Mozilla is giving up on their IRC server • Hacker News Board

Re: Mozilla is giving up on their IRC server

#251

Post by agentultra » Sat, Apr 27, 2019, 4:50 PM UTC

segmondy wrote: post #128

spystath wrote: post #83

It's a shame that IRC usage is dwindling especially in techie circles. However I can understand it if it doesn't work for them any more although in my opinion IRC has a lot of moderation tools available. In any case, the "problem", of sorts, is not abandoning IRC but what comes next. The web is choke full of proprietary communication protocols that cannot talk to each other and you have private entities acting as gat…

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

Textual is pretty great IMO.

Re: Mozilla is giving up on their IRC server

#252

Post by TheRealPomax » Sat, Apr 27, 2019, 4:55 PM UTC

joepie91_ wrote: post #69

ve55 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spam can be difficult to stop on IRC compared to modern webchat applications. From lacking things like javascript, captchas, cdns, and so on, to having a distributed network architecture and fewer ways to verify users.

> having a distributed network architecture and fewer ways to verify users You have exactly as many ways to verify users as are implemented in your NickServ, and pretty much every snazzy web-y proprietary chat platform has a "distributed network architecture" as well. IRC has plenty of real problems, but your particular list of arguments seems completely irrelevant.

NickServ is not part of IRC. It's just a bot that people wrote to overcome one of the key shortcomings of IRC, and is used at the discretion of individual server administrators. IRC itself has literally no way to verify users, and more importantly no _opinion_ on how you should verify them.

Sure, people have written bots/services that have become part of some server packages' standing offering (chanserv, nickserv, opserv, etc.) but there's no spec for them, every server's implemention has (sometimes wildly) different command sets, and as effectively text-scroll CLI, they don't actually make things all that much easier. They're a chore to use. And I say that as an IRCop.

IRC as a platform is insufficient in today's world, so if you're going to spend a lot of time either finding -- or more likely, making -- services to take care of all the administrative tasks that IRC itself does not cover, you might as well just go one step further and go "you know what? IRC isn't sacred, if we're spending time and money on trying to make it usable in 2019, then how we instead spend that same time and money on finding a good solution to the problem we're having, rather than sticking with IRC for no good reason".

Re: Mozilla is giving up on their IRC server

#253

Post by jkaplowitz » Sat, Apr 27, 2019, 5:07 PM UTC

TheSwordsman wrote: post #227

sk5t wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slack's refusal to add a "block user" option is beyond frustrating. Short of the nuclear option of disabling the account, there is no way to prevent a bad actor from pestering you. Yet this condition seems to be a deliberate choice of Slack's.

Because Slack's product assumes you have an HR department, and that's an HR issue.

True story: at a former employer, a colleague made an HR complaint that in reality was well founded due to abuse. At one point in the investigation, HR told the two people not to interact with each other directly, but for unavoidable work reasons they were still in the same team-related Slack channel.

A mute or ignore feature would have been great to lower the victim's anxiety level during that time due to HR's unhelpful handling of the situation. The victim's finances and general life circumstances did not make "just quit" a good resolution.

(Oh, and the end result: HR fired the victim, with some severance paid, and kept the abuser a while longer. The abuser eventually got fired but probably not due to this incident.)

Re: Mozilla is giving up on their IRC server

#254

Post by neiman » Sat, Apr 27, 2019, 5:08 PM UTC

steveklabnik wrote: post #165

obhmt wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they wanted to communicate with laypeople they'd offer support over the channels laypeople expect support nowadays, namely Facebook. Instead they are going to choose some middle ground that will displease everybody; they will botch it, as they like to do. They are already working on botching it, since they've moved the Rust channel to a closed source alternative with no expectations of privacy: https://blog.rust-l…

Mozilla did not move the Rust channels. We did.

Are there really no good open source forum alternatives?

-- asking for a friend :-)

Re: Mozilla is giving up on their IRC server

#255

Post by feanaro » Sat, Apr 27, 2019, 5:10 PM UTC

axaxs wrote: post #38

tannhaeuser wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's too harsh IMO. FF is working absolutely great on my desktops, phone, and as dev browser. And Rust seems extremely popular with a vocal minority on HN at least. But yeah, I'm concerned as well - Mozilla should focus on producing a good browser rather than pouring energy into side projects such as Rust and especially WASM which do not contribute to that goal.

I want to believe that, and even tried to go all Firefox for the previous two weeks. I will say they have good Sync, which nobody outside of Chrome had achieved at all. The desktop browser is mostly OK, no real complaints. On mobile, however, Firefox is noticeably slower than any of the usual blink based browsers, and most importantly to me, uses way more battery life. I love PL things and am glad Rust exists, but fr…

Interesting. Firefox is much more performant for me on mobile than Chrome (and crashes way less).

Re: Mozilla is giving up on their IRC server

#256

Post by neiman » Sat, Apr 27, 2019, 5:15 PM UTC

incompatible wrote: post #24

nwmcsween wrote: post #18

Irc unauthenticated? IRC has supported auth services since what 1995? There are also plenty of web irc gateways so I don't understand the reasoning to move to something more complicated for little gain, want history? Run ii in a tmux session and tail to a file, want to post images with a fancy GUI taking a gig or so of ram use slack.

They apparently want anyone to be able to easily connect and talk to developers, except for trolls, scammers, spammers etc. I'm not really sure what kind of authentication provides that, but they seem to have something in mind.

> I'm not really sure what kind of authentication provides that

KYC combined with sms confirmation, CC details and a Google account. All "normal" people have and share that, what's wrong with you?! weirdo.

Welcome to the web of 2019:-)

Re: Mozilla is giving up on their IRC server

#257

Post by snazz » Sat, Apr 27, 2019, 5:16 PM UTC

TheSwordsman wrote: post #248

snazz wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

From what I’ve seen (with grains of salt and whatnot):

Chat is an inherently transient medium. Being a participant in the conversation can be important and you can’t really reference a conversation you had on May 6th 2007 and expect to have people willing to continue it with you. On the other hand, you can resurrect an email or forum thread if you weren’t there in the first place and expect that it will continue to be replied to.

Re: Mozilla is giving up on their IRC server

#258

Post by shrimp_emoji » Sat, Apr 27, 2019, 5:27 PM UTC

carbocation wrote: post #116

pcwalton wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That experience report is valuable, thanks. I'll bring that up internally.

On the user side of things, I work at a large academic institution where I occasionally get unwanted contact (overly invasive, won’t stop messaging even when asked). I totally get that at an office workspace, the solution here is HR. But this is a loosely federated place, and even in my own opinion the conduct doesn’t merit such a response. I just want to be able to mute people.

Discord has a block function, and it's virtually identical to (if not better than) Slack (IIRC, it has better text -- and code -- formatting).

Sure, it's "chat for gamers", but it works for anything.

Re: Mozilla is giving up on their IRC server

#259

Post by steveklabnik » Sat, Apr 27, 2019, 5:28 PM UTC

neiman wrote: post #254

steveklabnik wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mozilla did not move the Rust channels. We did.

Are there really no good open source forum alternatives? -- asking for a friend :-)

We already use an open source forum: discourse.

If you mean real-time chat, in my personal opinion, Discord is the best choice. Zulip is good, if you can deal with it being a bit weird. The other options are fine, but not great. You may have different opinions than me personally.

Re: Mozilla is giving up on their IRC server

#260

Post by agentultra » Sat, Apr 27, 2019, 5:34 PM UTC

That's too bad.

Personally I dislike this trend towards a plurality of chat "services" and "apps." Now each project I interact with has their own chat service. I have to maintain accounts on all of them and install several applications to interact with each. It's a pain to manage.

Not to mention that most of these services use Electron-based chat clients which exclude a bunch of people who cannot afford the kinds of machines required to use them or they have to suffer a poor experience on lower-end hardware. It also excludes people who use accessibility software or automation that doesn't integrate with web-based clients.

The user experience on IRC scales better. Anyone can write a rich, easy-to-use client or server. If you happen to be a programmer you can write your own tools to manage your own user experience. The drift from casual user to power user isn't stopped by a walled garden of a tightly-controlled user experience that doesn't integrate with anything.