I'm surprised jabber wasn't even mentioned in the "also ran" section.
Candidates for Mozilla's IRC Successor
61–70 of 219 posts
Re: Candidates for Mozilla's IRC Successor
#62Why are they even considering Slack which is a proprietary IM service? Come on, they are Mozilla. Matrix which is federated and is proposed like a "better XMPP" is more like it.
Why should federation play into anything here? This is specifically something for people to talk to each other under the auspices of Mozilla's work efforts.
Non federated IMs are a major problem. So using them means proliferating this issue, instead of fixing it. It's not solved, because major players refuse to solve it even though they can. When Mozilla uses stuff like that, it gives them endorsement.
Re: Candidates for Mozilla's IRC Successor
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you know exactly what I'm referring to and are trying to drag the conversation into the weeds of vocabulary pedantry. I am of course talking about internet companies who turn user data into an asset. The facebooks, twitters, linkedins (same owner as github) etc of the world. You know that's what I'm talking about. Freenode is a far cry from facebook. > I have no idea why you think browsers are a tool to facil…
> I am of course talking about internet companies who turn user data into an asset. Then say that instead of rambling about social media like a tinfoil hatter. It’s totally fine if you don’t want to support Facebook or Github or Twitter. This isn’t just about “social media”, though. > IRC networks do not give my IRC client proprietary tracking scripts to run. There’s so much here to unpack. If you choose to use a com…
> Then say that
What, say this "The facebooks, twitters, linkedins (same owner as github) etc of the world." instead of "social media"? Why? To be needlessly verbose for fun and kicks? No thanks.
> "tinfoil hatter."
Well screw you too I guess? I don't appreciate your characterization at all.
Re: Candidates for Mozilla's IRC Successor
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I am of course talking about internet companies who turn user data into an asset. Then say that instead of rambling about social media like a tinfoil hatter. It’s totally fine if you don’t want to support Facebook or Github or Twitter. This isn’t just about “social media”, though. > IRC networks do not give my IRC client proprietary tracking scripts to run. There’s so much here to unpack. If you choose to use a com…
> Then say that What, say this "The facebooks, twitters, linkedins (same owner as github) etc of the world." instead of "social media" ? Why? To be needlessly verbose for fun and kicks? No thanks. > "tinfoil hatter." Well screw you too I guess? I don't appreciate your characterization at all .
> What, say this "The facebooks, twitters, linkedins (same owner as github) etc of the world." instead of "social media"? Why? To be needlessly verbose for fun and kicks? No thanks.
No. The “internet companies who turn user data into an asset“ part. i.e. Something concrete about your criticism rather than point to an extremely vague category. I think you could probably be more specific still, but at least now I have an idea what you don’t like about “social media” and why you don’t apply that criticism to IRC.
Re: Candidates for Mozilla's IRC Successor
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
No persistent presence, no true source-of-truth logging, bad authentiation - I mean, there's really nothing good about IRC unless you have a fetish for late '90s tech.
Everything you dislike about IRC is precisely what I like.
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.
Re: Candidates for Mozilla's IRC Successor
#66Why move away from IRC at all? If it ain't broken why "fix" it.
Lately I've been thinking about how amazingly successful IRC has been. I mean, it survived the "web" and smartphones as long as it did. Up until slack appeared on the scene. I was a heavy IRCer from '96 to '13, and then switched almost immediately to slack. Slack sucks in a lot of ways but it happens to hit the sweet point of convenience. It allows me to be a purely 'casual' chatter, I can close and open slack anytim…
> It allows me to be a purely 'casual' chatter, I can close and open slack anytime. I don't have to keep irssi running in a screen in the background. I don't have to have a bouncer.
What's the barrier to a SaaS IRC solution like irccloud?
Re: Candidates for Mozilla's IRC Successor
#67It'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…
I've actually had the opposite experience - it was easy enough to download/set up, and then it was just a matter of getting the letsencrypt daemon on the box to manage certs.
That said, I went in with pretty low expectations since it's a reference implementation - I think one of the great advantages of the open-source protocol is that anyone can design/build their own implementations with better UX on the sysadmin side. There are already projects in the works written in golang/rust, and I'm sure if the protocol takes off other languages will follow.
I do agree that the identity server piece is weird. I didn't set one of these up, so I haven't really looked into it (I don't have any 3rd party IDs connected to my matrix username, which from my cursory research is what the identity servers are for) but the philosophy behind them seems to go against the federation narrative the rest of the protocol is designed around. If anyone has done more research into this part of the protocol I'd love to be corrected on this point.
Re: Candidates for Mozilla's IRC Successor
#68Really excited to see Discord rejected. Watching Discord take over open source and free culture communities has been disheartening to say the least.
You must really dislike GitHub then.
Re: Candidates for Mozilla's IRC Successor
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
At some point you have to stop saying IRC is not broken. You keep justifying it. If it weren't broken, you wouldn't spend all that time justifying it.
And what point is that. I haven't even started saying it, but I guess I'll start now. IRC is not broken. I've never tried to justify it so I guess that proves it.
IRC is a perfectly functional, crank-started horseless carriage. You can still drive places and gas up easily enough, but I’d still rather drive a Tesla.
Re: Candidates for Mozilla's IRC Successor
#70Why move away from IRC at all? If it ain't broken why "fix" it.
I think the reason they are moving is that it is broken for them. IRC is fine if you are over forty and have been using IRC for the last few decades. I.e. it is not fine for most developers who are around 30 and have probably never encountered it professionally. The demographics of software development are such that people over forty are out numbered by an order of magnitude by younger people. There just aren't a lot of them.
I am over forty, I have used IRC professionally, and have not encountered it with any regularity in the last decade (that is to say exactly 0 times in the last six years). I can understand it's a non starter for younger developers as it is an unusable mess compared to other stuff they use. I suspect that part of the reason Mozilla is switching is that they realized people in their community were working around it already.
The real thing people should be asking about IRC is why attempts to fix, improve, or modernize it consistently get rejected by IRC users. It has not kept up and it isn't for a lack of trying. There have been many attempts to keep it alive and they all keep failing. E.g. slack had an IRC gateway for a while and this proved so unpopular that removing it was barely noticed by anyone. It was there but mostly unloved by IRC users. People voted with their feet by not using it. Now it's gone because apparently it was an unimportant/redundant/irrelevant feature with no commercial value whatsoever for Slack.