re: Mozilla is giving up on their IRC server

#249

Post by voltagex_ »

cagenut wrote: post #130
segmondy wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A slack like interface can be built on top of IRC. I'm a bit amazed that no one has decided to do that.

check out irccloud

I am permanently banned from an IRC channel because I connected to it from IRCCloud.

Re: Mozilla is giving up on their IRC server

#250

Post by snazz »

johncolanduoni wrote: post #154
caf wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems a bit rich to be complaining about "fiddling with config files" when the alternative in this specific case is writing custom code against an undocumented API ;)

The difference is only a small number of users need to write that custom code, while with tools like IRC everyone needs to fiddle with config files.

There are plenty of easy to use GUI clients with no config files.
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