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 chat, but it seems like etiquette is much more vaunted in IRC)
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.
My point is that any social media platform is not an acceptable IRC requirement, nor is requiring a social media account an acceptable requirement for any IRC requirement.
And Mozilla, more than perhaps anybody else, should be aware that web browsers facilitate surveillance of users.
IRC is a social media platform. The fact that it predates Github by two decades doesn’t mean it’s not social media. I don’t know know what you’re actually opposed to. A blanket disapproval of “social media” isn’t particularly meaningful, so there’s nothing of substance in your complaint to respond to.
I have no idea why you think browsers are a tool to facilitate surveillance to a greater extent than dedicated clients. If a nation state or corporation can compromise your browser, they can realistically compromise your entire OS.
I think you know exactly what I'm referring to and are trying to drag the conversation into the weeds of vocabulary pedantry. I am of course talking about internet companies who turn user data into an asset. The facebooks, twitters, linkedins (same owner as github) etc of the world. You know that's what I'm talking about. Freenode is a far cry from facebook.
>I have no idea why you think browsers are a tool to facilitate surveillance to a greater extent than dedicated clients.
Because that's simply factually the case? IRC networks do not give my IRC client proprietary tracking scripts to run. With an IRC client if any third party code execution occurs, it's due to an exploit in the client. On the other hand with web browsers, servers sending malicious scripts for the browser to run is par for the course.
Typical modern web browsers (even Mozilla's own) are total disasters, particularly in their default configuration. Why the hell aren't they shipping with resist-fingerprinting turned on by default? Because it would mildly inconvenience some users, and despite all their good intentions and positive words, they still prioritize user perception of convenience over privacy.
"I have a question and there are a few people about so I'll ask it....(10 mins later)... ok no-one's answered... no-one's said anything, in fact. I hope they can see me. Oh well, I'll just browse away from this tab/close the IRC client and just reconnect later on or tomorrow and see if there's an answer. I'll just reconnect and scroll back up and see all the history I missed. It'll be fine... (next day)...Uh...where's my history?"
> hmm, I have to download a client? maybe I can access a web interface?
irccloud.com
> okay, I have this connection string/url
No? What clients are you using that don't have an exhaustive network list in them?
> how do I join a channel?
The same way you do in Slack and other alternatives: you look at the channel list
> how do I set my nickname? ...
A good client, such as IRC Cloud, makes setting your nick name easy. Don't be lazy. Learn to use tools.
> ... is this persistent?
Yes, if you register it, and it's easier to register an IRC nickname than it is an account on virtually every other platform - no email/verification required.
> oh someone else is using my name? is this for the channel or the server??
lol?
> what's the etiquette of this particular channel?
That's an actual, serious reason you're put off from IRC?
Zulip uses three classes of communication: Streams which are like IRC channels; each stream has named threads (users are encouraged to reuse or start new ones as appropriate); and private messages can be 1:1 or multiparty.
Zulip doesn't do anything with github other than the regex-based integration -- you can create links more easily, that's it.
Nothing avoids etiquette or enforces etiquette except people.
Muting can be applied to people or named threads.
Zulip defaults to full archiving of everything, and making it searchable as well.
> Nothing avoids etiquette or enforces etiquette except people.
So why is it listed as an IRC specific problem?
> Zulip defaults to full archiving of everything, and making it searchable as well.
I have IRC logs from dead networks dating from over 15 years ago, and I still sometimes look things up in them. I don't want to trust Zulip to survive 15 years.
> I don't want to trust Zulip to survive 15 years.
You don't need to, we have an official tool that generates an HTML archive: https://github.com/zulip/zulip_archive. We recently adopted it from the great folks at the Lean Prover community, but we have plans to make it a lot nicer over the next couple months.
That said, one of Zulip's central technical design principles is to invest in making a codebase that is easy to understand, well-documented, and readable, with the goal of ensuring Zulip is able to thrive for the next 15 years and beyond.
I've been meaning to write a series of blog posts on the topic, but check out the 150K words of mostly Zulip developer-facing documentation on our ReadTheDocs:
> Nothing avoids etiquette or enforces etiquette except people.
So why is it listed as an IRC specific problem?
> Zulip defaults to full archiving of everything, and making it searchable as well.
I have IRC logs from dead networks dating from over 15 years ago, and I still sometimes look things up in them. I don't want to trust Zulip to survive 15 years.
> Zulip doesn't do anything with github other than the regex-based integration
I see. The parent poster implied that there's no need to pick a username, and that he logs in with GitHub. That implied that it used your GitHub account name, since I don't see another way to enforce unique names.
Zulip uses your full name as the primary identifier facing other users. Depending on the organization's configuration, a user's email address may or may not be available as well, but we just need your name (and auto-generated user ID) to display messages.
requiring a single commercial entity like github is a really bad idea. Sure it'll be fine for a few years but when github goes belly up or gets bought and the new CEO cuts all extraneous projects, then you're hosed.
That's counting on Microsoft taking good care of GitHub and maintaining its goodwill.
It might or might not be well managed in the years to come. Case in point, Skype. It was "the" tool to use for office communication. Hardly anyone I know uses Skype nowadays.
Sadly yes, because big businesses with insufficient concern for maintaining openness on the internet keep choosing siloed proprietary communication services, just because they're "more polished".
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 anytime. I don't have to keep irssi running in a screen in the background. I don't have to have a bouncer.
Anyways I think that if a new version of IRC came out with extra convenience for the pure 'casual' user, then we'd all go back to IRC.
> 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?
For a lot of people IRC is "broken" when compared to modern alternatives.
I personally really dislike using IRC. I am in several IRC channels because some open source projects I use and upstream code to are on IRC. I dislike it very much.
No persistent presence, no true source-of-truth logging, bad authentiation - I mean, there's really nothing good about IRC unless you have a fetish for late '90s tech.
Nothing like firing up google to search for where you might find the chat for the server you happened to connect to so you can see what you missed while you were away or disconnected while waiting for someone in a different timezone to respond.
It supports encryption but navigating what your client supports vs what the server supports is sufficiently finnicky that it can easily eat 5-10 minutes trying to set up, vs. plaintext which is easy. If someone non-technical had to get in, I'm not sure they could figure out enabling encryption on IRC in e.g. Pidgin which I've found to be a great client.
And what point is that. I haven't even started saying it, but I guess I'll start now. IRC is not broken. I've never tried to justify it so I guess that proves it.
IRC is a perfectly functional, crank-started horseless carriage. You can still drive places and gas up easily enough, but I’d still rather drive a Tesla.
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 of them.
I am over forty, I have used IRC professionally, and have not encountered it with any regularity in the last decade (that is to say exactly 0 times in the last six years). I can understand it's a non starter for younger developers as it is an unusable mess compared to other stuff they use. I suspect that part of the reason Mozilla is switching is that they realized people in their community were working around it already.
The real thing people should be asking about IRC is why attempts to fix, improve, or modernize it consistently get rejected by IRC users. It has not kept up and it isn't for a lack of trying. There have been many attempts to keep it alive and they all keep failing. E.g. slack had an IRC gateway for a while and this proved so unpopular that removing it was barely noticed by anyone. It was there but mostly unloved by IRC users. People voted with their feet by not using it. Now it's gone because apparently it was an unimportant/redundant/irrelevant feature with no commercial value whatsoever for Slack.
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.
Not everyone Mozilla hires is from a super technical background (ex: even though I now am a pentester, I actually did a UX research internship, wasn't hired to do software engineering at all). I wish they'd kept it around though, let the community die a natural death: slowly bleeding out as zoomers share memes in signal groups.
The young peeps like their icons and colors and gifs. Old people are always dying off and young people who turn into old people tend to bring their toys along with them, so I forsee something like slack/discord but OSS taking over in the next 10 years, at least in programming circles.
Please, having an usable, secure IRC setup is quite annoying, nothing to do with "icons and colors and gifs" (but difficulty at viewing that content in IRC clients could be counted as a negative). Also, some of the most active channels on a few IRC networks are primarily ~20-30yo people, maybe there are older-people channels but I suspect there's a few barriers at getting access to those.
- 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 chat, but it seems like etiquette is much more vaunted in IRC)
vs. zulip
- enter url in browser
- login with my github credentials
.... that's it