Why move away from IRC at all? If it ain't broken why "fix" it.
- 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
You realize we’re talking about Mozilla, right?
> requiring social media
They’re explicitly choosing between social media platforms...
And Mozilla, more than perhaps anybody else, should be aware that web browsers facilitate surveillance of users.
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 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.
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.
cough Mozilla cough Slack cough
- What does it replace channels with?
- How does it keep my github account separate from the identity I'm using in chat?
- How does it avoid etiquette in channels?
- Does it let me ignore or mute annoying people?
- Is it possible to easily archive communication for posterity?
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.
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.
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:
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.
https://zulipchat.com/help/restrict-visibility-of-email-addr...
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?
On the other hand, the same usage pattern with other chat apps such as Zulip/Slack/Mattermost and others requires no specialized knowledge.
irccloud.com looks great, except for the fact that you have to pay if you don't want to be kicked off after 2 hours of inactivity.
Yes, people need to eat. Sorry about that.
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.
By some odd twist of fate, WSL is what enables my IRC use. My only 24/7 PC is my HTPC/Plex server, which I also run ZNC on via WSL.
What's the barrier to a SaaS IRC solution like irccloud?
* General instability - I got plenty of notifications that the connection to Freenode had been dropped
* A couple of channels outright banned me for connecting from an IRCCloud host.
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.
When it's intentionally simple to sit in 50 rooms 95% of the time, it's pretty stupid for a disconnection to make you lose out on random chunks, or for you to miss events because you wanted to turn off your computer.
When you intend to be always in a room, and the only roadblock is the inconveniences of modern tech, the logical state of "inside a room" should be decoupled from "has an active TCP connection". So sure you'd miss what people talk about if you left, but a disruption to your TCP connection would not trigger leaving.
Or you're trying to have a normal conversation on a phone connection, or a flaky connection. Or switch to your phone in the middle.
Or you want to link something to a group of friends and you only want to send one message.
You keep justifying it. If it weren't broken, you wouldn't spend all that time justifying it.
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.
The statement I just made sounds like an absurd product but they exist. The weird part is everyone is trying to build it completely in javascript.
Stuff like multi-line posts and markdown are nice, but none of that is worth all the good stuff you lose from irc.
- difficult to monetize
- designed only as a communications medium, not a social medium
- doesn't work like other phone apps
- does not support multimedia or cat ears