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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

#311

Post by mcguire »

T-hawk wrote: post #180
mirkules wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why do people use chat services? They want responses . Getting responses is what Slack and Discord are optimized for and why they've gained adoption. The chat services enable responses, by making it low friction, by giving the feel of being informal and real-time in a way that email and forums don't. They also enable asynchronous responses by being persistent, that your message won't go lost and unseen by a moment wi…

Out of curiosity, when you log into slack/discord in the morning, do you scroll back through the log to see if there are any unanswered questions that you can answer?

Re: Mozilla is giving up on their IRC server

#312

Post by aerique »

loulouxiv wrote: post #309
j1elo wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So this is not a secret anymore. The only reasonable solution for such a mistake is to revoke the exposed token. If it is not easy to do then it is negligence of WhatsApp UX team. Your "let's pretend you didn't receive this" deletion message may have failed to propagate to some or all of the recipients, including that one guy that likes to mess things up

Also with WhatsApp going through my notification demon on my desktop the secret would not actually be deleted ever.

(Same for tweets etc.)

Re: Mozilla is giving up on their IRC server

#313

Post by astrobe_ »

zapzupnz wrote: post #296
intertextuality wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I find it pretentious that anybody could consider the following features "having fun while pretending to communicate" straw-man argument. Nobody considers these things to be frivolous. I would consider slack's annoying gifs and discord's extensive emoji to be frivolous. > the ability to modify one's own messages Please, no. People editing their own messages later on is possibly the most annoying thing about slack a…

> straw-man argument Not at all a strawman argument. As I stated, there are a plethora of features in Slack, Discord, and its ilk that are most assuredly not "having fun while pretending to communicate". The whole point of my post is that one cannot so off-handedly dismiss an entire class of application. If GP meant to be dismissive of GIFs and emoji, they can easily have said so. (That said, one can post standard Un…

> If GP meant to be dismissive of GIFs and emoji, they can easily have said so. (That said, one can post standard Unicode emoji to IRC, and will anybody call that frivolous?)

OP confirms. But that's the tip of the iceberg. Yes, you can use Unicode in IRC, and yes, people will kick you out if you "misuse" it - but perhaps I've been on weird channels.

> incorrectly-entered Markdown formatting, or other kinds of minor reformatting.

I don't know what you are talking about. Markdown in IRC? IRC was (one of) the electronic ersatz for verbal dialogue before VoIP. Chat messages shouldn't be longer than a tweet.

If you need formatting then you're writing a document, not chatting. There we agree you need another service for that. Something like Pastebin would probably be more suited.

However if you are writing something that people should remember or use as a reference, I'd suggest to use a CMS rather than a chat or IM or even email, because sooner or later you'll be sorry otherwise. Especially if your chat platform of choice keeps everything on servers that are not under your control and doesn't offer full client-side backup. Good communication starts with choosing the appropriate tool.

Re: Mozilla is giving up on their IRC server

#314

Post by acemarke »

mcguire wrote: post #311
T-hawk wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do people use chat services? They want responses . Getting responses is what Slack and Discord are optimized for and why they've gained adoption. The chat services enable responses, by making it low friction, by giving the feel of being informal and real-time in a way that email and forums don't. They also enable asynchronous responses by being persistent, that your message won't go lost and unseen by a moment wi…

Out of curiosity, when you log into slack/discord in the morning, do you scroll back through the log to see if there are any unanswered questions that you can answer?

I'm an admin in the Reactiflux server on Discord [0]. We currently show somewhere around 30K users who have joined, although that's _after_ having done a couple purges of inactive accounts over time.

I used to routinely go back through the day's discussions in #general and #need-help whenever I got home from work, and yes, reply to questions that had been asked 8-10 hours earlier. But, Reactiflux has become too high-volume for me to be able to do that.

That said, I still will scroll back in some of the lower-volume channels to see what came up. So yeah, having chat persistence is an incredibly nice feature, and I can't imagine doing without it.

[0] https://www.reactiflux.com

Re: Mozilla is giving up on their IRC server

#315

Post by seancorfield »

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…

I'm an admin on the Clojurians Slack workspace where we have about 15,000 members, of whom about 1,400 or so are considered "active" for Slack's purpose -- which is still an unaffordable amount for an open source community. Over the years since we created the Clojurians Slack, we've tried to create communities on a broad range of alternatives. None of the others have gained traction, unfortunately. I think Zulip is probably the best alternative and it offers a free option for open source projects with full history/searching, and that's probably been the most successful alternative so far. Clojure's community on IRC was in the hundreds. Slack very quickly became thousands. It surprised us. The fact that none of the alternatives have grown has also surprised us but people go where people go.

Re: Mozilla is giving up on their IRC server

#316

Post by seancorfield »

nickjj wrote: post #219
Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't get the log history of what happened while you were offline, though. This is probably the killer feature of Slack over IRC, especially for professional use, together with more seamless attachment integration. Don't get me wrong, I love IRC. I have been using it for over 20 years (wow, I'm old). I have met there very important people in my life. But I coordinate a team at work, we use Slack and I wouldn't ev…

You can track logs if you want. It's up to the channel owner. Once you have that set up you won't miss anything, and people new to the channel could view previous history. You could also connect remotely through a server that never reboots too and log things yourself (as a client). I find Slack to be even worse in that regard because they'll purge your history after 10,000 lines unless you pay, but the payment scheme…

First off, the history is NOT purged. It's just not searchable beyond 10,000 messages. Pay for a month (if you can afford it!) and you'll see the entire history available. Further, the cost is $6.67/month -- substantially less that $15.

I'm not fan of Slack for large communities but, seriously, let's stick to facts when discussing the pros and cons.

Re: Mozilla is giving up on their IRC server

#317

Post by mirkules »

acemarke wrote: post #314
mcguire wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, when you log into slack/discord in the morning, do you scroll back through the log to see if there are any unanswered questions that you can answer?

I'm an admin in the Reactiflux server on Discord [0]. We currently show somewhere around 30K users who have joined, although that's _after_ having done a couple purges of inactive accounts over time. I used to routinely go back through the day's discussions in #general and #need-help whenever I got home from work, and yes, reply to questions that had been asked 8-10 hours earlier. But, Reactiflux has become too high-…

This is exactly the functionality of forums, for example Stack Overflow (and many others before SO). I guess the only real advantage of Slack is that it's both real-time and persistent. That said, is that advantage really worth millions of dollars, or is it just clever marketing?

Re: Mozilla is giving up on their IRC server

#318

Post by mirkules »

TheRealPomax wrote: post #245
mirkules wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I was never an IRC user, mainly because I never really needed it. Everyone I wanted to talk to back in the day was on BBSes, later ICQ and later still AIM, and IRC just always seemed so desolate and took a lot of investigative work to find the right channel to find something interesting. I'm not really defending IRC, more than questioning the need for yet another chat application, with a distinct con of being centralized when we have all these other means of accomplishing the same thing

Re: Mozilla is giving up on their IRC server

#319

Post by ebiester »

j605 wrote: post #289
ebiester wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, what client just allows you to join a channel and scroll up without having to learn the idiosyncrasies of a bot? Now, how do you search every channel on the instance? I'm curious if someone has figured this out in the interm. (My current hope lies in Mattermost, honestly.)

My chat logs are just plain text under ~/.weechat/logs and I search them using rip-grep. Works really fast. I am guessing a nicer interface like IRCCloud or TheLounge can work like Slack for searching, file/snippet hosting etc in a more approachable manner.

So, you come to a new job and join a channel that has been around for 2 years. Design decisions and discussions from 4 months ago with the old tech lead are there. Does weechat give you access to those logs?
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