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Synchronous Messaging at Mozilla: The Decision

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Re: Synchronous Messaging at Mozilla: The Decision

#31

Post by sondr3 »

dzypa wrote: post #8

Daily reminder that Rust uses Discord, a closed source piece of software with draconian privacy and data retention terms. Steve Klabnik will predictably reply to me saying that it was the decision of the community and blah blah, but the Mozilla Corporation should not have allowed it.

Agreed, this together with how they handled the redesign of the website left a sour taste in my mouth. Especially with the promised retrospective that has been promised for over a year now; there have been at least two posts on the internals forum about the followup but still nothing. It's frustrating, especially because both decisions felt like they were made in a vacuum without properly listening to the community; chiefly how the redesign suddenly was suddenly announced close to the 2018 edition release and a whole lot of the feedback and criticism has not yet been addressed. The website still does not have syntax highlighting [0] nor a snippet of Rust code on the frontpage [1], not to mention the lack of addressing the change in the pitch used on the frontpage (compared to the previous website [2]). The language itself is amazing and I love using it and, the community is awesome and I for the most part think the governance is great; but on some issues they have some catching up to do.

[0]: https://www.rust-lang.org/what/networking [1]: https://www.rust-lang.org/ [2]: https://prev.rust-lang.org/en-US/

Re: Synchronous Messaging at Mozilla: The Decision

#32

Post by Mathnerd314 »

dzypa wrote: post #8

Daily reminder that Rust uses Discord, a closed source piece of software with draconian privacy and data retention terms. Steve Klabnik will predictably reply to me saying that it was the decision of the community and blah blah, but the Mozilla Corporation should not have allowed it.

AFAICT they moved off IRC in response to Mozilla's announcement that it was being deprecated and also because IRC was terrible. They tried Zulip but concluded it wouldn't work well. There was already a community Discord server doing well so they set up an official one.

I suspect they might move back to Mozilla's Riot/Matrix instance once it's set up in production, but that hasn't happened yet.

Re: Synchronous Messaging at Mozilla: The Decision

#33

Post by StavrosK »

dsypa wrote: post #30
StavrosK wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if I give you a dollar you'll stop commenting?

If you were paying me to comment and you wanted me to stop commenting, yes definitely. I could go my own way and comment for free (as I already do) and then I would be able to do whatever I wanted. But as long as I am funded by you, yes I should do what you ask of me.

Wouldn't you have a choice between continuing to get paid or continuing to comment? And what if I already knew your decision would be to stop getting paid and quit HN but I still needed you to continue being on HN because your presence here was valuable to me? Would that not mean that I'm paying you, but I can't force you to do anything without harming myself much more than you?

Re: Synchronous Messaging at Mozilla: The Decision

#34

Post by k__ »

rtpg wrote: post #12
xfalcox wrote: post #6

Can't wait for Mozilla to back a stable, native desktop client into a daily driver state so we can finally ditch Mattermost at work.

Seriously, I feel like it’s such an indictment on native app tool development that we have a bazillion new electron apps written by ppl all the time for weekend projects yet almost no one spitting out native apps to interface with services. It’s clearly in demand (if a bit of a niche kind of demand)

At least some people try to work on that issue:

https://www.outrunlabs.com/revery/

Re: Synchronous Messaging at Mozilla: The Decision

#35

Post by [deleted] »

swiley wrote: post #19
rtpg wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously, I feel like it’s such an indictment on native app tool development that we have a bazillion new electron apps written by ppl all the time for weekend projects yet almost no one spitting out native apps to interface with services. It’s clearly in demand (if a bit of a niche kind of demand)

Native development on OSX and iOS both kind of suck unless you completely embrace objective C and coaca. I think that’s what’s turned so many people off to it. It’s comparatively easy to write complex portable applications with tk (or even just strait win32 and whichever X11 widget toolkit is your favorite.)

[deleted]

Re: Synchronous Messaging at Mozilla: The Decision

#36

Post by sreevisakh »

sandGorgon wrote: post #3

Congrats to Riot/Matrix. I'm hoping with Mozilla's backing the product, there's a lot of features that get built out. There's no reason this cant be a Slack-beating product now. I'm betting a Rust based homeserver replacing Synapse.

The official successor to Synapse homeserver is Dendrite written in Go (https://github.com/matrix-org/dendrite). There is homeserver project in Rust called Ruma (https://github.com/ruma/ruma). Ruma was waiting for async/await to stabilize. But it doesn't seem to have much activity even after that.

Re: Synchronous Messaging at Mozilla: The Decision

#37

Post by mehhh »

jeltz wrote: post #7

Nice, given how the discussions were going some months ago I was worried that they would pick some closed source solution like Discord or Slack. I have not used Matrix so I do not know how good it is, but I do not like the lock-in of Discord and Slack.

Matrix can bridge in IRC, Slack, Gitter and a few other protocols very nicely, it reminds me of Pidgin but with much better UX.

Re: Synchronous Messaging at Mozilla: The Decision

#38

Post by est31 »

gsnedders wrote: post #15
scrollaway wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you want mozco to go against the community's and project leaders decisions? Do you see the problem with that line of thinking or do I have to explain further?

(Also, Rust isn't under MoCo, it's under MoFo directly.)

In which way? I've thought the Rust engineers were employees of the Mozilla corporation? And the Rust trademark seems to be owned by the Mozilla corporation as well: https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=87796977&caseSearchType=U...

Re: Synchronous Messaging at Mozilla: The Decision

#39

Post by dstaley »

I really hope this means more development and focus on building great mobile apps for Matrix. For the past four months the Riot Android app has had this bug where login state expires after a day and the app gets stuck in an infinite loop trying to refresh the token. Supposedly a fix was merged [1], but after four months of not being able to use Riot (and thus Matrix) my friend group has fallen back to Discord.

[1] https://github.com/vector-im/riot-android/issues/3249

Re: Synchronous Messaging at Mozilla: The Decision

#40

Post by Mathnerd314 »

est31 wrote: post #28
kibwen wrote: post #5

I'm pleasantly surprised! They took the route of "promising but underdeveloped technology" rather than settling for a well-developed solution that compromises their principles (which, frankly, I wouldn't have faulted them for; at the end of the day you still have to get work done). With luck maybe we'll see Mozilla contribute to Matrix? There is, after all, an implementation written in Rust: https://github.com/ruma

The last ruma commit was in August, which was after a long period where nothing happened at all. Is the project dead?

The latest status seems to be https://github.com/ruma/ruma/issues/189#issuecomment-5539555... from a month ago. It looks like he is working on the client while he waits for Rust web server frameworks to adopt the recently-released async-await language features.
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