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Candidates for Mozilla's IRC Successor

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Re: Candidates for Mozilla's IRC Successor

#81

Post by voltagex_ »

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…

This is really frustrating. I was hoping I could replace ZNC with Matrix plus my own IRC bridge. Yes I know about Matrix's bridge.

Re: Candidates for Mozilla's IRC Successor

#82

Post by voltagex_ »

berti wrote: post #66
fouc wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I paid for IRCCloud for 2 years (I think)

* General instability - I got plenty of notifications that the connection to Freenode had been dropped

* A couple of channels outright banned me for connecting from an IRCCloud host.

Re: Candidates for Mozilla's IRC Successor

#83

Post by agumonkey »

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 probably peak in its niche. Simple design, cheap to run, cruftless. Anything else added really lowers its value.

Re: Candidates for Mozilla's IRC Successor

#85

Post by opan »

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…

For what it's worth, I'm in my 20s and love IRC. I do also use matrix and xmpp, but they aren't as fast and comfortable. I love how irc logs work. I have everything stored locally and can search it very quickly with grep. I'm always frustrated with the search of other things, both for being slow and for not finding what I know is there.

Stuff like multi-line posts and markdown are nice, but none of that is worth all the good stuff you lose from irc.

Re: Candidates for Mozilla's IRC Successor

#86

Post by Arathorn »

silon42 wrote: post #72
gtirloni wrote: post #25

Maybe Mozilla can put its weight behind Matrix and create a decent client that grandparents can use.

Integrate it into Thunderbird Chat... when I used it for gtalk/XMPP it was completely acceptable for basic use.

thunderbird has a primordial matrix plugin already, but it’s very much a proof of concept. there are plans to make it much more :)

Re: Candidates for Mozilla's IRC Successor

#87

Post by hoseja »

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.

Re: Candidates for Mozilla's IRC Successor

#88

Post by zingmars »

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…

> 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 weird how while IRC is full with FOSS people who are willing to use their time on various projects they're not getting paid for, most of whom also seem to worry about IRC dying out, nobody is really doing anything about it. A lot of the conveniences we miss could mostly be solved by making modern clients that are actually good.

Re: Candidates for Mozilla's IRC Successor

#89

Post by dngray »

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 am hoping they go with Matrix, least then I will be able to have the choice of having a client appropriate to my needs.

I do prefer my chat client to not be a part of my browser. That way I can close my browser, start my browser and chat client on login ie from i3/sway etc. A tab in a browser runs the risk of getting closed.

I love using weechat (weechat.org) and have used it for decades. The Matrix plugin for Weechat is really well done https://github.com/poljar/weechat-matrix

Other people who want to use Riot can if they want at the end of the day I think matrix is probably the best option as it will cater for many people's needs.

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