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Synchronous Messaging at Mozilla: The Decision

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Re: Synchronous Messaging at Mozilla: The Decision

#151

Post by jeltz »

jokoon wrote: post #145

I'm curious, what's wrong with IRC? Is it too old? Too difficult to monitor and moderate? Too easy to spam? I don't understand. I've never really understood why mozilla chose their own servers and not freenode. I've never really grasped the whole history of enet vs freenode either.

Mozilla has said they thought it was too difficult to monitor and moderate. Could that have been solved by moving to Freenode? Probably, but there are other issues with IRC.

Having to run your own IRC bouncer increases the barrier of entry, as does nickserv based auth. Modern people also expect to be able to seamlessly post images, large code examples, files, etc. Some people also want support for threaded conversations. None of this is offered by the typical IRC setup which Mozilla probably thinks that it scares away users. I do not think Matrix solves all of these yet, but it solves some of them.

Re: Synchronous Messaging at Mozilla: The Decision

#152

Post by mindB »

pmoriarty wrote: post #133
Arathorn wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a bunch of very promising native desktop Matrix clients in progress: https://github.com/Nheko-Reborn/nheko as a Qt telegram-like https://github.com/quotient-im/Quaternion as a Qt xchat-like https://github.com/manuroe/messagerie for instance is a SwiftUI client proof-of-concept that should work on macOS as well as iOS None are as polished as Riot functionalitywise, but we will get there eventually - even mor…

I wonder if there's one for emacs. That's what I'd like to see.

There is.

https://github.com/alphapapa/matrix-client.el/

Re: Synchronous Messaging at Mozilla: The Decision

#153

Post by kibwen »

jeltz wrote: post #148
Coding_Cat wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For rust it's sometimes useful to split it like that, because it makes it easy to publish small subsets of your project on cargo. Say you develop a custom datastructure, or an extension on Streams. The same applies to other languages to some degree, but crates/cargo just makes it very painless to grab crates that are on a seperate git.

But Cargo supports having multiple crates in the same git repo. Many projects do this like regex (regex and regex-syntax are in the same repo) and openssl (openssl, openssl-sys, openssl-errors). Maybe I am missing something but it seems very easy to handle multiple closely related crates in the same repo.

What makes this possible is Cargo's "workspace" feature, which is relatively new enough that it's not hard to imagine that some older projects may simply predate it.

Re: Synchronous Messaging at Mozilla: The Decision

#154

Post by shmerl »

kibwen wrote: post #132
shmerl wrote: post #110

Good, but what about Rust project jumping to Discord instead? They should have used Matrix as well.

Each individual Rust team (which govern individual aspects of Rust) got to choose where to jump to; I believe one did choose to use Matrix, but the others mostly chose Discord (because there was already a very large Rust user community there), a few chose Zulip, and one is still on IRC. If Matrix clients were more well-developed and widely-used, I believe there would be good incentive for them to transition--the Rust…

I still find it inappropriate for a FOSS project to promote closed non federated communication tools. Hopefully they won't be stuck with Discord because "we already switched to it".

Re: Synchronous Messaging at Mozilla: The Decision

#155

Post by cjbprime »

pmoriarty wrote: post #124
cjbprime wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't describe Zulip as coming from the IRC tradition -- it was built by MIT students as an improvement on MIT's Zephyr. There's a split between line-at-a-time messaging like IRC or Slack, and paragraphs-at-a-time messaging with per-message channels like Zephyr, Gale, and now Zulip. I really miss the paragraphs style.

Wait, why can't you type a paragraph at a time in IRC?

I said "paragraphs-at-a-time", not "paragraph-at-a-time". You can't type paragraphs at a time on IRC because a single message can't contain newlines.

But even then, paragraph-at-a-time is hard on IRC because there's a max line length that's surprisingly short (and usually just truncates the rest of your message once you exceed it!), and just because you'd stand out as being the person writing much more than everyone else and being slow to reply. IRC simply isn't a medium designed for carefully considered thought like that.

Re: Synchronous Messaging at Mozilla: The Decision

#156

Post by Arathorn »

nullc wrote: post #141
Arathorn wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really: anyone can run an IRC bridge, and many people do. The #mozilla_#wherever:matrix.org namespace is the preexisting moznet bridge run by Matrix.org (not Riot.im), but anyone with their own server could also run their own bridge, much like they could run their own bouncer today. There is then additional decentralisation from the fact that the room history is replicated throughout all the participating Matrix…

And them Matrix will happily spam IRC with links to comments instead of the comments themselves. Matrix is toxic to IRC. Any widely used IRC channel that has matrix joined to it would do well to ban matrix if they want the channel to pratically continue to exist as a IRC channel.

The default heuristic is that if someone sends a message on Matrix which is longer than 3 lines, it gets sent as a pastebin to IRC. This feels significantly better than spamming an N-line paste into IRC, which could be seen as even more toxic.

Open to suggestions on how to improve it, though...

Re: Synchronous Messaging at Mozilla: The Decision

#157

Post by derefr »

jasonzemos wrote: post #122
basilgohar wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are using a hosted provider, run by the makers of Matrix themselves. This lets them get the benefits of federation while making the hosting someone else's problem. Of course, we all want to see Mozilla bootstrap their own Matrix instance, but maybe the cost/benefit equation worked out differently for them than we would have expected. I can imagine this lets them replace IRC with a better solution faster while st…

Is Mozilla an example for the next major adopter of Matrix or are they not? If they are, and everyone else signs up for modular.im as well: at what point does this ship of Theseus called Federation only exist inside a bottle?

WordPress exists as as OSS even though WordPress.com exists. And there's a clear migration path from being hosted by WordPress.com to running your own private WordPress.org instance (or vice-versa), that can be taken at any time if someone's needs change. I don't see what's so different here.

Re: Synchronous Messaging at Mozilla: The Decision

#158

Post by Arathorn »

feanaro wrote: post #58
pteraspidomorph wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I try matrix on occasion (as in, I set up my own server from scratch). The last time I tried it, support for multi-participant audio and video calls (and screensharing) was still between terrible and nonexistant. Definitely much worse than Discord. Has it improved?

There were some bug fixes in the last year (IIRC) though nothing very substantial, I think. Then again, it's always worked reasonably well for me and I'm using it regularly. I heard it was going to get worked on soon, though.

There was a major upgrade to the conference calling about 6 months ago which took it from being "barely usable" to "almost as good as Zoom". It's different semantics to Discord in that it's classic conferencing rather than a voice channel, but it works well enough for the whole core Matrix team to use it basically constantly for remote collaboration.

The conferencing servers are currently in London however, so you may suffer from transatlantic traffic problems if you are elsewhere in the world.

Re: Synchronous Messaging at Mozilla: The Decision

#160

Post by lousken »

So after testing matrix and riot with friends for a couple of months, there're still a ton of work to be done. We all used the most common setup - matrix.org homeserver, riot and riotX as apps. (Also please don't point me to dev version, I am only considering what's in stable.) Random stuff not in particular order:

1a) e2e is a choice that affects experience in riot, a lot - you can't use search, you don't see recent images/files ...

1b) you have to verify each others devices, N:M; although they're working on a change

2) I hoped that riotX will be a lot better at the end of this year, but there're still lots of bugs, messages get stuck at the bottom, mobile - mobile e2e can't be decrypted sometimes, you have to have another device online; and you can't even zoom in or save an image that's sent to you which is infuriating

3) matrix.org homeserver performance, although a lot better now is still sometimes utterly slow

4) riot is still missing crucial functions like copy entire message, online status, jump to date, and lacking any good notification system(the current one is really simple/stupid) and you can't even enable notifications without sound e.g.

4) also it's still lacking custom emote support although many ppl asked, there's no option to pin/save messages...

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