[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.

[Crinus]

7zip from both a UX and feature perspective is awful compared to something like WinRAR, it is popular mainly because it provides good compression and is free, but beyond that it is eclipsed by WinRAR in almost every other front (outside of compression, the only other thing that i find 7zip good at is archive support - it supports a ton of formats including even disk images with support for various filesystems, although only for reading).

Even PeaZip has a (slightly) better UI than 7zip (and that one is also crossplatform, if you care about that stuff).

[handzbagz1]

Whats wrong with the UI in 7zip? Its basic but it works absolutely fine.

The reason I use it is because it's open source and there are no terrible nag screens.

[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/

[icebraining]

Where's the part about Matrix?

[spicytunacone]

Oh, I thought you just needed a source on the harassment claims. I do not believe there was an explicit rejection, however at the bottom of the blog post, we have...

* 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.

* We are evaluating products, not protocols.

* 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.

Given other language such as "modern expectations" in regard to interfaces and being "spoiled for good options" as well as Rust's move to Discord possibly setting a precedent within Mozilla, the posters in the HN thread above don't have a lot of hope Matrix will be selected even via Riot.