351–360 of 370 posts
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You mean the same Discord that's now majority-owned by Tencent, right?
I don’t know anything about their ownership, but I also don’t think you’re actually asking that question.
I don't understand what moving to slack is going to give them, which is inevitably where this is going to lead (or a similar web-based chat). IRC has the same tools for banning users as Slack, if not more powerful as you can ban ranges etc. 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 feat…
IRC isn't really anonymous or private. Your IP address is visible to everyone by default.
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I don’t know anything about their ownership, but I also don’t think you’re actually asking that question.
Sure, it may be a bad-faith question, but I think the point still stands. IRC, as an open communications protocol, will always, always, always be better than private companies with the potential to be controlled by anything. Richard Stallman would be rolling in his grave.
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But how about Matrix, Rocket.Chat, Mattermost, IRC, and other open source chat servers?
Mattermost is a terrible example of open source. It is just cheap rip-off of Slack and every pixel say that.
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.
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$/month on CloudOcean or some such. https://www.irccloud.c…
Yep. Easy. So I assume you already did this, what's the frontend website for us to start using? (As a long time IRC user, I'd love a free irccloud with all the features of Slack and the freedom of IRC. However, setting that up scaled for "thousands of concurrent users" with normal, modern, administrator interfaces for all those tasks that the IRC RFC themselves left up to individual implementations is REALLY EFFING H…
Also, building and maintaining a free IRCCloud clone is worth much more of 5$/month of my time.
And seriously, it's not that hard. I know people who master the ins and out of much more complex server stacks as a hobby. A nice example is the implementation of World of Warcraft private servers. IRC is nowhere near as complex as that. I do concede that it's a long-term effort though. It's certainly not just a "weekend project".
Still as far as "saving things" go, this one is easy enough that a single person could build the tech on his free time and then you just need (a) patron(s) to pay for the infrastructure bill.
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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?
No, not by default but if your organization uses IRC then it would be near guaranteed that whoever set up the IRC server will enable logging on all channels and then likely give you a web front end to it so you can easily read and search through all of the history. In other words, yes, in any reasonable environment you would have access to everything ever said in any logged channel.
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So it sounds like regarding moderation, slack is at best on par with irc. And while on orc you can pretty much script and automate anything you want to facilitate the moderation job, with slack you're at the mercy of having some documented or undocumented api call available? One step forwards and two steps back...
And yet, slack has seen exponential growth, while IRC was always available but rarely used. We have seen this before and we will see it again. If OSS wants to be widely used, it needs to take UI seriously, and not dismiss it as frivolous “eye-candy”. It’s ok so say ‘no, we are fine within our niche’. But then you don’t get to arrogantly explain to them how they are “taking one step forward, two back” by not embarking…
More than this, if mass-market OSS wants to be widely used, it needs a mass marketing budget. Not many deep-pocketed stakeholders in a community united around non-profit work.
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Sure, it may be a bad-faith question, but I think the point still stands. IRC, as an open communications protocol, will always, always, always be better than private companies with the potential to be controlled by anything. Richard Stallman would be rolling in his grave.
Christ, you scared me there. Stallman is not dead.