[jonawesomegreen]

> We collaborate inside proprietary environments, such as Slack and Google Hangouts. Most of the chat and messaging systems in use today are also proprietary and closed. So are most video-conferencing systems and the codecs they use.

This one in particular worries me. Having access mailing list conversations and IRC logs provides such a rich history of open source development. I worry about every open source project moving to github / slack, where we may not have nearly as good a record of conversations that formed the software in 20 - 30 years.

On the other hand you won't see any argument from me that these services provide an easier workflow than what existed before, and maybe that easier workflow opening development up to a wider community is more important.

[rst]

For what it's worth, there are workalikes for both Github and Slack which are at least tolerable -- Gitlab has most of Github's core features, and there are multiple slack-alikes (the one I've got experience with is Zulip, which I, at least, find to be a whole lot better than Slack). BUT...

Just having open-source (or free software) alternatives doesn't necessarily solve the problem. Gitlab and Zulip still leave your data scattered around back-end DBs which may not be terribly accessible in 20 years' time if the software itself doesn't still run.

[tabbott]

Zulip lead developer here.

For chat apps, I don't think the problem of "data scattered around backend-DBs" is a real concern. E.g. Zulip has a well-defined data export format that's easily parsable JSON and contains all non-transient data (i.e. the status of who's typing right now isn't included): https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/production/export-and.... And so do most of the other popular chat systems.

I'd be surprised if Zulip doesn't still run in 20 years, but in any case, we have data import tools for the export formats of Slack, Mattermost, Gitter, and HipChat, and ultimately it wasn't that much work (The most recent few we've added were each a few person-weeks' work). So I think we can safely assume that at least for chat, it'll be possible to import the history.

But even if they don't, there are already scripts to export the public history of a Zulip organization and turn it into a webpage that can be hosted wherever (see for example: https://leanprover-community.github.io/archive/).

The https://zulipchat.com homepage and https://zulipchat.com/for/open-source are relevant reading for folks considering Zulip for their open source project.

[wmf]

Can non-admins export data? Mailing lists often allow downloading archives in mbox format and people also have local archives.

In cases of catastrophic failure or why-style "digital suicide", it seems like modern tools could easily leave a community with no records at all.

[tabbott]

Yes, via the Zulip API, which is how the Lean Prover tool works. Zulip's "full organization data" export tool is only available to administrators, and we haven't heard any complaints about that model.

[oldjokes]

This one really freaks me out. Especially since many of the TOS are downright abusive. Discord, for example, reserves the right to read through and listen to all your communications and monetize that in any way and you agree to let them sell all that to anyone, forever.

The fact that we're just sort of expecting everyone to slave away on github every night and weekend to remain employable is pretty disgusting too. That's not sustainable.

[iaarn]

Friendly reminder that Mozilla has decided to abandon IRC and the Rust community has therefore moved to Discord, a platform that is abusive regarding data and requires you to use a closed source javascript application to access the service.

Mozilla is a bad example because their leadership is simply pathetic, but you get the point. This trend is very, very dangerous. But well the writing was on the wall when many open source projects started moving to github.

[pixelbath]

While Mozilla seems to be a large open source/web advocate, I always have a hard time with the fact that, as an organization, most of their revenue comes directly from Google buying the top spot in default search engines.

[Drdrdrq]

And yet, they have one of the few FOSS products that can compete with any of its rivals on quality alone (the only one I can think of actually).

[smnrchrds]

Don't forget about VLC.

[wyre]

Also 7zip, Calibre, some torrent clients.

[amyjess]

Calling people "pathetic" is generally a very bad way of convincing people of your argument.

[iaarn]

You misunderstand, I'm not trying to convince anybody of anything, I'm merely conveying information.

The leadership of the Mozilla corporation is pathetic, toothless, and either useless or ill-intentioned. This is a comment and I'm not trying to convince you of these things, I'm stating my opinion. Readers of this comment should feel free to look at the decisions taken by those people these past years and agree or disagree with me.

[nexuist]

>requires you to use a closed source javascript application to access the service

Closed source in the legal sense, I guess, but there's nothing stopping you from popping a devtools inspector inside of Discord and reading through everything. It is an Electron app after all.

[shmerl]

Why couldn't they use Matrix instead of Discord?

[eclipseo76]

According to them, because they have special needs regarding moderation, because "muh harassment".

[Arathorn]

fwiw Matrix provides pretty comprehensive moderation tools as per https://matrix.org/docs/guides/moderation, hopefully exceeding Mozilla’s requirements

[icebraining]

Source?

[spicytunacone]

«While we still use it heavily, IRC is an ongoing source of abuse and harassment for many of our colleagues and getting connected to this now-obscure forum is an unnecessary technical barrier for anyone finding their way to Mozilla via the web. Available interfaces really haven’t kept up with modern expectations, spambots and harassment are endemic to the platform, and in light of that it’s no coincidence that people trying to get in touch with us from inside schools, colleges or corporate networks are finding that often as not IRC traffic isn’t allowed past institutional firewalls at all.»

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19763276

http://exple.tive.org/blarg/2019/04/26/synchronous-text/

[mikenew]

Use Matrix. It's been a slow and bumpy few years, but it's there now. Idealism aside I genuinely prefer it to other messaging services.

You don't need to host your own server or anything special (unless you want to). You can just sign up here: https://riot.im/app/

[bsder]

Another website with ferociously irritating password restrictions... sigh.

[zanny]

Just use Riot. I actively seek to contribute to projects nowadays that actively use Matrix as its communication platform. Rust was mentioned in another comment - Mozilla might move to a proprietary data-insecure privacy violating walled garden of Discord, but the Rocket web framework, Tokio, and several other Rust projects have official Matrix discussion rooms as some of their primary points of contact.

[jaabe]

I’m probably bad but I honestly can’t get slack to work with all the different communities I’ve been invited to. Discord basically works like IRC, except almost every channel I’m in is by invitation only, making it almost impossible for new people to join.

In my opinion IRC is still the best tool out there and I really, really wonder why we stopped using it.

[coldpie]

I think by a wide margin the biggest problem is that IRC doesn't have any offline features. In a world where people swap devices all the time, it really sucks to have to drop your connection on every device change, and lose any chat that occurred while you were offline and be unreachable while you're offline.

[michaelmrose]

Maybe IRC should have a standard way to send an email to a user wherein the irc client knows the users email but don't reveal the users email. It could also use its intermediary status to filter obvious spam, individual channels/users could also set policy as to who is allowed to mail users for example registered accounts only.

[ghostly_s]

Well that sounds like a feature I would absolutely hate and never enable. Offline messages need to live in the same place as online messages.

[kuschku]

So use IRCCloud or selfhosted Quasseldroid+Quassel? Or maybe even Matrix with Riot and the IRC bridge?

[cpach]

IRCCloud is really neat. Great UI IMHO. However, I must admit I’m too cheap to pay $50 USD/year for something that I use even less than once a month. So I go with irssi+screen instead.

[kuschku]

In that case you may want to try quassel + quassel-webserver + quasseldroid, which gets you something very close to IRCCloud, entirely selfhosted

[cpach]

Cool. Looks really useful!