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Mozilla is giving up on their IRC server

exple.tive.org

321–330 of 370 posts

Re: Mozilla is giving up on their IRC server

#321
post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Slack is trash and hostile to users It seems better than Skype and Hipchat and whatever Google's latest chat app.

But how about Matrix, Rocket.Chat, Mattermost, IRC, and other open source chat servers?

I have not used them so I cannot comment on that.

Re: Mozilla is giving up on their IRC server

#322
post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You can easily see if someone is active or not. Most clients even tell you that the user is away. The other problem you describe is related to it being an open standard. If you had a custom slack client or server you also would not be able to make assumptions about how it works on the remote end.

If you're an organization like Mozilla that uses IRC for company business, you can just tell employees what they must support (with an or closed product).

Re: Mozilla is giving up on their IRC server

#323
post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>the ability to modify one's own messages >- the ability to delete one's own message, and have that deletion propagated > - the ability to delete other peoples' messages, and have that deletion propagated These 1) don’t work when you need them too and 2) are very much antifeatures I’ve been in slack and discourd channels with important people who will post things that cause me to make some decision and then will go b…

> These 1) don't work when you need them too They don't? They work perfectly fine for me and always have. Citation needed. > 2) are very much antifeatures According to whom? People use and profit from these features all day, every day on Slack and Discord. Whether you put any stock into them doesn't make any difference: they are features for a vast number of people other than yourself, they are definitely features. >…

> People use and profit from these features all day, every day on Slack and Discord. Whether you put any stock into them doesn't make any difference

You have totally missed the point of what I said. I know some people want them and it's nice to be able to correct your "there" to "their." That's fantastic, good for them.

My complaint is that these features are abused by nasty people who you end up having to work with. By not having them they can't be abused. When I can't trust software running on my own machines to accurately tell me what someone said yesterday that's unacceptable. I'd rather the thing not work at all than give me bad data.

And I don't think there's any bigger work around than having to screenshot an app every time certain people send you a message.

Re: Mozilla is giving up on their IRC server

#324

I know there were/are a few blind people working on Mozilla's stuff and the move to anything that is not open source will make it much harder for them. There was a person[1] who had done significant work on the Rust compiler and said that he would have a much harder time doing it now, since the move to Discord and that he might not be able to participate in the community after the switch[2]. Proprietary solutions are…

It's really frustrating to me how inaccessible Discord is. At its heart, Discord is text and voice chat, which you would think would be the easiest forms of communication to make accessible.

Due to a genetic condition I have that predisposes me to blindness I have preemptively installed NVDA on Windows and Orca on Linux, and the inability of either of these tools to deal with Discord the last time I tried is shameful.

Re: Mozilla is giving up on their IRC server

#325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can require people to register with an email in the same way slack does, although I'd argue being anonymous and being able to talk without an account is one of IRC's best features. As someone from the “old” and free internet I agree, but there seems to be a new generation of users who seem to have the ability to perform censorship as a core requirement (although they prefer to call it “governance”). It’s sad to…

How would you have them deal with harassment and spam, or do you not believe it is as much of a problem for them as they claim it is?

Usenet kill file style support for chat clients, optionally with a subscription option to shared blocklists like uBlock Plus supports.

Re: Mozilla is giving up on their IRC server

#326

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 has terrible accessibility - its themes are low contrast.

The GFW is also a concern here.

Re: Mozilla is giving up on their IRC server

#327
post #299
post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I think this is fundamentally the main issue people have with IRC. Some IRC users don’t like the idea of the channel being logged though? That’s the best I can come up with for an argument against it.

I can't see why anyone would want that. If you weren't connected to the server then those lines were not sent to you. They're ephemeral. Ask someone to fill you in on what happened or send you a log.

Because chat is not ephemeral? It’s an asynchronous communication method like sms, im, email, and snail mail of old. When I send a text to a friend at 2am I don’t expect a response right then. I expect that their phone will be muted and they’ll see my message in the morning and then they can choose if and when to respond back.

This is how literally all my peers think.

Re: Mozilla is giving up on their IRC server

#328

I know there were/are a few blind people working on Mozilla's stuff and the move to anything that is not open source will make it much harder for them. There was a person[1] who had done significant work on the Rust compiler and said that he would have a much harder time doing it now, since the move to Discord and that he might not be able to participate in the community after the switch[2]. Proprietary solutions are…

Bryan Smart's reply to that Twitter thread depresses me.

>Don’t worry. They’ll totally fix Slack and Discord around the time everyone is using VRChat and VisualTeam. It’s always been this way. Accessibility is catchup work. The next big thing always destroys our gains.

The language at the end of the blog post "We are evaluating products, not protocols" and "We aren’t picking an outlier" almost guarantees we're looking at solutions as heavy as Slack and Discord which I would not have been able to run on my laptop back when I was involved in the switch to Firefox Quantum. It's challenging enough having to advocate for "niche" (my words) features and work out their implementations, but IRC was also necessary to keep track of which builds on what dates would introduce which breaking changes, since this information was published nowhere else, and also to minimally participate in decision meetings that ended up in video chats anyway. If they do move to a heavier, but closed, solution, I hope they also find ways to make contribution less reliant on chat.

For what it's worth, I thought Mozilla had a fairly decent wiki page for IRC[0]. I always believed a streamlined quickstart section, suggesting one or two clients at most, walking through steps to registration and configuring authentication with ghost killing, and how to get activity from when you were offline either via bouncer or just logs[1] would more than adequately address ease-of-use without rolling out a newer, modernized client. Even working from libraries wasn't an issue for me using web-based clients like Kiwi IRC.

[0]: https://wiki.mozilla.org/IRC

[1]: https://mozilla.logbot.info/

Re: Mozilla is giving up on their IRC server

#329
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.

I hope they're willing to consider https://www.modular.im/ then, which would be based off Matrix

Re: Mozilla is giving up on their IRC server

#330

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…

>There is no mechanism to ignore a user, mute a user, or temporarily suspend a user if they need a timeout. The first two are completely impossible, while the latter today is manual / mostly possible using undocumented APIs and mechanizing of HTTP requests.

I've been using IRC for almost two decades now and I can't help but feel this is a good thing. A lot of big IRC channels have become very good at alienating members of their communities through excessive moderation - if you don't believe me spend some time on Freenode on any given day. Having to go through a few additional steps seems like it could benefit many communities.

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