
Mozilla is giving up on their IRC server - ori_b
http://exple.tive.org/blarg/2019/04/26/synchronous-text/?s
======
TheSwordsman
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 to ignore a user, mute a user, or temporarily suspend a
user if they need a timeout. The first two are completely impossible, while
the latter today is manual / mostly possible using undocumented APIs and
mechanizing of HTTP requests. Users reporting spam is done by them sending a
message to an admin, or in the admin channel, and requires someone to manually
intervene and moderate the message. So we effectively need to aim for follow-
the-sun moderator coverage, which is a bit painful.

In terms of usability and accessibility, some of the things Slack does (e.g.,
threads) are not super-inclusive or accessible to users who use screen
readers. Today, based on feedback I've gotten, IRC is still superior for users
who rely on screen readers due to some form of visual impairment.

Whichever product they go with, it'd be nice if they provided an authenticated
IRC gateway which would allow this class of user to have a better experience
using the platform as they could use one of the text-based IRC clients that
has served them well.

For everyone who is saying they hope Slack isn't the choice, I'm fairly
confident with these issues today they won't pursue Slack. If anyone from
Mozilla, or any other org, would like to discuss some of the challenges we've
had using Slack as an open community I'm more than happy to schedule time. I'd
like to help you provide the best experience and community for your users.

~~~
hanniabu
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.

~~~
Sir_Substance
Discord has aggressive security measures. I can't use it, because it won't let
me access it from my desktop unless I give it a phone number. I guess it's
decided I look like a headless browser or something.

Certainly I'd say discord is a poor fit for an organization allegedly
dedicated to web freedoms, such as mozilla.

I'd suggest rocketchat or mattermost, personally. Well, to be honest I'd
suggest IRC, but if that must be abandoned, rocketchat is pretty good.

------
newscracker
_> We are not rolling our own. Whether we host it ourselves or pay for a
service, we’re getting something off the shelf that best meets our needs._

I sincerely hope it’s not Slack and some restricted search archive platform.
Moving away from IRC to a newer system could provide long lived archives to
users. But if privacy is very important, then a “no archive” option would be
fine (similar to IRC). Anything in between, like “search the last 10000
messages”, would be a disaster for active channels with many members.

 _> It needs to be accessible to the greater Mozilla community. We are
evaluating products, not protocols._

I’m sure whichever the chosen product is, it’s going to be based on HTTP to
allow “schools, colleges or corporate networks” to be able to connect. It
seems weird that we’re dumping everything on to HTTPS, and one day in the
future there would be a world where only port 443 would be open and all the
mess, and the holiness, would flow through it, and it alone. In the name of
securing networks, we seem to have gone to an illusion of security by moving
to one port for almost all communications.

 _> We aren’t picking an outlier; whatever stack we choose needs to be a
modern, proven service that seems to have a solid provenance and a good life
ahead of it. We’re not moving from one idiosyncratic outlier stack to another
idiosyncratic outlier stack._

I still hope it doesn’t come down to Slack or Hipchat or some commercial
offering. Maybe host a Matrix instance? Or Mattermost? Or Rocket.chat?

~~~
wahern
Matrix shows how thorough the switch to HTTP has become. Like with DoH, what
makes Matrix most attractive is the ability to implement solutions using pre-
existing web application stacks, like Node.js. It's a sort of path dependency
where the easiest way to implement a simple solution starts with a very
complex, mostly superfluous foundation.

The fact that port 80 and 443 are less likely to be blocked is a distant,
secondary factor. Frankly, I've never been on a network that blocked other
outbound ports. And I've definitely never seen a network where hosted services
could only ever receive traffic on port 80 or 443. Rather, I think it's _more_
(if not entirely) a matter of people justifying the use of web stacks to
implement services which cry out for simpler solutions.

~~~
bartread
> Frankly, I've never been on a network that blocked other outbound ports.

That's just down to who you've worked for. I've worked for two companies, both
well-known brands, both operating in the consumer space (nothing
secret/shady), where most outbound ports were blocked.

In one case it certainly was possible to get them unblocked for access to
specific hosts or endpoints but you'd have to go through an approval process
that took about a week. I never had a request refused but it certainly could
slow progress, although I got into the habit of trying to get all of us to
anticipate what we might need and front-load such requests.

~~~
snazz
At one time in a past life, I was running SSH on port 80, then using a SOCKS
proxy to escape the madness of the network I was on.

------
orev
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, 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
particular topic or how the channel is being run (any such challenge, no
matter how genially presented, is perceived as combative and results in a
swift kick).

The heyday has past. People moved on, had families and other responsibilities,
with no time to sit idly chatting anymore. The newer generations are on
various messenger apps, Slack, or Discord.

Though The Lounge looks pretty nice.

~~~
travbrack
>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 particular topic or how the channel is
being run (any such challenge, no matter how genially presented, is perceived
as combative and results in a swift kick).

Funny, it's been my experience that IRC culture was always like this,
especially in the late 90s when I started using it.

~~~
bamboozled
Came to say the same, I can hardly remember participating in a constructive
conversation over IRC within the last 10-15 years. Not saying they don’t
happen, just my experience has been the same as the parent posters.

~~~
StudentStuff
Depends on the channel, Mozilla's IRC has channels (like #deeplearning) with
helpful people ready to hold your hand through using and extending Mozilla TTS
& Mozilla DeepSpeech.

------
norswap
I never see addressed the biggest reason (according to me) why IRC loses, so
let's spell it out.

IRC isn't persistent (i.e. you can't read messages delivered while you were
offline) unless you setup an IRC shell. This is technically difficult (much
more so than dicking with nickservs and so, which is already a pain point).
Hosting it is also not __free __. Count 5$ /month on CloudOcean or some such.

[https://www.irccloud.com/](https://www.irccloud.com/) is a great service that
alleviates the pain, but now you're paying 5$/month and you just have IRC —
you can't run other services on your server.

If you value 5$ or your time more than the idea of "fighting for freedom by
using IRC", you just don't use IRC unless you're forced to. This is not
unreasonable, so many people do that, and consequently, communities miss out
on these people.

You want to save IRC? Make a free (as in free beer) clone of IRCCloud. Easy.

~~~
mirkules
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 messages,
emaills, and everything in between), I don’t understand how an entire industry
spawned from a concept we already had?

~~~
caltelt
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 join, and wait for a bit to get a feel for what
they're talking about before piping in. But with IRC, sometimes it can take
_days_ to get that amount of information, depending on how active the channel
is. The same thing could easily be accomplished by being able to read the last
10 messages in the channel.

~~~
Moter8
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.

~~~
voltagex_
What ircd are they using?

~~~
buovjaga
InspIRCd according to this:
[https://ircv3.net/support/networks.html](https://ircv3.net/support/networks.html)

------
spystath
It's a shame that IRC usage is dwindling especially in techie circles. However
I can understand it if it doesn't work for them any more although in my
opinion IRC has a lot of moderation tools available. In any case, the
"problem", of sorts, is not abandoning IRC but what comes next. The web is
choke full of proprietary communication protocols that cannot talk to each
other and you have private entities acting as gateways to online
communication. Instead on relying on protocols and let clients decide how they
connect to the network you have users being herded into walled "communication"
gardens. This goes beyond Slack or Discord or chat-app-of-the-month. Having a
flagship open-source project behind a proprietary platform for communicating
with the users and developers can't help but leave a sour taste in the mouth.

Well, at least there is still Matrix to hope for.

~~~
segmondy
A slack like interface can be built on top of IRC. I'm a bit amazed that no
one has decided to do that.

~~~
cagenut
check out irccloud

~~~
voltagex_
I am permanently banned from an IRC channel because I connected to it from
IRCCloud.

~~~
amoeba
What was the reasoning?

~~~
voltagex_
Haven't been able to confirm it, but I believe it's because IRCCloud stores
logs in plaintext.

~~~
amoeba
Interesting, thanks for the response!

------
neiman
I use IRC quite heavily. Especially for cryptocurrencies and local hackerspace
channels. They're all very active.

But I agree with the post, "irc is not fine", and never was fine if you want
to communicate with "regular" people.

It doesn't have spam filters, easy GUI or easy registration process. You could
build all of those on top of IRC, and I'm sure that some people did, but
there's no "standard" and most people just can't be bothered.

As the post said, often "IRC traffic isn’t allowed past institutional
firewalls".

Besides, when was there a time in the history of the internet that irc was
used to communicate with laypersons? If that's Mozilla's goal, they're right
to switch.

That said, irc is fine, or even the best, for some communities. Especially
communities of internet-savvy people.

It's decentralized, open, easy to access and inclusive. Such communities
rarely meet the need for spam filters, and each of their members possess a
well-distilled taste for personalized tools for irc.

That's why cryptocurrencies or hackerspaces channles are great on irc. That's
why #rust channel is fantastic.

I still didn't find any modern substitution as good as irc for those
communities. And yes Matrix, I'm looking at you! You're just not there yet.

~~~
obhmt
>But I agree with the post, "irc is not fine", and never was fine if you want
to communicate with "regular" people.

That's cool. I don't want to communicate with regular people, I want to
communicate with hackers. If I wanted to communicate with regular people I
would use Twitter.

~~~
gtirloni
And you're not Mozilla (which does want to communicate with laypeople) so...

~~~
obhmt
If they wanted to communicate with laypeople they'd offer support over the
channels laypeople expect support nowadays, namely Facebook. Instead they are
going to choose some middle ground that will displease everybody; they will
botch it, as they like to do.

They are already working on botching it, since they've moved the Rust channel
to a closed source alternative with no expectations of privacy:
[https://blog.rust-lang.org/2019/04/26/Mozilla-IRC-Sunset-
and...](https://blog.rust-lang.org/2019/04/26/Mozilla-IRC-Sunset-and-the-Rust-
Channel.html)

~~~
steveklabnik
Mozilla did not move the Rust channels. We did.

~~~
neiman
Are there really no good open source forum alternatives?

\-- asking for a friend :-)

~~~
steveklabnik
We already use an open source forum: discourse.

If you mean real-time chat, in my personal opinion, Discord is the best
choice. Zulip is good, if you can deal with it being a bit weird. The other
options are fine, but not great. You may have different opinions than me
personally.

~~~
naiveai
You mean the same Discord that's now majority-owned by Tencent, right?

~~~
steveklabnik
I don’t know anything about their ownership, but I also don’t think you’re
actually asking that question.

~~~
naiveai
Sure, it may be a bad-faith question, but I think the point still stands. IRC,
as an open communications protocol, will always, always, always be better than
private companies with the potential to be controlled by anything. Richard
Stallman would be rolling in his grave.

~~~
bopbop
Christ, you scared me there. Stallman is not dead.

~~~
naiveai
He's pretty old, I was making a statement about the future. Bit sloppy
nevertheless.

------
miki123211
I know there were/are a few blind people working on Mozilla's stuff and the
move to anything that is not open source will make it much harder for them.
There was a person[1] who had done significant work on the Rust compiler and
said that he would have a much harder time doing it now, since the move to
Discord and that he might not be able to participate in the community after
the switch[2]. Proprietary solutions are a little bit better for the 80% of
people, but way worse and/or unusable for the 1 to 5 percent, depending on how
techy the community is. We have to realize that those solutions have big
gains, but they also have huge tradeoffs. IRC inconveniences some people.
Discord excludes some completely.

[1] [http://camlorn.net/posts/April%202017/rust-struct-field-
reor...](http://camlorn.net/posts/April%202017/rust-struct-field-
reordering.html) [2] This thread
[https://twitter.com/camlorn38/status/1121879891035602945](https://twitter.com/camlorn38/status/1121879891035602945)

~~~
ohithereyou
It's really frustrating to me how inaccessible Discord is. At its heart,
Discord is text and voice chat, which you would think would be the easiest
forms of communication to make accessible.

Due to a genetic condition I have that predisposes me to blindness I have
preemptively installed NVDA on Windows and Orca on Linux, and the inability of
either of these tools to deal with Discord the last time I tried is shameful.

------
unicornporn
Only Matrix would make sense.

Here's something worth paying for if they don't want to selfhost:

[https://www.modular.im/](https://www.modular.im/)

[https://medium.com/@RiotChat/introducing-modular-awesome-
hos...](https://medium.com/@RiotChat/introducing-modular-awesome-hosting-for-
riot-matrix-665a7a0c616)

------
doomrobo
I just want to say, for all it's worth, that the #rust channel on MozNet has
been by far one of the most healthy and productive IRC channels that I've
participated in. The channel is always active, and there is a constant
presence of extremely qualified and patient folks in the chat (and often Rust
core members as well). I hope that whatever they switch to will be able to
foster a community as open and welcoming as their IRC.

~~~
floatingatoll
Rust’s post about this:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19761836](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19761836)

------
deanclatworthy
I don't understand what moving to slack is going to give them, which is
inevitably where this is going to lead (or a similar web-based chat).

IRC has the same tools for banning users as Slack, if not more powerful as you
can ban ranges etc. You can require people to register with an email in the
same way slack does, although I'd argue being anonymous and being able to talk
without an account is one of IRC's best features.

I can't say I ever went on Mozilla's IRC, but I have spent almost 20 years on
other IRCd's. Seeing it be replaced, just to be able to use rich messaging
breaks my heart.

~~~
ignoranceprior
IRC isn't really anonymous or private. Your IP address is visible to everyone
by default.

~~~
deanclatworthy
Which is incredibly easily to get around with a bouncer and shell company in
eastern europe or pretty much anywhere. We're not talking state-actor
anonymous, but anonymous enough.

------
acd
Matrix and Riot is good open source replacements for IRC. With Matrix and Riot
you get a modern interface yet can bridge out to IRC open source networks and
channels!

Here is links to Matrix and Riot.
[https://matrix.org/blog/index](https://matrix.org/blog/index)
[https://about.riot.im/](https://about.riot.im/)

Please support open source projects! The Internet was built on open standards.

------
meribold
I had a question for the Firefox UX team a few months ago and went to #ux on
irc.mozilla.org. The channel was completely dead. Someone that wasn't from the
UX team was still there and told me they all moved to a private Slack channel.

~~~
stupidthrottle
> Someone that wasn't from the UX team was still there and told me they all
> moved to a private Slack channel.

So private channel _and_ closed platform.

Excellent discoverability and excellent UX, eh?

------
nwmcsween
Irc unauthenticated? IRC has supported auth services since what 1995? There
are also plenty of web irc gateways so I don't understand the reasoning to
move to something more complicated for little gain, want history? Run ii in a
tmux session and tail to a file, want to post images with a fancy GUI taking a
gig or so of ram use slack.

~~~
incompatible
They apparently want anyone to be able to easily connect and talk to
developers, except for trolls, scammers, spammers etc. I'm not really sure
what kind of authentication provides that, but they seem to have something in
mind.

~~~
maximilianburke
Perhaps something like being able to browse and search without registering,
but if you want to chat you need to create an account?

~~~
behringer
So basically muting all unregistered users by default. Something IRC can do.

------
bastawhiz
When I worked at Mozilla, "talking to a room full of bouncers" was a common
joke on my team. In a fully distributed team (we were spread out across the
northern hemisphere) this is a terrible way to work. You don't know who is
online or whether you can contact them. There's no guarantee they'll get your
message if you send them something urgent. Everything that's not "typing text
in real time" is harder and worse (search, sharing files, sending long
messages, mobile support, etc.) and everyone has to scrounge for their own
tools to work around these insufficiencies. In a work environment, using a
tool that only does part of what you need it to do is a crazy irresponsible
use of resources.

IRC might be useful in some circumstances, but supporting team
communication—especially for remote teams—is not one of those circumstances.

~~~
0xcde4c3db
> You don't know who is online or whether you can contact them.

I've actually had this problem with most, if not all, IM/chat systems I've had
to use for serious work. They have better UX _design_ for indicating
availability, but I can't think of one where it's consistently worked the way
I expect it to. Some explicitly allow people to fake/hardcode their status;
others have some mixture of caching/update issues and strange criteria for
deciding whether a user is "active" or "present" such that the indicator isn't
very reliable in practice.

~~~
bastawhiz
> Some explicitly allow people to fake/hardcode their status

That's not an issue with the tech, it's an issue with the people. I'm not
shooting off messages with no idea of whether they'll arrive, I'm at least
trusting the person's intended availability. If they're just being an ass and
marking themselves as perpetually unavailable, that's an issue I'd take up
with their manager.

In my experience, modern systems like slack and discord (and even hipchat)
work well enough with their availability indicators. Chat apps five years ago
I would not trust as much.

------
Perceptes
Please, Mozilla, choose Matrix.
[https://www.ruma.io/docs/matrix/why/](https://www.ruma.io/docs/matrix/why/)

------
andai
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 and it's instantly 20 years more
modern :)

~~~
andai
> And when we’re talking about blind spots and invisible social access
> controls, of course, what we’re really talking about is privilege. “Working
> in the open”, in a world where computation was scarce and expensive, meant
> working in front of an audience that was lucky enough to go to university or
> college, whose parents could afford a computer at home, who lived somewhere
> with broadband or had one of the few jobs whose company opened low-numbered
> ports to the outside world; what it didn’t mean was doxxing, cyberstalking,
> botnets, gamergaters, weaponized social media tooling, carrier-grade
> targeted-harassment-as-a-service and state-actor psy-op/disinformation
> campaigns rolling by like bad weather. The relentless, grinding day-to-day
> malfeasance that’s the background noise of this grudgefuck of a zeitgeist
> we’re all stewing in just didn’t inform that worldview, because it didn’t
> exist.

[http://exple.tive.org/blarg/2018/11/09/the-evolution-of-
open...](http://exple.tive.org/blarg/2018/11/09/the-evolution-of-open/)

~~~
saalweachter
Given ... everything ... about the internet, do you ever think we're at the
"throw one away" point of the dev cycle?

~~~
andai
I'd like to take your argument and apply it to the human species. In both
cases, I think the good outweighs the bad.

------
agentultra
That's too bad.

Personally I dislike this trend towards a plurality of chat "services" and
"apps." Now each project I interact with has their own chat service. I have to
maintain accounts on all of them and install several applications to interact
with each. It's a pain to manage.

Not to mention that most of these services use Electron-based chat clients
which exclude a bunch of people who cannot afford the kinds of machines
required to use them or they have to suffer a poor experience on lower-end
hardware. It also excludes people who use accessibility software or automation
that doesn't integrate with web-based clients.

The user experience on IRC scales better. Anyone can write a rich, easy-to-use
client or server. If you happen to be a programmer you can write your own
tools to manage your own user experience. The drift from casual user to power
user isn't stopped by a walled garden of a tightly-controlled user experience
that doesn't integrate with anything.

------
Dylan16807
I don't really understand how switching to a different system is going to do
anything about levels of abuse and harassment.

I'm sure it will be easier to use, at least. IRCv3 was trying to solve some of
this but I haven't heard a peep in years.

~~~
ve55
Spam can be difficult to stop on IRC compared to modern webchat applications.
From lacking things like javascript, captchas, cdns, and so on, to having a
distributed network architecture and fewer ways to verify users.

~~~
joepie91_
> having a distributed network architecture and fewer ways to verify users

You have exactly as many ways to verify users as are implemented in your
NickServ, and pretty much every snazzy web-y proprietary chat platform has a
"distributed network architecture" as well.

IRC has plenty of real problems, but your particular list of arguments seems
completely irrelevant.

~~~
xena
NickServ is not typically required for IRC usage.

~~~
varjag
If your network is large enough to have spam and identity issues, you have
nickserv.

------
ivank
Discord is blocked in China, and a large number of people in China are not
willing to use VPNs.

Discord uses themes that do not meet minimum contrast guidelines (#747F8D on
#FFFFFF is 4.06:1, failing WCAG AA for normal text).

Discord says third-party clients[1] and even client-side CSS modifications
violate their ToS
[https://twitter.com/discordapp/status/983359562458849280](https://twitter.com/discordapp/status/983359562458849280)

[1]
[https://old.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/8tukek/ripcord_...](https://old.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/8tukek/ripcord_unofficial_native_discord_client_no/e1adbu5/)

------
fulafel
There's really a need for IM interop. These fragmented islands stall the
network effect (Metcalfe's law) that is needed to sustain and grow
communities.

I guess the best thing for the current situatio would be a headless service
that would connect to your IM identities, and buffer messages, from many
different IM identities and protocols. You would then have intermittedly
connected web or terminal or mobile apps as its clients. Does something like
this exist?

~~~
ATsch
sounds like matrix.org

~~~
fulafel
I think bridges are not a good enough level of integration. You really need to
have your personal connection to your IRC servers.

(Unless the matrix IRC bridge connects to the IRC server with a server-to-
server type connection and can thus address messages from/to virtual users on
the IRC protocol level. But that would need a lot of coordination and
authorizations from IRC server administrators, which brings in so much
friction that it probably kills the idea.)

edit: it seems possible that the matrix irc bridge will make a new client irc
connection per bridged user, which sounds like a better idea. hard to make out
from the docs though.

~~~
ATsch
This is precisely what happens. The matrix.org bridge has approximately 25k
open client connections to freenode. It would probably be a good idea to
switch it to server-server connections to save resources, but afaict nobody
has experimented with that yet. If you've ever seen users with an [m] at the
end of their names, that's the default name for bridged matrix users.

------
neilv
Freenode works for other open source projects. Mozilla might even be able to
direct a little resources and governance influence their way. (If Freenode
didn't work out, it was worth a try, and an easy move from irc.mozilla.org.)

~~~
Svoka
Rust has unofficial channel on Freenode, and it's mentioned in Rust team
announcement for moving away from IRC: [https://blog.rust-
lang.org/2019/04/26/Mozilla-IRC-Sunset-and...](https://blog.rust-
lang.org/2019/04/26/Mozilla-IRC-Sunset-and-the-Rust-Channel.html)

I am sure other products/teams have channels there too, they just won't be
official go-to place to chat.

------
syntheticnature
Reading the comments, it amuses me that those who support Linux fail to
realize that IRC is the microkernel (i.e. Minix) approach in messaging. Want
authentication/security/archiving/etc.? Layer things of variable quality on
top, and hope there aren't any holes on them!

------
ParadisoShlee
This is a good watershed moment for FOSS as a whole and I hope Mozilla decide
to fork Mattermost or something similar and expand it to suit their needs over
using Slack if that's the direction they head.

Something federated and encrypted like Matrix/Riot would be fun. Having
something that's federated would be lovely to see other members of the FOSS
community start to come together over time.

but there is a lot of problems with those rich text/react/Electron thick apps
can be "painful" tho

------
mschuster91
As you are considering multiple alternative stacks, may I suggest Mattermost?
Runs decently across all major client OSes, supports Slack-style hooks and
thanks to multi-team capability can also be used to further the development of
other OSS projects.

------
josteink
> We are evaluating products, not protocols.

So _not_ using the open internet protocols Mozilla claims to champion.

What a disappointment.

~~~
kentrado
It is! This is one of the things where they can be principled instead of
pragmatic because their browser share will not diminish due to this decision
(unlike the inclusion of DRM).

------
bayareanative
The danger of giving up on IRC and going with a hosted corporate product is
the chilling effects on free speech by being at the whims and mercurial mercy
of corporate interests. They ought to stay with a self-hosted product that
cannot be shutdown by whichever government or corporation decides to ban or
restrict speech, thereby ceding what should've been public commons to being
under the thumb of a particular government or corporation, and what they deem
acceptable, not the community/community leaders deciding. I suggest hosting it
somewhere like Iceland.

------
superconformist
Mozilla's talk:

> Our mission is to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and
> accessible to all. An Internet that truly puts people first, where
> individuals can shape their own experience and are empowered, safe and
> independent.

Mozilla's walk:

Fuck it, spin up a Slack room.

~~~
kibwen
You could levy this complaint if they actually end up picking Slack (or
something similarly proprietary like Discord), but that seems quite premature.
I'll miss moznet as much as anyone, but there's no denying that IRC has been
left in the dust this past decade or more.

~~~
ori_b
It seems that by left in the dust, you mean "remained lightweight and simple".
The popular alternatives so far don't seem to have any clients I find pleasant
to use, and are rather strongly discouraging anyone from writing third party
clients.

~~~
Certhas
No, by left in the dust they mean plummeting usage numbers.

It seems your priorities are not well aligned with those of the majority of
users...

~~~
nwmcsween
If the majority of users cannot figure out how to type /nickserv register do
you really want to talk to them? Consider it a filter

~~~
Multicomp
This elitism is a big part of why younger users* such as myself have never
gotten much use/utility from IRC and hence exacerbates its growing irrelevance
compared to alternative tools.

*Think XMPP GTalk etc. which were IMO superior in many ways to Slack or MS Teams

~~~
nwmcsween
I'm not trying to be elitist, but if someone won't put a little effort into
joining a conversation how will they ask questions or report issues?

------
lenkite
Please Mozilla! Use an open alternative like Matrix/Riot or even better -
BUILD one of your own if you think Matrix doesn't cut it. A foundational OSS
company depending on a closed source product and closed protocol for such a
fundamental need such as communication is simply wrong.

------
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.

------
itchyjunk
Looks like I am too late to this party. I just recently started visiting the
mozilla ircd. There are lots of channels and very little way of navigating
around. I was trying to figure out who to talk to about network support or if
such a channel existed and no one had an answer. People come in asking support
questions but no one has an idea of which channels to best ask in. #firefox,
#introduction and #newbie are 3 channels doing the same thing and the
questions just get split off. If they can't maintain their ircd, maybe just
register a project on freenode who seems to be able to handle roughly 80k
people just fine.

Edit: Just checked, freenode has a #firefox, not sure how official or how
maintained it is.

------
pojntfx
Please use Matrix. Please.

------
zzo38computer
Many things mention about other services are still possible with IRC; in some
cases by the client side and in some cases by the server side. Server side
logging is possible (and I have implemented this once) with IRC. Still, you
can make it available with multiple protocols, and you can alter an
implementation of a IRC server even if you do not have it available with other
protocols too. IRC is also easy to use without any special software.

I currently have a NNTP server set up, but not IRC or any other kind of chat
system (but if I do set one up, it will almost certainly be IRC).

------
peterwwillis
Are Riot and Matrix compatible with irc clients? If so, wouldn't that mostly
solve the problem? You have a way to phase out legacy clients and time to work
the kinks out of an open solution.

------
car12
I hope they move on to using Matrix. I think the successor to IRC ought to be
not slack or any other closed source chat app but an open source one.

------
agustif
Mozilla could be interested in the greatest new chat product from the
getstream.io folks. It looks like not an outlier, being used by PH, unsplash,
and other great websites.

Maybe worth checking out!

[https://getstream.io/chat/](https://getstream.io/chat/)

------
zgramana
I’m more than a little surprised nobody has chimed in advocating Openfire,
which is Apache 2.0, standards based (XMPP et. al.), extensible, and also has
some pretty nice browser clients out there (e.g. conversejs).

~~~
j--r
There are way better XMPP Servers now ;)

------
mcguire
Whatever happened to XMPP?

------
eadmund
> We’ve come to the conclusion that for all IRC’s utility, it’s irresponsible
> of us to ask our people – employees, volunteers, partners or anyone else –
> to work in an environment that we can’t make sure is healthy, safe and
> productive.

I don't know about healthy or productive, but I am fairly certain that IRC is
safe.

What worries me is that 'safe' has become a bit of a euphemism to mean
'unchallenging,' and what this really means is that the organisation which
booted Brendan Eich really wants to unperson anyone who blasphemes this week's
orthodoxies.

~~~
IfOnlyYouKnew
> ‘safe' has become a bit of a euphemism to mean 'unchallenging

I doubt the concerns are about people discussing Rust vs C++. And, this being
Mozilla’s semi-internal technical discussions, even the most intellectual,
data-backed hot takes on the culture wars de jour are probably out of place:
getting DMs like “here are twenty proven statistics girls are bad at math”
because you happen to use a female handle is still harassment, even if
(hypothetically) true.

------
obhmt
I sometimes feel bad about Mozilla dying, then I see all the stupid stuff they
do and I realise it serves them right.

------
petre
What are they replacing it with?

~~~
Sphax
It's right there in the blog post:

> Very soon, I’ll be setting up the evaluation process for a couple of
> candidate replacement stacks

They don't know yet.

------
okasaki
Users seem to have given up on Mozilla a long time ago.

~~~
axaxs
You're not wrong, even if it is an unpopular opinion. It's really sad to me as
an early internet user. Their side projects have all seemed to fail, and
Firefox has never been further behind. I don't see them as being solvent in as
little as a few years.

~~~
tannhaeuser
That's too harsh IMO. FF is working absolutely great on my desktops, phone,
and as dev browser. And Rust seems extremely popular with a vocal minority on
HN at least. But yeah, I'm concerned as well - Mozilla should focus on
producing a good browser rather than pouring energy into side projects such as
Rust and especially WASM which do not contribute to that goal.

~~~
axaxs
I want to believe that, and even tried to go all Firefox for the previous two
weeks. I will say they have good Sync, which nobody outside of Chrome had
achieved at all. The desktop browser is mostly OK, no real complaints. On
mobile, however, Firefox is noticeably slower than any of the usual blink
based browsers, and most importantly to me, uses way more battery life. I love
PL things and am glad Rust exists, but from the outside it feels like a wasted
effort, for now.

~~~
sciurus
Keep an eye out for improvements on mobile.

[https://www.androidpolice.com/2019/04/26/mozilla-outlines-
pl...](https://www.androidpolice.com/2019/04/26/mozilla-outlines-plan-to-
replace-firefox-for-android-with-fenix/)

~~~
JetSpiegel
[https://github.com/mozilla-
mobile/fenix/pull/1707](https://github.com/mozilla-mobile/fenix/pull/1707)

I will wait for Fennec...

