Comment by Wxc2jjJmST9XWWL | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Wxc2jjJmST9XWWL | Hacker News Reader

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Wxc2jjJmST9XWWL

Not sure about people pushing matrix as an alternative. I tried out Matrix several weeks ago and hated everything about it. From the account creation process, shiny modern UI, channel finding options, activity level (since you are basically constantly logged in, channels with even quite a lot of users have next to no activity for days at a time), kind of activity (and most of it was really poor activity, like someone sharing a link, someone giving a thumbs up, and channel dead for another day) and I'm not sure I fancy large number of mobile phone users on any form of IRC replacement.

It's complicated/convoluted enough to be for a tech crowd, and modern/shiny/complex enough to be a disgusting mess to someone coming from IRC. At least for me. Given more users and activity I still wouldn't like it.

I might be wrong, but maybe this whole mess with Freenode won't be a big deal in the end. IRC never held a particular promise of "privacy" for me, many channels are logged by some or most of their users, or even publicly online via some sites. As long as Freenode continues to work (in a technical sense), and mass migration of channels doesn't ensue, I see no point in stopping my use of it.

I desperately hope matrix (or discord, which I haven't yet tried, but don't have much hope for either) won't be the answer. Maybe a switch to OFTC is an option for some channels.

We will see.

> IRC never held a particular promise of "privacy"

True, like almost all nice network protocols and implementations in heavy use of the 90s (NNTP/Usenet, Mail, IRC amongst others) no one did foresee the privacy/spam wave that hit us when the internet became famous. I remember in Europes most used IRC network at that time - IRCnet - it was mandatory to run an identd server that would tell the user of the logged in system to the IRC server, and it would display it to all users (along with the IP address of course). Imagine such requirements today...

With Matrix there is also a lack of good lightweight clients and servers. The official client uses Electron. It will never be an alternative to the IRC with this attitude. There is a Weechat plugin but it's in Python...

There's a trend of "new, revolutionary Internet protocols" having reference (and, chronically, sole actually-useful, but with other ones always at various uselessly-incomplete stages of development so they can point to those and say "see, we're catching on!") implementations in languages that integrate like shit, crippling their adoption, rather than writing, say, a C library. IPFS is another one (and I like Go).

I setup a server a few months ago to get familiar with matrix. It wasn’t very lightweight either. I have since shut it down because I felt it was too resource intensive for the small amount of users that were using it.

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I think it's the other way around - bridge your slack/discord/whatever into matrix, and then bridge the matrix results into IRC channels. That way everything stays put in your IRC client and you don't have to have a webpage open just to chat.

The weechat plugin is being rewritten in Rust right now.

https://github.com/poljar/weechat-matrix-rs

My hope is that bc it's an open protocol that it'll be simple to create local bridges to services and then hook those into an irc client. I agree with the parent that Discord and Slack are absolute messes and all I want is text on a screen with hyperlinks for chat.

To that end, I tried to set a personal server up on a local box that I have running, but it didn't take. I'm surprised there aren't any good tutorials sitting around to create a local instance/bridge.

weechat-matrix seems to be the lightweight client of choice.

weechat-matrix unfortunately cannot coexist with wee-slack if running on top of Python 3.9 (https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack/issues/812, https://github.com/poljar/weechat-matrix/issues/248), so one has to choose between Slack and Matrix. It's just a bug that will eventually get fixed, but it does make things unnecessarily complicated right now.

With this issue and Matrix being several times slower than any other instant messenger I've ever seen, I'd really prefer communities didn't move to Matrix. :-/

Your UI complaints apply only to Element (the flagship client) rather than to Matrix the protocol. As others have said, there are other, less-flashy clients available (and others under development).

Some examples:

Quaternion: https://github.com/quotient-im/Quaternion

Hydrogen: https://github.com/vector-im/hydrogen-web

Nheko: https://github.com/Nheko-Reborn/nheko

with UI I meant user interface, but also to some degree feature set. I know they want to have it modern, but the charm of IRC to me is that it's a simple stream of text messages. No 'answering' to specific messages, URL previews, reacting to messages with smileys and a thumbs up, et cetera. Also quite a few of the clients listed on the official website are inactive or as of now "incomplete" (aren't yet full featured), so in the end I went with the official client (as it seemed the best bet to just try it).

A simpler client would do away with some of it, but some of my complaints have to do with the features the protocol implements rather than the client.

>mass migration of channels

...has been happening for the past several hours. It's bedlam...

I think many are registering nicks and channels "just in case", I haven't seen true "migration" as of yet, meaning large public channels forcibly shutting down on Freenode.

Let the storm calm down and then we will see where we're at. The whole conflict seems to be opinionated ops clashing over governance rather than any serious privacy related issues imo. It still might bring Freenode down in the end, who knows, but I don't think panic is warranted.

From what I'm seeing, everything I'm active in is moving (including my own channels) -- the old ones aren't being shut down yet, mostly because people want to give libera.chat a few days first to make sure it doesn't suffer major hiccups. But the new ones are going to be the permanent ones, I expect. (That's certainly our plan.)

Yep, 12 hours later it certainly looks that way. One channel I know migrated to OFTC, others seem to have parallel channels on Libera or are thinking about it, and might make the switch. Am registered on Libera just in case, and connected. Will go wherever my channels will end up on, even if they end up on different networks, not a problem. It's that simple.

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