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Mozilla is giving up on their IRC server

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261–270 of 370 posts

Re: Mozilla is giving up on their IRC server

#261
post #170

When I worked at Mozilla, "talking to a room full of bouncers" was a common joke on my team. In a fully distributed team (we were spread out across the northern hemisphere) this is a terrible way to work. You don't know who is online or whether you can contact them. There's no guarantee they'll get your message if you send them something urgent. Everything that's not "typing text in real time" is harder and worse (se…

How is that different from Slack though? Did people use bouncers that don't set /away ?

On slack it shows whether someone is active or away. It also guarantees they'll get the message. You're not praying that you picked the right bouncer to direct your message at and that it's configured to let them know when they get back.

Re: Mozilla is giving up on their IRC server

#262
post #131

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…

Slack is trash and hostile to users, but unfortunately, it has significant momentum. I wouldn’t be surprised if Mozilla switches over.

In my mind, Mozilla is an open source company though. One of the preeminent open source companies. Didn't they create Bugzilla?

It would be really strange to me if they used a closed source community messaging platform.

Re: Mozilla is giving up on their IRC server

#263

When I worked at Mozilla, "talking to a room full of bouncers" was a common joke on my team. In a fully distributed team (we were spread out across the northern hemisphere) this is a terrible way to work. You don't know who is online or whether you can contact them. There's no guarantee they'll get your message if you send them something urgent. Everything that's not "typing text in real time" is harder and worse (se…

> You don't know who is online or whether you can contact them. I've actually had this problem with most, if not all, IM/chat systems I've had to use for serious work. They have better UX design for indicating availability, but I can't think of one where it's consistently worked the way I expect it to. Some explicitly allow people to fake/hardcode their status; others have some mixture of caching/update issues and st…

> Some explicitly allow people to fake/hardcode their status

That's not an issue with the tech, it's an issue with the people. I'm not shooting off messages with no idea of whether they'll arrive, I'm at least trusting the person's intended availability. If they're just being an ass and marking themselves as perpetually unavailable, that's an issue I'd take up with their manager.

In my experience, modern systems like slack and discord (and even hipchat) work well enough with their availability indicators. Chat apps five years ago I would not trust as much.

Re: Mozilla is giving up on their IRC server

#264
post #38

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…

You speak as if FF was a niche product that is a sacrifice to use. There are markets such as Germany, that were always more seceptical of IE/Chrome where FF is still in second place at around 25% and recently rising again while Chrome has fallen back below 50%.

Chrome is definitely the dominant browser, FF is far from irrelevant.

I also echo the content of the sibling comment: on mobile u block origin is really a God send.

Re: Mozilla is giving up on their IRC server

#267
post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure about the delete other peoples messages, and have that deletion propagated , but having the possibility of deciding over own messages it's basic and desirable, in my opinion. I've just used such a feature less than 2 hours ago, in Whatsapp. Published a secret in the wrong group, by mistake. That's the whole point of allowing editions or deletions of one's own contents: humans are fallible , and shit happ…

> I've just used such a feature less than 2 hours ago, in Whatsapp. Published a secret in the wrong group, by mistake. By this time, it's too late, anybody could have seen it, copied it, etc. Deleting it after the fact is security theater.

The "secret" (a link to another private whatsapp group to which not everybody should enter, just for easiness of organizational purposes in an event, so not much of a critical secret) was reportedly seen by around 5 people out of 200 in the group. No one of them bothered, if they did it would mean just a bit of explanation and taking them out of the new group. By all means, being able to quickly make a correction was not too late and was not security theater. Your position is that of "if we cannot solve 100% of a problem, there is no use to solving 95%" which is clearly a false dichotomy. There is value on editing or deleting messages after the fact of sending them.

Case in point, I just edited this message to change all "_" to "*" to make italics work. That's another use: fixing wrong assumptions about usage of technology itself.

Re: Mozilla is giving up on their IRC server

#268
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends. If they choose something open like Matrix or XMPP, it could work well in the long-term.

The blog post says "We are evaluating products, not protocols". There are no XMPP frontends that can compete with the "shininess" of the modern, proprietary systems like Slack so that's out already. As for Matrix/Riot ... maybe, but I don't think it's likely that they'll go with that.

But IRC isn't also shiny and they used it long time...

Re: Mozilla is giving up on their IRC server

#269
post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've just used such a feature less than 2 hours ago, in Whatsapp. Published a secret in the wrong group, by mistake. By this time, it's too late, anybody could have seen it, copied it, etc. Deleting it after the fact is security theater.

The "secret" (a link to another private whatsapp group to which not everybody should enter, just for easiness of organizational purposes in an event, so not much of a critical secret) was reportedly seen by around 5 people out of 200 in the group. No one of them bothered, if they did it would mean just a bit of explanation and taking them out of the new group. By all means, being able to quickly make a correction was…

>Your position is that of _if we cannot solve 100% of a problem, there is no use to solving 95%_ which is clearly a false dichotomy.

No, my position is that if 5% of a problem (5 out of 100 people seeing it) is equally catastrophic as 100%, then it makes no sense to differentiate, which is a very true dichotomy.

The fact that just 1 person that's not supposed to see it seeing it can do damage, makes the problem a binary and not a spectrum.

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