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Mozilla is giving up on their IRC server

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Re: Mozilla is giving up on their IRC server

#211

Post by consto »

hanniabu wrote: post #191
TheSwordsman wrote: post #33

As an admin helping out the Go Slack workspace, which is about to cross 39,500 registered users, they would be ill-advised to go with Slack if moderation is one of their goals. Full disclosure: our Workspakce does have some sort of agreement with Slack, so our space isn't a free space (we have full history), and even then we aren't able to get them to provide support around moderation of users. There is no mechanism…

Have you tried Discord? I seems like it would meet all these desires. We switched to it a year ago and it's been great.

Isn't Discord burning through VC money right now to aquire users?

Re: Mozilla is giving up on their IRC server

#212

Post by sk5t »

carbocation wrote: post #116
pcwalton wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That experience report is valuable, thanks. I'll bring that up internally.

On the user side of things, I work at a large academic institution where I occasionally get unwanted contact (overly invasive, won’t stop messaging even when asked). I totally get that at an office workspace, the solution here is HR. But this is a loosely federated place, and even in my own opinion the conduct doesn’t merit such a response. I just want to be able to mute people.

Slack's refusal to add a "block user" option is beyond frustrating. Short of the nuclear option of disabling the account, there is no way to prevent a bad actor from pestering you. Yet this condition seems to be a deliberate choice of Slack's.

Re: Mozilla is giving up on their IRC server

#213

Post by edoceo »

garaetjjte wrote: post #105
edoceo wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It lacks administration features - kicking, banning, etc.

Has to self script, it's all packed in a PostgreSQL database - you can do anything you want!!

Re: Mozilla is giving up on their IRC server

#214

Post by orev »

travbrack wrote: post #32
orev wrote: post #3

As an IRC user since the early 90s (EFnet and freenode), I can say that it really feels like it is dying. There are still a few popular channels with helpful people, but the vast majority of channels are silent with no one but afk users logged into a seemingly forgotten ‘screen’ session. And of the channels that do have real people, those people often seem to be there for no reason other than to tell people to RTFM,…

>those people often seem to be there for no reason other than to tell people to RTFM, play topic nazi to such an extreme level that apparently nothing is actually on topic, or just generally berate people for having the gall to say something in the channel. Ops are extremely touchy and seem willing to immediately kick people rather than have actual discussions about things that challenge any of their beliefs about a…

There’s always been some of these elements, and RTFM has always been a prerequisite, however there were also other people who were not as strict so it was diluted. With the reasonable people gone, the harshness is now more obvious and keeps reasonable people away.

Re: Mozilla is giving up on their IRC server

#215

Post by repolfx »

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…

I suspect the amount of spam and harassment on MozNet hasn't actually changed over time, or given Firefox's decline may have even got lower (as fewer people care about Mozilla anymore). No evidence was provided that times have actually changed w.r.t. spam and harassment even though this appeared to be the primary motivation to shut down IRC.

Rather, I suspect Mozilla's increasingly sensitive SF bubble-immersed culture has created an environment in which ever more mundane disagreement and conversation is relabelled as "harassment" and what they want is a system that allows for much more controlled speech. Seems a part of the general zeitgeist of the Valley in which techies are concluding free speech is harmful and they should control what's said.

Re: Mozilla is giving up on their IRC server

#216

Post by swiftcoder »

Off of the main topic, but this blog is basically unreadable to my form of colour-blindness. The link colour is unreadable against the page background, and the right nav is so low in contrast I can't read any of it without using text selection to artificially improve the contrast.

Re: Mozilla is giving up on their IRC server

#217

Post by Moter8 »

caltelt wrote: post #174
mirkules wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once all the chat systems without persistence have disappeared, some new hip company will come along touting “no persistence” as a feature, maybe even a privacy feature. But seriously, I don’t understand why persistence is such a huge deal to people. Chat is for transient chat - it is meant to be non-persistent just like verbal communication. There are so many mechanisms for persistent messaging (forums, text message…

I know I hate it when I join IRC channels and have no context as to what anybody has been talking about, as there is no history to quickly go over. Even just having the past days history would help in this regard, at least for more active channels. It's the same as just barging into a conversation a group of people are having. You don't want to just join and start talking about a completely different topic. So you jo…

On snoonet at least there is a channel option frequently used, that makes the channel send the last x messages to the recently joined user.

It exists.

Re: Mozilla is giving up on their IRC server

#218

Post by est31 »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #7
newscracker wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The post says the new system will enforce authentication, and hints at dealing with bots and spam accounts. But it’s not going to be easy without inconveniencing users to some extent (or a greater extent than now).

IRC could enforce authentication without much effort. You could use email registration, etc. Maybe there's some black magic in other services to do better anti-bot/spam than that?

The typical ways to combat spam are also the ones most toxic for privacy and anonymity. On discord, the chat service that Rust migrates from IRC, I had to enter captchas quite often in order to log in to my existing account. Simply because I cleared all my cookies and had a different IP address. I rather have the little amounts of IRC spam than having to give them my phone number (EDIT: I've heard from someone who logged in to discord using a VPN who now has to enter one even on logins outside of VPNs). Abandoning IRC seems to be against Mozilla values.

Re: Mozilla is giving up on their IRC server

#219

Post by nickjj »

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #189
nickjj wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> while IRC was always available but rarely used. Freenode has about 85,000 people logged in right now and there's over 50,000 channels. I'm in a bunch of tech related channels and there's hundreds (or 1,000+) people in most of them. It's still active and has been for 15+ years. Freenode is just 1 IRC network of many too but it's where a lot of tech channels are set up. IRC is awesome. You can use it from a terminal…

You don't get the log history of what happened while you were offline, though. This is probably the killer feature of Slack over IRC, especially for professional use, together with more seamless attachment integration. Don't get me wrong, I love IRC. I have been using it for over 20 years (wow, I'm old). I have met there very important people in my life. But I coordinate a team at work, we use Slack and I wouldn't ev…

You can track logs if you want. It's up to the channel owner. Once you have that set up you won't miss anything, and people new to the channel could view previous history. You could also connect remotely through a server that never reboots too and log things yourself (as a client).

I find Slack to be even worse in that regard because they'll purge your history after 10,000 lines unless you pay, but the payment scheme doesn't make sense for a lot of communities. Like, whose going to pay $15/month per USER if you have 300 people in your channel? That would be $4,500 / month to get unlimited history right? I never signed up because I don't want to pay a mortgage to get chat history.

I dunno. I just don't see the appeal of Slack for both communities and small teams.

Re: Mozilla is giving up on their IRC server

#220

Post by nickjj »

Frondo wrote: post #204
nickjj wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> while IRC was always available but rarely used. Freenode has about 85,000 people logged in right now and there's over 50,000 channels. I'm in a bunch of tech related channels and there's hundreds (or 1,000+) people in most of them. It's still active and has been for 15+ years. Freenode is just 1 IRC network of many too but it's where a lot of tech channels are set up. IRC is awesome. You can use it from a terminal…

IRC is rarely used compared to Slack, with its 10 million users. I used it daily for decades, but let's not forget netsplits, nick collisions, zero log history (without a bouncer, and then you need a place to run a bouncer!), no file-sharing in a NAT world (dcc stopped working a loooong time ago), and no integration with any other apps, and on and on. Don't get me wrong, I wish there was an open-source project that b…

Netsplits happen once in a blue moon nowadays (on freenode at least), nick collisions are also solved (you can register your nick on freenode and other networks), and you can totally set up logging on your channel and unlike Slack it won't disappear after 10,000 messages. You can also make it accessible through the web so people can easily see past history.

File transfers are definitely an issue over IRC but https://send.firefox.com/ solves that problem very well. For sharing code, there's gists (which I often send directly through my code editor which makes it seamless).

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