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Candidates for Mozilla's IRC Successor

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Re: Candidates for Mozilla's IRC Successor

#111

Post by Avamander »

zingmars wrote: post #88
jjcm wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Die? No, but it is slowly degrading. More and more the people in my old freenode chatrooms are idle or simply leaving. We've gotten so used to phone notifications and a persistent history, that IRC has fallen behind purely from a convenience factor. It's rock solid in what it does, I have zero doubt about that or your 15 year claim. But even if the protocol works, if the user base isn't being added to it will die eve…

> We've gotten so used to phone notifications and a persistent history, that IRC has fallen behind purely from a convenience factor. I have that with a bouncer (znc) and a plugin. I've not used it, but it is my understanding that IRCCloud does this too. Problem is that there aren't many easily usable options for this apart from IRCCloud and even IRCCloud itself isn't all that well marketed. Always seemed kind of weir…

Quassel is being actively worked on and solves a lot of the woes for me.

Re: Candidates for Mozilla's IRC Successor

#112

Post by Avamander »

corndoge wrote: post #6
client4 wrote: post #2

Keybase Chat would make a solid choice as well. *I work for Keybase, but chose to work here because I love the mission / product.

Keybase chat doesn't have a server client available. It is nothing like IRC.

Actually there's a bot available https://github.com/keybase/bot-sshca in addition to the regular CLI API keybase has.

Re: Candidates for Mozilla's IRC Successor

#113

Post by Avamander »

TingPing wrote: post #30
radus wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My experiences as an infrequent IRC user over many years: - hmm, I have to download a client? maybe I can access a web interface? - okay, I have this connection string/url - how do I join a channel? - how do I set my nickname? is this persistent? - oh someone else is using my name? is this for the channel or the server?? - what's the etiquette of this particular channel? (I realize this is probably the case for any c…

Nothing prevents a nearly identical frontend to IRC.

Would love to see one.

Re: Candidates for Mozilla's IRC Successor

#115

Post by Avamander »

stjohnswarts wrote: post #40
bhhaskin wrote: post #3

Why move away from IRC at all? If it ain't broken why "fix" it.

The young peeps like their icons and colors and gifs. Old people are always dying off and young people who turn into old people tend to bring their toys along with them, so I forsee something like slack/discord but OSS taking over in the next 10 years, at least in programming circles.

Please, having an usable, secure IRC setup is quite annoying, nothing to do with "icons and colors and gifs" (but difficulty at viewing that content in IRC clients could be counted as a negative). Also, some of the most active channels on a few IRC networks are primarily ~20-30yo people, maybe there are older-people channels but I suspect there's a few barriers at getting access to those.

Re: Candidates for Mozilla's IRC Successor

#116

Post by buboard »

lima wrote: post #94

I'm sad to see Zulip excluded from the list. It solves the #1 issue with large group chats - proper threading. Nothing worse than waking up to a 1000 message backlog you have to sort through to filter out the information relevant to you. Except for Slack, all of their other choices have very poor threading. They said they had trouble to get it working behind IAM, but Zulip is just a Django application. Surely there's…

> but Zulip is just a Django application.

Yet again:

> The installer expects Zulip to be the only thing running on the system; it will install system packages with apt (like nginx, postgresql, and redis) and configure them for its own use. We strongly recommend using either a fresh machine instance in a cloud provider, a fresh VM, or a dedicated machine. If you decide to disregard our advice and use a server that hosts other services, we can’t support you, but we do have some notes on issues you’ll encounter.

Re: Candidates for Mozilla's IRC Successor

#117

Post by Avamander »

emptysongglass wrote: post #114
client4 wrote: post #2

Keybase Chat would make a solid choice as well. *I work for Keybase, but chose to work here because I love the mission / product.

I love Keybase. I wish it was fully open source though. And that group chats weren't slow as sin.

Yeah, it has some usability concerns, not yet at the level of Slack for large group work or onboarding speed, but I've found it very good for smaller groups of people and the rest of the features they've built on it are very cool and useful (at least for me).

Re: Candidates for Mozilla's IRC Successor

#118

Post by Avamander »

hoseja wrote: post #87
esotericn wrote: post #26

I have full faith that, if I had left a computer running, in the corner of my home, with an IRC client open, it would have been able to maintain a connection to Freenode (not continuously, but just work) for fifteen or more years. Personally I don't think IRC will ever be replaced. Well, it will, but it'll happen when my generation dies and gets fully replaced with the New Shiny. I _hope_ that some sort of real, prop…

IRC is a pretty awful standard though. It works, through immense hacking effort but as (utterly under-) specified, it's a nightmare.

IRCv3 tries to fix a lot of those concerns and provides a lot of features long due. If you have any specific concerns not yet addressed by IRCv3 I'd start talking about it in the issue tracker.

Re: Candidates for Mozilla's IRC Successor

#119

Post by calcifer »

M2Ys4U wrote: post #109
kzrdude wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> They've been knowingly and willingly violating the GDPR

That's quite the inflamatory statement to throw out there without at least providing a source or two.

Re: Candidates for Mozilla's IRC Successor

#120

Post by movedx »

radus wrote: post #14
bhhaskin wrote: post #3

Why move away from IRC at all? If it ain't broken why "fix" it.

My experiences as an infrequent IRC user over many years: - hmm, I have to download a client? maybe I can access a web interface? - okay, I have this connection string/url - how do I join a channel? - how do I set my nickname? is this persistent? - oh someone else is using my name? is this for the channel or the server?? - what's the etiquette of this particular channel? (I realize this is probably the case for any c…

> hmm, I have to download a client? maybe I can access a web interface?

irccloud.com

> okay, I have this connection string/url

No? What clients are you using that don't have an exhaustive network list in them?

> how do I join a channel?

The same way you do in Slack and other alternatives: you look at the channel list

> how do I set my nickname? ...

A good client, such as IRC Cloud, makes setting your nick name easy. Don't be lazy. Learn to use tools.

> ... is this persistent?

Yes, if you register it, and it's easier to register an IRC nickname than it is an account on virtually every other platform - no email/verification required.

> oh someone else is using my name? is this for the channel or the server??

lol?

> what's the etiquette of this particular channel?

That's an actual, serious reason you're put off from IRC?

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