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radus

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)

vs. zulip

- enter url in browser

- login with my github credentials

.... that's it

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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.

> Requiring a browser

You realize we’re talking about Mozilla, right?

> requiring social media

They’re explicitly choosing between social media platforms...

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.

Considering the fact that they disqualified several options for not working with Mozilla IAM, I doubt they'll be requiring social media login.

"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?

Based on my infrequent use of IRC, I am not interested in investing in learning the tools - which by the way change quite a bit over a few decades.

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.

> irccloud.com looks great, except for the fact that you have to pay

Yes, people need to eat. Sorry about that.

I admit, I never used zulip -- I don't like using chat from the browser, so I generally stick to things that I can connect to from chat clients.

- 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 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:

https://zulip.readthedocs.io/en/latest/overview/readme.html

> 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.

https://zulipchat.com/help/restrict-visibility-of-email-addr...

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.

You realize they're owned by Microsoft yes?

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.

Skype is still pretty big in the enterprise chat space.

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".

cough Mozilla cough Slack cough

Nothing prevents a nearly identical frontend to IRC.

Would love to see one.

These are all advantages to me.

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