[nntwozz]

Dat feeling when reading "IRC (an open protocol)" on HN—the parenthesis being necessary to explain IRC.

Makes me think in 10 years time the web will all be discord-like data silos behind infernal subscriptions and/or dark patterns with ads.

What a wonderful thing we've created.

[jm4]

I think “IRC (an open protocol)” served more to explain the why than the what here. It frames the whole rest of the story and why GP felt alienated.

It wasn’t because Mozilla stopped using GP’s favorite chat software. It’s because GP was a believer in the mission and the principles. Switching from an open system to a corny corporate one made the whole illusion fall apart. Mozilla was a corp all along and they took their volunteers for a ride.

[CGamesPlay]

Is there a widely-used open modern chat network? Specifically, I'm fine with the feature set of IRC, but I want durable messages and a mobile client.

Speaking as someone who hasn't run their own bouncer in 10+ years.

[nicoburns]

Yes, Matrix. It all seems a bit overengineered, but it's open and has good clients, and all the modern features you'd expect.

[jcgl]

> has good clients

So far, I've only found clients with different bugs. Calling them good would be a stretch. Passable, perhaps. But the scene as a whole is more of a choose-the-bugs-to-live-with situation than choose-a-good-client.

[jcgl]

Case-in-point: just started a new chat with a new person (we had a previous room in common)--My desktop client, NeoChat, shows "This message is encrypted and the sender has not shared the key with this device." for all of their messages. FluffyChat on my phone shows their messages correctly.

Welcome to Matrix. It's the best option there is, and it's not very good.

[collabs]

I'm sorry but I lost interest in matrix in 2017 ish when I tried to use my existing matrix log in when trying to sign into the Mozilla matrix and I simply couldn't. At the end I ended up creating a new account on Mozilla side just so I could use it for a few days.

I've never thought of matrix as a mature technology ever since.

even mastodon figured out federation.

[stryan]

That's not how federation works? You wouldn't log into Mozilla's matrix server with another Matrix server's login, you would just join the :mozilla.org rooms with your normal Matrix account. That's the whole point of federation.

It sounds like you were trying to login to Mozilla's Element web client and it was only set up to authenticate against the Mozilla homeserver but A) that's a client setting unrelated to federation or really the protocol in general and B) not what you were supposed to be doing to begin with.

[Timwi]

Mastodon does not have persistence of data though. Your instance shuts down? All your posts are gone. I naively assumed I could just move them to a new instance and found out the hard way. I have felt disillusioned with Mastodon ever since.

[CalRobert]

Ultimately all things are ephemeral.

[Bender]

For what it's worth there are some web front-ends to IRC that make it more approachable from the modern crowd. [1][2] These both have live demo's

[1] - https://thelounge.chat/

[2] - https://convos.chat/

[PuercoPop]

> but I want durable messages and a mobile client.

And IRCv3 has chat history to provide that. But https://snikket.org/ (XMPP) is more likely aligned with what you are looking for

[noosphr]

I just run emacs with termux proot debian.

It just works.

[axus]

Sounds like some decision-maker couldn't figure out how to connect to the IRC channel. That's not the right type of management for Mozilla.

[1vuio0pswjnm7]

Another feeling when reading "(I woudn't know, uBlock is pretty effective)" coming from a volunteer for MDN

Who else would be likely to look at what a web page is trying to get the browser to do, e.g., trigger requests for ads using Javascript. There are a variety of places to look, it is not like this is seriously hidden from those with even the slightest curiousity

That a former MDN volunteer is apparently disappointed by ads on MDN yet satisfied with MDN anyway because of a community-sourced browser add-on. An add-on that can be rendered useless at any time by the browser vendor, including the one that puts ads on MDN

It is not unimaginable that one day uBlock Origin may cease to work on Firefox when Mozilla sells search data to Google as its primary source of income and is actively working on such things as "making ads more private"

I thank the volunteer for their past work on MDN, I'm not singling him out, nor am I holding it against anyone for thinking this way, but I wonder how many uBlock Origin users believe themselves to possess some "specialised knowledge",^1 for lack of a better term, but would be all but helpless against advertising without a solution provided by someone else, e.g., a browser extension

The point I'm making is that today it seems like "knowing which app to install and how to install it" is considered specialised knowledge instead of actually knowing how to avoid ads to an extent where if the app stopped working they could devise another solution

There are definitely some HN users who can do it, and you, dear reader may be amongst them, but it seems, based on the comments I have seen over the years, there are many, many more who cannot. In that sense the situation is a bit like the IRC comment

The more one understands about online ads, the more clear it should be that so-called "ad blockers" is only a temporary solution at best, and these only work with web browsers

IMHO it is important that more people who wish to avoid ads become more curious about how they work instead of only installing a browser extension and concluding the problem is solved for the long-term

1. Many calling themselves "engineers" for example

[1vuio0pswjnm7]

*wouldn't

[aboardRat4]

IRC's UI is horrible. (Like email.)

No wonder people don't want to join it.

(Saying that as someome who has his own bouncer.)

[tjoff]

It's not like you couldn't create an IRC-client with better UI than discord. Not as many features, but whatever strength discord has it is not UI.

Email really could have been great, but html and bad actors have made it so much worse than it needs to be.

[crote]

In practice "better UI" would mean things like being able to trivially share files and images, or quote/link a specific message, or even making it easier to distinguish between users with similar nicks via their profile pictures. And those UI improvements are actually features which are integral to its protocol, so they can't easily be bolted on by a custom IRC client in a backwards-compatible way.

Literally every single modern chat platform has support for stuff like that, and for a reason. Discord became popular because it combined those modern chat features with the ability for every community to create its own private little "server" - while at the same time making it trivial to participate in multiple "servers" at once.

[hnlmorg]

Quoting/linking is a client feature, not a server one.

IRC servers do also support profiles.

I think the real “issue” with IRC is that its users generally prefer the minimal UI. So there isn’t an high enough demand to make prettier UIs. But there are web clients that are a little less basic.

For what it’s worth, I’m in that minimal camp too. I wish I could still connect Slack to IRC.

[roenxi]

I'd guess the important feature for Discord is it is easier for the administrators to get hosted and online, but "you could create a client with a better UI than discord" is a terrible line of argument. People could do lots of things in the OSS world and they don't. I can't recall any IRC client that I have found as easy to use as the Discord client except - ironically given the topic - ChatZilla which died off years ago because Mozilla decided that extensions were more of a 2000s technology than something they wanted to support.

[pmontra]

Email is OK. The point is that most conversations moved to other media (mainly chats) and so 90% of my mail is notifications, 9% is newsletters, 1% are real messages. They used to be 99%.

[dariusj18]

I really wish Google's Wave went somewhere. It was the real solution.

[esafak]

Which feature did you like most?

[em-bee]

try deltachat. it's essentially a chat client with all the features you would expect but using SMTP as the protocol.

[aboardRat4]

>It's not like you couldn't create an IRC-client with better UI than discord

No, you cannot. You cannot, because you need a team for this, and they need salaries, and unless you push ads into people's throats, there won't be any.

[amatecha]

indeed, there is https://www.irccloud.com which is quite excellent!

[prmoustache]

I am puzzled by this comment. IRC is a protocol, it is not a software and doesn't have an UI. IRC clients do, and they aren't all the same.

[aboardRat4]

Lol. You must be from the "wayland is just a protocol" bunch.

UI(IRC) = MIN_{c \in clients : #user(c) > 100 } UI(c)

But even if you take "max" and not "min", it's still horrible.

[AlienRobot]

It's been a while since I last used IRC, but afaik one of the issues with it was that servers revealed the IP address of users to every other user by default. Since the IP is geographic that's one piece of information you could use to doxx someone.

[gordonfish]

IP addresses aren't linked to a complete street address, and many times don't even show the right town, especially those on CG-NAT or a plain ol' direct public dynamic address. I have seen some IPs, like on AT&T and Comcast home Internet, showing a different state.

So in many cases, you don't need a VPN to prevent revealing your actual geographic location.

[esseph]

And some IPs stick to users for over a decade, and over time the data pieces add up and connect the dots.

[bitbasher]

Libera gives all registered users a cloak to hide their ip.

[netsharc]

It'd be trivial (TM) for someone to make a web interface, and the connections would say "Connecting from some-data-center.aws-cloud.bl"...

[dollylambda]

There are many ways to mask your "real" ip address, VPN being an easy start.

[crote]

The fact that this is needed at all is a serious problem. Making people who aren't aware of some obscure details accidentally doxx themselves is incredibly user-hostile.

[yason]

> IRC's UI is horrible. (Like email.) No wonder people don't want to join it.

I consider it a feature that acts as a filter.

[Natfan]

if you consider a high bar for entry to be a good thing, don't be surprised when your community dies

[account42]

Eternal september has shown that the opposite is even more of a problem.

[bachmeier]

The entire reason Mozilla came into being is to do things like improve the user experience for IRC so we can keep the internet open. There has never been any other reason for Mozilla as an organization to exist.

[loloquwowndueo]

Dunno man, it’s miles better than discord which bombards me with ads every single time I log in.

[ekianjo]

UI? Its a protocol.

[setopt]

They probably meant UX, which is arguably similar between implementations.

[47282847]

Like “the UX of HTTP is horrible”? Still doesn’t make any sense.

Discord could well run on top of IRC the protocol and be open to federation without any change of UX.

[oriolid]

Netsplits, missed messages and bot wars over channel and nick ownership were an integral part of IRC UX, and they were direct consequences the IRC protocol. If Discord was run on top of IRC protocol, it would have the same. Discord would probably be its own network and the people who prefer IRCnet, EFnet or QuakeNet would never touch it.

[progval]

> Netsplits

It's not inherent to the protocol. https://ergo.chat/ does not have netsplits (from having a single server) and https://github.com/Libera-Chat/sable replaces the server-to-server protocol to eliminate netsplits as well.

And even when not eliminated entirely, they are infrequent and barely visible on well-managed networks like Libera.Chat. Many chat platforms have more (and longer) outages than Libera has netsplits.

> missed messages

Solved by most server implementations using https://ircv3.net/specs/extensions/chathistory

> bot wars over channel and nick ownership

Solved decades ago thanks to NickServ and ChanServ (though I'll admit they are ad-hoc additions on top of the protocol). And ~15 years ago we got native support for authentication (https://ircv3.net/specs/extensions/sasl-3.1)

[luke5441]

IRC doesn't have offline messages and standardized user accounts.

Just looked it up and there is IRCv3 to fix this, but idk what the state of that is.

[FireBeyond]

"... not great".

IRCv3 was already late to the party and when I saw that the Working Group's mailing list was composed of lots of debates on formats for server daemon configuration files, it was clear many couldn't see the forest for the trees.

[coldtea]

>Like “the UX of HTTP is horrible”? Still doesn’t make any sense

Sure it does, when all browsers have more or less the same, and the context makes clear we're not talking about the mere programmatic consumption of HTTP (like through some REST api).

"But it's a protocol and not a client" is pedantically irrelevant, given that the clients for that protocol all follow the same conventions. The parent already said they meant the UX of it "which is arguably similar between implementations".

Besides, protocols impose some concepts and models of interaction and consumption, which informs any UX created on top of them. So it's not like that client sameness is merely accidental and unrelated to the protocol either.

[ciroduran]

It hasn't been the same since Comic Chat was discontinued

[joeypickles]

I wish there was an article on the oral history of comic chat.

[code_biologist]

What? I just want to share cat pics, video clips, and memes with my friends and respond to their stuff with not-inline emojis.

[gsich]

It's a skill check.

[crote]

It's gatekeeping. Don't be surprised when your pet project slowly dies because potential new contributors choose to join less hostile communities instead.

[gsich]

Gatekeeping is not always bad.

[aboardRat4]

Gatekeeping is only good when there are no easier options.

When IRC is the only instant messaging system, and it has an entry barrier, clever people will pass this barrier, and stupid people will not.

But when there are easier alternatives, clever people won't bother.

[Gud]

What’s wrong with IRCs UI?