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Candidates for Mozilla's IRC Successor

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Re: Candidates for Mozilla's IRC Successor

#211

Post by gregknicholson »

alexhutcheson wrote: post #199
cocoa19 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's counting on Microsoft taking good care of GitHub and maintaining its goodwill. It might or might not be well managed in the years to come. Case in point, Skype. It was "the" tool to use for office communication. Hardly anyone I know uses Skype nowadays.

Skype is still pretty big in the enterprise chat space.

Sadly yes, because big businesses with insufficient concern for maintaining openness on the internet keep choosing siloed proprietary communication services, just because they're "more polished".

cough Mozilla cough Slack cough

Re: Candidates for Mozilla's IRC Successor

#212

Post by olah_1 »

tabbott wrote: post #179
olah_1 wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's $7 per user per month unless you are a favored open source project that they want to bless. Unless I'm reading the pricing info[1] incorrectly, it seems like the free plan wouldn't be even close to being usable for a project of more than 2 people... [1]: https://zulipchat.com/plans/

Our plans page reads: "Zulip Cloud Standard is free for open source projects and affiliated institutions." which I thought was unambiguous that our paid plan is free for open source projects. The intent of our pricing model is to charge businesses $80/employee/year for use by full-time staff. If you're a business that can afford to hire people, you can definitely afford $80/employee/year (under If there's something w…

Yeah, it's not clear to me. Do the limitations of the Free tier still apply to open-source projects?

It may help to just add a third box up top for Open Source or something. I didn't think that there would be a totally different tier listed below in the FAQs.

Re: Candidates for Mozilla's IRC Successor

#213

Post by fouc »

If the author of this blog post reads this:

Based on your earlier article, you mentioned the issue of spam. Slack is even worse than IRC for spam controls, I've seen spammers be hugely disruptive when the admins aren't around. It could be partially solved with bots, but that doesn't stop PM spam.

I looked at the docs for mattermost, riot.im, and rocket.chat.

Seems like rocket.chat has the best docs and lots of fine-grained control about permissions and also has rate limiting. Mattermost also has rate limiting (but API level only?) but their docs are horrible. Riot.im doesn't seem to have any controls.

Re: Candidates for Mozilla's IRC Successor

#214

Post by Arathorn »

fouc wrote: post #213

If the author of this blog post reads this: Based on your earlier article, you mentioned the issue of spam. Slack is even worse than IRC for spam controls, I've seen spammers be hugely disruptive when the admins aren't around. It could be partially solved with bots, but that doesn't stop PM spam. I looked at the docs for mattermost, riot.im, and rocket.chat. Seems like rocket.chat has the best docs and lots of fine-g…

Matrix/Riot has a lot of anti-abuse stuff fwiw - https://matrix.org/docs/guides/moderation has more details, and we're about to launch a shared blacklist feature in addition.

Re: Candidates for Mozilla's IRC Successor

#215

Post by darnir »

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…

Nice work! I've actually been working on writing something like this for a while now.

Do take a look at https://gitlab.com/darnir/matrix-shell-suite

It's a basic matrix client written in pure POSIX sh.

Re: Candidates for Mozilla's IRC Successor

#216

Post by jlokier »

steveklabnik wrote: post #186
M2Ys4U wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Activity only started after the ICO made contact with them as a result of my complaint. (I also have issues with how slow the ICO are at investigating, but that's a different story)

This is not accurate. I can agree that the process has been slow and frustrating, but that’s for us as well. We would have much preferred to have this all sorted a long time ago. I won’t be able to say more than that, but I can’t stand by suggesting that we don’t care about this issue. I’ve been personally advocating for these things longer than that issue has been open.

If you've been personally advocating against the inertia of your team for a long time, I think that lends weight to the idea that "we" (the team) don't care about the issue so much. You do, but not the team you're part of.

Re: Candidates for Mozilla's IRC Successor

#217

Post by steveklabnik »

jlokier wrote: post #216
steveklabnik wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not accurate. I can agree that the process has been slow and frustrating, but that’s for us as well. We would have much preferred to have this all sorted a long time ago. I won’t be able to say more than that, but I can’t stand by suggesting that we don’t care about this issue. I’ve been personally advocating for these things longer than that issue has been open.

If you've been personally advocating against the inertia of your team for a long time, I think that lends weight to the idea that "we" (the team) don't care about the issue so much. You do, but not the team you're part of.

That could be the case but the inertia doesn’t come from the team.

Re: Candidates for Mozilla's IRC Successor

#218

Post by movedx »

radus wrote: post #189
movedx wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.…

Based on my infrequent use of IRC, I am not interested in investing in learning the tools - which by the way change quite a bit over a few decades. On the other hand, the same usage pattern with other chat apps such as Zulip/Slack/Mattermost and others requires no specialized knowledge. irccloud.com looks great, except for the fact that you have to pay if you don't want to be kicked off after 2 hours of inactivity.

> irccloud.com looks great, except for the fact that you have to pay

Yes, people need to eat. Sorry about that.

Re: Candidates for Mozilla's IRC Successor

#219

Post by Arathorn »

Arathorn wrote: post #133
Arathorn wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Too late to edit the original post, but thanks to anoa for fixing up my crappy bash there's a version that actually works now at https://github.com/ara4n/random/blob/master/bashtrix.sh . The uglinesses are mainly bash's fault rather than matrix's ;P

comedy punchline; turns out that people are actually using this monstrosity in the wild:

> I used bashtrix for about 4 hours this morning. Why, you ask? I didn't have the bandwidth, latency or reliability to use Riot. I ended up using bashtrix on one of my servers through mosh...

> Could have done with scroll back (the screen fills up with 'null' and '[]' – the latter, I started to recognise as marking read receipts and/or perhaps presence) but shrank the font size down and made the most of it :p. Worked Rather well considering

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