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Candidates for Mozilla's IRC Successor

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Re: Candidates for Mozilla's IRC Successor

#71

Post by ascorbic »

partialrecall wrote: post #29
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…

Requiring a browser and requiring social media credentials are both misfeatures in my book. Browsers are excellent tools.. for spying on users. And for as benign as github in particular may seem, we shouldn't be replacing standard internet protocols with products that promote and further normalize the expectation that people have a social media account.

Considering the fact that they disqualified several options for not working with Mozilla IAM, I doubt they'll be requiring social media login.

Re: Candidates for Mozilla's IRC Successor

#73

Post by rtpg »

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…

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.

Re: Candidates for Mozilla's IRC Successor

#74

Post by ryacko »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #70
bhhaskin wrote: post #3

Why 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…

People want interactive web forums that offer notifications and offer thread/channel history from an accessible front end.

The statement I just made sounds like an absurd product but they exist. The weird part is everyone is trying to build it completely in javascript.

Re: Candidates for Mozilla's IRC Successor

#75

Post by kzrdude »

DeepYogurt wrote: post #38
keyle wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never heard of this but I'm not particularly in the field... Can you expand?

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.

Re: Candidates for Mozilla's IRC Successor

#76

Post by derin »

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…

It was pretty straight forward to install/set up? There are some requirements to be able to federate, namely having a domain and associated certs for encryption, but otherwise nothing stood out as overtly obtuse/difficult.

You have to either make a venv for a binary or just install a package, then reverse proxy 2 ports from your http daemon, and finally also hook things up to your Postgres database. After all that it's just a matter of configuring your homeserver's config (which is large, but you can easily get support via the community for any poorly documented options)

The documentation could definitely be improved, though.

Re: Candidates for Mozilla's IRC Successor

#77

Post by Arathorn »

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…

there’s a successor fork to that identity server over at https://github.com/ma1uta/ma1sd which is being well maintained :)

sorry that setting up a homeserver was hard; we’ve been doing a lot of work recently to improve this (eg https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse-config-generator/tree/... is a graphical installer which should be released very shortly).

Re: Candidates for Mozilla's IRC Successor

#78

Post by triodan »

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...

Re: Candidates for Mozilla's IRC Successor

#79

Post by tastroder »

jjcm wrote: post #57
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…

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…

> if the user base isn't being added to it will die eventually.

Which is, sadly, a lost cause. We had a simple, reliable, open, decentralized base that simply did not adopt to the needs of a changing userbase of the internet enough. Non-technical users have expectations that are incompatible with the text only format and they prefer platforms that feel more like their other social media tools. Technical users don't fix that and get riled up about nonsense instead, like non-TLS connections and other points that were addressed a decade ago, alongside people that just prefer a more decentralized system.

It feels like xkcd #927 is also relevant [0]. The open source world in chat/social platforms often looks like Googlers looking for a promotion instead of addressing real needs and most efforts seem to be drowning in irrelevance. Even technically sensible projects like Matrix, who's going to use that? Not the instagram crowd that's for sure, heck, many technically inclined people cannot be bothered with IRC when the alternative is convenient. I'd be really surprised if we see a widely adopted open messenger in 10 years, it's more likely that people just settle on a new random walled garden every 3-5 years.

[0] https://xkcd.com/927/

Re: Candidates for Mozilla's IRC Successor

#80

Post by frenchy »

wetpaws wrote: post #39

Why the hell they have slack and not discord eludes me.

As per the article: "Discord’s terms of service, particularly with respect to the rights they assert over participants’ data, are expansive and very grabby, effectively giving them unlimited rights to do anything they want with anything we put into their service. Coupling that with their active hostility towards interoperability and alternative clients has disqualified them as a community platform."
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