Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Mozilla is giving up on their IRC server

exple.tive.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 370 posts

Re: Mozilla is giving up on their IRC server

#101

Post by Multicomp »

nwmcsween wrote: post #79
Certhas wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, by left in the dust they mean plummeting usage numbers. It seems your priorities are not well aligned with those of the majority of users...

If the majority of users cannot figure out how to type /nickserv register do you really want to talk to them? Consider it a filter

This elitism is a big part of why younger users* such as myself have never gotten much use/utility from IRC and hence exacerbates its growing irrelevance compared to alternative tools.

*Think XMPP GTalk etc. which were IMO superior in many ways to Slack or MS Teams

Re: Mozilla is giving up on their IRC server

#102

Post by saalweachter »

andai wrote: post #80
andai wrote: post #78

If I'm reading this correctly, the main problems they have with IRC is that it's too "old"/obscure, and too open — simultaneously too difficult and too easy to access. Hard to control who gets in and what they say. I haven't seen much spam or harassment on IRC, but I haven't been to Mozilla's server. As for newbie accessibility, doesn't a web gateway solve that? You could change the font family from monospace to Lato…

> And when we’re talking about blind spots and invisible social access controls, of course, what we’re really talking about is privilege. “Working in the open”, in a world where computation was scarce and expensive, meant working in front of an audience that was lucky enough to go to university or college, whose parents could afford a computer at home, who lived somewhere with broadband or had one of the few jobs who…

Given ... everything ... about the internet, do you ever think we're at the "throw one away" point of the dev cycle?

Re: Mozilla is giving up on their IRC server

#103

Post by astrobe_ »

IfOnlyYouKnew wrote: post #86
iforgotpassword wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

IRC has gigatons of clients because it is an open protocol. Some clients are even shareware/commercial. Same goes for servers and server admin interfaces.

IRC may have its shortcomings, but its worst defect, for the too many people that want to have fun while pretending to communicate, is that it is not "modern".

Re: Mozilla is giving up on their IRC server

#104

Post by obhmt »

gtirloni wrote: post #99
obhmt wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>But I agree with the post, "irc is not fine", and never was fine if you want to communicate with "regular" people. That's cool. I don't want to communicate with regular people, I want to communicate with hackers. If I wanted to communicate with regular people I would use Twitter.

And you're not Mozilla (which does want to communicate with laypeople) so...

If they wanted to communicate with laypeople they'd offer support over the channels laypeople expect support nowadays, namely Facebook. Instead they are going to choose some middle ground that will displease everybody; they will botch it, as they like to do.

They are already working on botching it, since they've moved the Rust channel to a closed source alternative with no expectations of privacy: https://blog.rust-lang.org/2019/04/26/Mozilla-IRC-Sunset-and...

Re: Mozilla is giving up on their IRC server

#105

Post by garaetjjte »

edoceo wrote: post #12
newscracker wrote: post #8

> We are not rolling our own. Whether we host it ourselves or pay for a service, we’re getting something off the shelf that best meets our needs. I sincerely hope it’s not Slack and some restricted search archive platform. Moving away from IRC to a newer system could provide long lived archives to users. But if privacy is very important, then a “no archive” option would be fine (similar to IRC). Anything in between,…

We put our FOSS community on Mattermost - it's awesome!

It lacks administration features - kicking, banning, etc.

Re: Mozilla is giving up on their IRC server

#106

Post by IfOnlyYouKnew »

astrobe_ wrote: post #103
IfOnlyYouKnew wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

IRC has gigatons of clients because it is an open protocol. Some clients are even shareware/commercial. Same goes for servers and server admin interfaces. IRC may have its shortcomings, but its worst defect, for the too many people that want to have fun while pretending to communicate, is that it is not "modern".

This is quite close to what I would write as a parody to prove my point.

Re: Mozilla is giving up on their IRC server

#107

Post by user17843 »

IfOnlyYouKnew wrote: post #89
josteink wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't really understand how switching to a different system is going to do anything about levels of abuse and harassment. It’s just another failed attempt at trying to find a technical solution to a social problem.

Do you have any social solutions to the “social problem”?

The solution to a social problem can be social in nature.

If you apply this to the OP blog post you can see that the desire to get away from IRC to "safer" products comes from the desire to deal with the social problem in a social way, but in a hidden way:

The technical solution will supposedely make it easier to apply the social solutions, i.e. the barrier of entry for undesired participants will be higher.

An undesired participant can be someone who questions Mozilla on a fundamental level (i.e. on the topic of meritocracy, privacy, inclusion, activism, etc.)

The proposed solution is reverting to a "safe space", i.e. something that promises to automatically protect against undesired participants, because Mozilla has long ago decided that it does not tolerate being questioned on a fundamental level.

This ultimately results in a reclusive filter bubble, where a significant part of the audience is no longer allowed to exist.

Since Mozilla does not seem to want to invest in moderating these spaces in a democratic and open way, which is very costly (but human relationships are always costly), the proposed solution is to build a fence between "us" und "them".

Re: Mozilla is giving up on their IRC server

#108

Post by cf498 »

IfOnlyYouKnew wrote: post #86
iforgotpassword wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

To be fair, it is "frivolous eye-candy”. But that doesnt change the fact that you are not going to reach the people which rank eye candy higher then functionality.

Re: Mozilla is giving up on their IRC server

#109

Post by dTal »

astrobe_ wrote: post #103
IfOnlyYouKnew wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

IRC has gigatons of clients because it is an open protocol. Some clients are even shareware/commercial. Same goes for servers and server admin interfaces. IRC may have its shortcomings, but its worst defect, for the too many people that want to have fun while pretending to communicate, is that it is not "modern".

Its worst problem is the inability to request scrollback from the server. I don't understand why that extension wasn't written, like, 20 years ago.

You also need a "de facto official" client that includes a small list of default servers, and big friendly buttons for /JOIN and /PART - in fact the user should not be required to type a /COMMAND at any point.

Re: Mozilla is giving up on their IRC server

#110

Post by zapzupnz »

astrobe_ wrote: post #103
IfOnlyYouKnew wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

IRC has gigatons of clients because it is an open protocol. Some clients are even shareware/commercial. Same goes for servers and server admin interfaces. IRC may have its shortcomings, but its worst defect, for the too many people that want to have fun while pretending to communicate, is that it is not "modern".

> for the too many people that want to have fun while pretending to communicate

It's exactly this kind of flippant dismissal that is why IRC is dying, because there are too many people who equate modernity with frivolity. That is, unless our requirements strictly adhere to your arbitrarily-defined notions of that which has merit, our voices are left unheard.

And IRC's greatest defenders wonder why everybody jumps ship.

Whereas, for the rest of us, we just want the same features I've been using on other platforms not just since the rise of Slack, Discord and its ilk, but other platforms besides, both before and after the rise of Web 2.0 and social media.

I find it pretentious that anybody could consider the following features "having fun while pretending to communicate", showing their profound lack of understanding for what communication can, perhaps should, be:

- 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

- simple but flexible role-based permissions systems that can be defined on a per-community basis

- collections of text channels in one community/guild/server that can be ordered, and that ordering propagated and standardised for all participants in that community (for the sake of consistency)

- usernames and nicknames that don't collide, using a normally-hidden primary key for each user that is associated with an account rather than ever-changing hostmasks that can be hidden, making bans and ignores ineffectual

- automatically-created community-based moderation logs

- the ability to create private group discussions without needing to create a text channel

- the ability for all participants in the community to see messages in the same format, including code blocks with syntax highlighting, images, video links, and web embeds

- a contacts list that travels across sessions, regardless of client, sign-in location, etc., and associated direct message history

- the ability to read missed messages while offline without needing to set up a bouncer (either necessitating a home computer be left on all the time AND be accessible via the web, not always practical; or every individual user paying for a bouncer, something that should be considered vastly unnecessary)

- everything just working

Instead of thinking "everybody just wants to send silly emojis and video chat, what a waste of time", the IRC crowd would do well to listen to what people actually want, need, and have come to expect from online communication, rather than derisively and condescendingly covering their eyes and putting their fingers in their ears.

Post reply on HN