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Candidates for Mozilla's IRC Successor

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Re: Candidates for Mozilla's IRC Successor

#101

Post by rtpg »

Arathorn wrote: post #96
rtpg wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like Matrix is basically the "real standard" here that supports a lot more than IRC. The question for me is about how easy it is to build a client for that (IRC is stupid easy, of course). Ideally you should be able to build a Matrix client in something like a Python REPL and like 20 lines of code with an `input` loop at the end. I don't know if that's the case at the moment.

Ooooh... sounds like a fun challenge :D I've typed this out straight into the HN input box so it almost certainly doesn't work and will be full of typos and escaping bugs, but for illustrative purposes: here's what a ~8 line Matrix client for basic bi-directional chat in a given room could look like (complete with login) in almost-bash, with deps only on curl and jq: USERNAME='@whoever:matrix.org'; SERVER='https://ma…

Wow, definitely wasn’t expecting this! Very cool

I think it’s important to not be “using a library” since the test case is hopefully that the protocol is easy enough to get something barebones with even super baseline tools. Your bash script obviously matches this requirement

My reference here is the excellent Haskell Wiki “Build tour own IRC bot”. Really captures the simplicity of the protocol

https://wiki.haskell.org/Roll_your_own_IRC_bot

Re: Candidates for Mozilla's IRC Successor

#103

Post by dngray »

swalladge wrote: post #15

It's great to see 3/4 of the options are open source! Whatever happens, I really hope the community get behind the open source options and don't let more things get eaten up by commercial silos cough slack cough. I'm partial towards Matrix/Riot.im - the progress made on those projects is awesome and they really have a highly usable product, with bonuses such as e2e encryption and federation.

> I really hope the community get behind the open source options and don't let more things get eaten up by commercial silos cough slack cough.

Don't forget Slack also bans people who they think are from sanctioned countries:

https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/20/18150129/slack-iran-deac...

I would like to see a neutral platform be chosen to be honest.

Re: Candidates for Mozilla's IRC Successor

#104

Post by ZoomZoomZoom »

ndidi wrote: post #92
nomel wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing like firing up google to search for where you might find the chat for the server you happened to connect to so you can see what you missed while you were away or disconnected while waiting for someone in a different timezone to respond.

If you leave a room then you are no longer inside and you can't know what people inside were talking about while you weren't inside. As it should be.

There should probably be a distinction between "conference" and "room", where one is logged and one is not, but it can be argued that logging is an expected feature and access is a matter of the room being private or not. IRC doesn't work like this and many users are not exactly happy, which is why so many run their clients just for logging.

Re: Candidates for Mozilla's IRC Successor

#105

Post by swalladge »

dngray wrote: post #103
swalladge wrote: post #15

It's great to see 3/4 of the options are open source! Whatever happens, I really hope the community get behind the open source options and don't let more things get eaten up by commercial silos cough slack cough. I'm partial towards Matrix/Riot.im - the progress made on those projects is awesome and they really have a highly usable product, with bonuses such as e2e encryption and federation.

> I really hope the community get behind the open source options and don't let more things get eaten up by commercial silos cough slack cough. Don't forget Slack also bans people who they think are from sanctioned countries: https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/20/18150129/slack-iran-deac... I would like to see a neutral platform be chosen to be honest.

Yeah wow that too. :O

> I would like to see a neutral platform be chosen to be honest.

Exactly, and if one of the FLOSS options are chosen, Mozilla could self-host and not need to rely on any third party.

Re: Candidates for Mozilla's IRC Successor

#107

Post by swalladge »

22c wrote: post #54
swalladge wrote: post #15

It's great to see 3/4 of the options are open source! Whatever happens, I really hope the community get behind the open source options and don't let more things get eaten up by commercial silos cough slack cough. I'm partial towards Matrix/Riot.im - the progress made on those projects is awesome and they really have a highly usable product, with bonuses such as e2e encryption and federation.

> they really have a highly usable product Setting up a Matrix server is a lot harder than you might think, especially when you start talking about federation and identity management. The mxisd[1] project has recently disbanded due to what I believe to be philosophical differences with the Matrix maintainers vision of identity management. I like a lot of things about Riot/Synapse, but I would suggest you try setting…

Interesting. Yeah I've set up a synapse server and maintained a small instance for a while in the past. I didn't find it overly difficult, and I hear they've made usability improvements since then. I didn't try anything advanced with identity management though (and don't know much about it apart from the fact that it's not decentralized yet).

Re: Candidates for Mozilla's IRC Successor

#108

Post by swalladge »

triodan wrote: post #78
swalladge wrote: post #15

It's great to see 3/4 of the options are open source! Whatever happens, I really hope the community get behind the open source options and don't let more things get eaten up by commercial silos cough slack cough. I'm partial towards Matrix/Riot.im - the progress made on those projects is awesome and they really have a highly usable product, with bonuses such as e2e encryption and federation.

Until Matrix/Riot resolves their problem of having a centralized identity server[0] I wouldn't recommend it. [0]: https://gist.github.com/maxidorius/5736fd09c9194b7a6dc03b6b8...

Yeah that's true, if you wanted a private server a la mattermost/riot/slack, it wouldn't be ideal. However, I feel it's a decent tradeoff at present for what it's aiming for.

Re: Candidates for Mozilla's IRC Successor

#109

Post by M2Ys4U »

kzrdude wrote: post #75
DeepYogurt wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rust is moving from irc to discord as a result of mozilla sunsetting their irc server. I know one datapoint is not a trend, but it's a high profile datapoint.

Rust has already moved to discord, but it's subject to evaluation and might as well change.

I doubt it'll change. The Rust team simply don't care about privacy.

They've been knowingly and willingly violating the GDPR since it came in to force despite constant reminders of that fact.

Re: Candidates for Mozilla's IRC Successor

#110

Post by Arathorn »

triodan wrote: post #78
swalladge wrote: post #15

It's great to see 3/4 of the options are open source! Whatever happens, I really hope the community get behind the open source options and don't let more things get eaten up by commercial silos cough slack cough. I'm partial towards Matrix/Riot.im - the progress made on those projects is awesome and they really have a highly usable product, with bonuses such as e2e encryption and federation.

Until Matrix/Riot resolves their problem of having a centralized identity server[0] I wouldn't recommend it. [0]: https://gist.github.com/maxidorius/5736fd09c9194b7a6dc03b6b8...

Matrix does not require a centralized identity server (which exists only for optionally discovering users on Matrix based on their email/phone numbers).

The linked gist is loudly complaining (amongst other things) that Riot's default config points at a centralised one by default.

We've already fixed this (https://github.com/vector-im/riot-web/issues/10553) by simply removing the concept of default identity servers entirely and instead prompting the user to select on demand whichever one they want to use, if they actually try to look up a user based on email/phone. It should be released in Riot 1.4 (on Web, and equivalent ones on mobile etc) in the coming weeks.

You can see our response to that original gist at https://matrix.org/blog/2019/06/30/tightening-up-privacy-in-..., and you can track progress over at https://vector-im.github.io/feature-dashboard/#/plan?label=p... (which has a cache from yesterday published at https://matrix.org/~matthew/privacy-sprint.html).

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