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Leaving Mozilla

blog.unitedheroes.net

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Re: Leaving Mozilla

#171

Post by jcgl »

nicoburns wrote: post #136
CGamesPlay wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a widely-used open modern chat network? Specifically, I'm fine with the feature set of IRC, but I want durable messages and a mobile client. Speaking as someone who hasn't run their own bouncer in 10+ years.

Yes, Matrix. It all seems a bit overengineered, but it's open and has good clients, and all the modern features you'd expect.

> has good clients

So far, I've only found clients with different bugs. Calling them good would be a stretch. Passable, perhaps. But the scene as a whole is more of a choose-the-bugs-to-live-with situation than choose-a-good-client.

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#172

Post by roenxi »

tjoff wrote: post #93
aboardRat4 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IRC's UI is horrible. (Like email.) No wonder people don't want to join it. (Saying that as someome who has his own bouncer.)

It's not like you couldn't create an IRC-client with better UI than discord. Not as many features, but whatever strength discord has it is not UI. Email really could have been great, but html and bad actors have made it so much worse than it needs to be.

I'd guess the important feature for Discord is it is easier for the administrators to get hosted and online, but "you could create a client with a better UI than discord" is a terrible line of argument. People could do lots of things in the OSS world and they don't. I can't recall any IRC client that I have found as easy to use as the Discord client except - ironically given the topic - ChatZilla which died off years ago because Mozilla decided that extensions were more of a 2000s technology than something they wanted to support.

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#173

Post by heresie-dabord »

magpi3 wrote: post #62

Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy absolutely applies here: https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html "Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers, launch techni…

"The bureaucracy will expand to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy." -- paraphrase of C. Northcote Parkinson [0]

[0] _ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#175

Post by crote »

tjoff wrote: post #93
aboardRat4 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IRC's UI is horrible. (Like email.) No wonder people don't want to join it. (Saying that as someome who has his own bouncer.)

It's not like you couldn't create an IRC-client with better UI than discord. Not as many features, but whatever strength discord has it is not UI. Email really could have been great, but html and bad actors have made it so much worse than it needs to be.

In practice "better UI" would mean things like being able to trivially share files and images, or quote/link a specific message, or even making it easier to distinguish between users with similar nicks via their profile pictures. And those UI improvements are actually features which are integral to its protocol, so they can't easily be bolted on by a custom IRC client in a backwards-compatible way.

Literally every single modern chat platform has support for stuff like that, and for a reason. Discord became popular because it combined those modern chat features with the ability for every community to create its own private little "server" - while at the same time making it trivial to participate in multiple "servers" at once.

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#176

Post by crote »

skywhopper wrote: post #86
teaearlgraycold wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I just love downvotes, but the Firefox AI sidebar is incredibly useful and I make use of it nearly every day.

Good for you. The point is that a lot of Firefox users actively didn't want these sorts of features enabled and pushed on them. That was clear and obvious to anyone paying attention to general reactions to unsolicited AI helper tools, going back decades. For Mozilla to turn this on without any respect for those users’ preferences was a huge mistake that they keep making over and over again.

More specifically: they chose Firebox because it doesn't have those kind of features. If the just wanted a (sorta-kinda) open-source browser filled with all the latest hype features they would've simply used Chromium.

Using Firefox is a political choice. People use it because it's one of the few remaining traditional browsers which isn't a tentacle of Big Tech. Chasing the competition and adding the stuff your users are actively trying to avoid isn't going to work.

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#177

Post by progval »

oriolid wrote: post #152
47282847 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like “the UX of HTTP is horrible”? Still doesn’t make any sense. Discord could well run on top of IRC the protocol and be open to federation without any change of UX.

Netsplits, missed messages and bot wars over channel and nick ownership were an integral part of IRC UX, and they were direct consequences the IRC protocol. If Discord was run on top of IRC protocol, it would have the same. Discord would probably be its own network and the people who prefer IRCnet, EFnet or QuakeNet would never touch it.

> Netsplits

It's not inherent to the protocol. https://ergo.chat/ does not have netsplits (from having a single server) and https://github.com/Libera-Chat/sable replaces the server-to-server protocol to eliminate netsplits as well.

And even when not eliminated entirely, they are infrequent and barely visible on well-managed networks like Libera.Chat. Many chat platforms have more (and longer) outages than Libera has netsplits.

> missed messages

Solved by most server implementations using https://ircv3.net/specs/extensions/chathistory

> bot wars over channel and nick ownership

Solved decades ago thanks to NickServ and ChanServ (though I'll admit they are ad-hoc additions on top of the protocol). And ~15 years ago we got native support for authentication (https://ircv3.net/specs/extensions/sasl-3.1)

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#178

Post by prmoustache »

aboardRat4 wrote: post #76
nntwozz wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dat feeling when reading "IRC (an open protocol)" on HN—the parenthesis being necessary to explain IRC. Makes me think in 10 years time the web will all be discord-like data silos behind infernal subscriptions and/or dark patterns with ads. What a wonderful thing we've created.

IRC's UI is horrible. (Like email.) No wonder people don't want to join it. (Saying that as someome who has his own bouncer.)

I am puzzled by this comment. IRC is a protocol, it is not a software and doesn't have an UI. IRC clients do, and they aren't all the same.

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#179

Post by deng »

RobotToaster wrote: post #35
matsemann wrote: post #5

Interesting to read, but ultimately it's very easy to blame "leaders" for everything and I'm not sure it has much merit. It's popular to pile on them and their decisions. But I don't think it's as obvious as people (often here on HN) make it out to be. If Mozilla didn't try out these avenues deemed wrong, if Mozilla spent all money on the browser only, if Mozilla made the best browser ever, would that really make a d…

It doesn't seem a coincidence that it started to go down hill after they removed an engineer from CEO (Brendan Eich), and replaced him with a marketing dude, then a lawyer lady, and now an MBA bro.

That engineer went on to create Brave, a browser that pays you Monopoly money for watching ads, injected affiliate links, installed their commercial VPN without asking, and leaked DNS traffic when using Tor in its "privacy" mode. I'd say Mozilla dodged a bullet there.

Re: Leaving Mozilla

#180

Post by SilverSlash »

magpi3 wrote: post #62

Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy absolutely applies here: https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html "Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers, launch techni…

damn! then what's happens at the EU where the "goals of the organization" are themselves to increase and champion bureaucracy?
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