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Comment by klez | Hacker News Reader

Some 10 years ago I was a Mozilla volunteer. I mainly worked on MDN, to the point of becoming a so-called "topic driver" for the glossary. Some of the work I did landed in the citations of a couple of papers about web technology. They flew me a whole week to Vancouver for an event where employees and volunteers worked together in the same room and they even made me (and the other volunteers ) attend a sort-of-corporate meeting where they sort-of fought about something (can't even remember what it was).

I'm telling you this to highlight that volunteers where a huge part of Mozilla.

But on the last day they announced that they were moving the day-to-day conversations from IRC (an open protocol) to Yahoo Messenger (a closed protocol). I felt sort of betrayed in that moment: the company that was all about openness and to which I dedicated countless hours doing unpaid work for and even more years evangelizing for was imposing its volunteers and employees used a proprietary app to coordinate. That didn't sit well with me. At all. I basically lost interest.

This was in 2015. Last I heard MDN introduced ads (I wouldn't know, uBlock is pretty effective) and is not showing contributors to a page on the page itself anymore.

So yeah, the part of OP saying how Mozilla managed to piss volunteers resonated pretty hard with me.

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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.

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.)

UI? Its a protocol.

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

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.

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.

"... 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.

>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.

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.

> 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)

So... Usually it's claimed that one of the advantages of IRC is that it doesn't depend on a single server, so using a single server feels a bit like cheating. Replacing the server-to-server protocol sounds a lot like it's not really IRC protocol any more. The chathistory link says "This specification may change at any time and we do not recommend implementing it in a production environment." right on top. And yes, NickServ and ChanServ exist on some networks and IIRC they were one of the major points in debates over which network is the best and which ones to not touch with a ten feet pole. A hypothetical IRC-based Discord-like service could have it.

> Replacing the server-to-server protocol sounds a lot like it's not really IRC protocol any more

There hasn't been a standard server-to-server protocol in like three decades. Even RFC 2813 only specifies one of the protocols in use at the time (IRCnet's). Each implementation has its own (some of them forked from the original)

> The chathistory link says "This specification may change at any time and we do not recommend implementing it in a production environment."

True. Ratification of the final spec is stuck on some details, unfortunately.

I mean the word "Relay" in Internet Relay Chat was meant to refer to relaying between servers. Larger networks even had some hub servers that didn't allow users to connect at all, and existed to be server interchanges.

IRCv3 missed the boat by years. By 2016, when the working group was formed, IRC was already well past its glory years. Even then, it took til the 2020s before any major network fully adopted it. Because - and I say this as a nerd who held an O line on two of those major networks at one point in my life - a bunch of nerds got hung up on arguing about implementation specs rather than looking at features and functionality organically. Ironically, in the quest to avoid becoming a closed Discord/Slack/what-have-you ecosystem product, they needed a product manager to remind them that what they needed to build in that working group was an evolution to IRCv2, not endless arguments over the format of configuration files for server daemons, for but one example.

> And ~15 years ago we got native support for authentication (https://ircv3.net/specs/extensions/sasl-3.1)

The IRCv3 WG was convened near the end of 2016, so 9 or so.

> IRCv3 missed the boat by years

Because people invested/wasted their energy into building proprietary silos instead.

Like Matrix (the one at https://matrix.org)?

The Working Group on IRCv3 started in 2011. Matrix in 2015.

Does it make Matrix "proprietary" or "silo"? Did the IRCv3 WG have any results in 2015?

> The IRCv3 WG was convened near the end of 2016, so 9 or so.

SASL support in IRC predates IRCv3.

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

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

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

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.

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%.

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

Which feature did you like most?

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

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.

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.

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.

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

>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.

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.

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"...

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

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.

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

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.

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

It's a skill check.

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

Gatekeeping is not always bad.

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.

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

What’s wrong with IRCs UI?

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.

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.

> 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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Ultimately all things are ephemeral.

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.

> 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.

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.

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/

I just run emacs with termux proot debian.

It just works.

> 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

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.

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

*wouldn't

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.

I've been using Firefox for almost 20 years as my default browser. Thank you for your work!

Yes, I'd echo thanks to parent, the OA and all still in the trenches.

Since 2007 in my case which is when I started using Linux at home. The distributions I use come with Firefox as the Web browser (Ubuntu, Debian and latterly Slackware).

I do find myself turning things off more now than I used to.

There were a few years where it was hard to justify using Firefox, it was just so slow compared to Chrome at the time. Nowadays it's fine again.

> I felt sort of betrayed in that moment: the company that was all about openness and to which I dedicated countless hours doing unpaid work for and even more years evangelizing for was imposing its volunteers and employees used a proprietary app to coordinate. That didn't sit well with me. At all. I basically lost interest.

I feel the same way after seeing what they've done with AI chatbots in the sidebar. Five cloud providers. No local AI option. I don't see a reason to use Firefox today and it's been my main browser since it was called Phoenix. I use it only because it's what I've been using for a long time. There's no relationship between Mozilla of today and the group that placed the ad in the NY Times in 2004.

The AI chatbot thing was just the latest happening, but it shows how devoid of meaning that organization has become when you have a technology like AI and nobody even looks to Mozilla to provide leadership on an issue like that. Sure, send all your data to a large cloud outfit, that's the corporate world of Mozilla in 2026. It would actually be shocking to see Mozilla promote AI data privacy. Ironically, the local model I run the most is provided by Google, and it's not the least bit surprising that they're making it possible.

Last I heard the ads were introduced to be less dependent on Google money - they actually cover the costs/salaries of the internal MDN team and thus secure the existence of MDN within the organisation.

Also apparently they are non-tracking ads, and so provide only a small fraction of income that tracking ads would bring, but that would go against the ideals of Mozilla.

So I'm seeing the ads as a net positive. (And am surprised that the people visiting MDN don't use an ad blocker anyhow).

I support MDN by disabling UBO. This is not (much) of a burden: there is no animation, and the advertised products are always technical and possibly of interest. Only complaint is the occasional large light areas, which do not play well with dark mode.

> But on the last day they announced that they were moving the day-to-day conversations from IRC (an open protocol) to Yahoo Messenger (a closed protocol).

IIRC they had a partnership with Yahoo around that time. Interesting to hear it went that deep. Notable: Yahoo Messenger was shutdown in 2018.

Yeah, the part that I was most surprised at from this sort was the 2015; when they said Yahoo Messenger I had been assuming it was like a decade earlier.

Mozilla ended up switching from IRC to Matrix. Maybe they tested Yahoo Messenger at some point but I'm pretty confident there was never any switch to it (I left in 2016).

Libtewolf is hopefully there. Ublock origin is pre-installed

Librewolf, like all the forks, free-rides on the upstream work of paid Mozilla staff in order to be secure. It's a band-aid, not a solution.

But perhaps the existence of the forks tells the Mozilla management something?

Band-aids like this have existed for many years, plenty of time for Mozilla to listen. And in all that time, they never had the idea to make the band-aids redundant.

WebKit (as used by Safari) was a fork of kHTML (written by the KDE team). And Google forked WebKit. Now we have dozens of Blink forks including Microsoft’s own browser: Blink.

I think it’s pretty safe to assume that forking the code is a low incentive for change

I'm using Waterfox on desktop at the moment, but I really wish Mozilla would get their act back together and make all the forks unnecessary. I'm not saying they need to die: I only hope one day they aren't needed anymore.

Also, I'm afraid that's not sustainable in the long run. How long before Mozilla makes a change so big to introduce some nasty feature that it becomes impossible for forks to stay up to date with upstream? Do they really have the resources necessary to maintain an actual fork and not just a customized version?

Of all the forks I think Waterfox is the one with the strongest case that they can continue on even if they have to fully decouple from Mozilla Firefox.

Do Mozilla really still need volunteers in this day and age? Tbh even in 2015. They are established enough to not need to exploit goodwill.

As the OP says, the point is not that they needed unpaid work, if that's what you mean. The point is that volunteers shaped what Firefox, MDN, Thunderbird, Mozilla itself were.

This is why I refuse to donate to Mozilla, despite only paying for open source products, believing that 100% open source should be mandatory in every democractic government, Firefox and Thunderbird being my daily drivers for many years, and donating several hundred dollars every year on FLOSS projects.

Many of Mozillas product decisions prove that the Mozilla corporation is not aligned with the interests of FLOSS. I can't donate to Firefox or Thunderbird specifically, neither at the feature or product level. There is no way to ensure my donations go to enriching these products, instead of profit generating features that benefit the Mozilla corporation. One example is the container VPN proxy, which only allows you to implement a VPN per container if you pay for Mozilla VPN. This is a feature that should be universally available to all users, and all VPN providers, but they locked it behind a paywall for profit.

The is the same (logically analogous) reason I no longer use Reddit after the API changes in 2023, after using the platform for 15 years, and has become common among newer FOSS startups like OpenAI, minio, and bambu; using the philosophy of open source &/or unpaid community labor to achieve a certain level of trust, growth, users, funding, and market saturation, only to screw them all over in the name of profit. This for-profit parasitic greed and corruption in FLOSS is the antithesis to the philosophy of the FLOSS community.

In a sane world this type of community exploitation would be criminally prosecutable. Reddit decision makers would see the inside of a prison cell; the moderators and commenters – as well as the developers who built the 3rd party apps that grew the company from nothing for over a decade – would be given shares/ownership, and paid from the company for their time and labor; same for every other scammer that exploits these "bait-and-switch" deceptive tactics to succeed in businesss. Unfortunately for us all, we live in a world ruled by parasites.

Not to mention scandals like this...

"In 2018 she received a total of $2,458,350 in compensation from Mozilla, which represents a 400% payrise since 2008. On the same period, Firefox marketshare was down 85%. When asked about her salary she stated "I learned that my pay was about an 80% discount to market. Meaning that competitive roles elsewhere were paying about 5 times as much. That's too big a discount to ask people and their families to commit to."

In 2020, after returning to the position of CEO, her salary had risen to over $3 million. In the same year the Mozilla Corporation laid off approximately 250 employees due to shrinking revenues. Baker blamed this on the Coronavirus pandemic"

Failed their way to the top.

Imagine getting paid millions to kill a company, who needs enemies/competitors when you have “leaders” like that?

I remember Nokia and their CEO from Microsoft.

Incidentally, I have recently come across some Mozilla job postings with salary ranges I would consider to be at a considerable "discount to market". For example, here is a senior role at 59 000 euro per year: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/mozilla/jobs/7843229

That salary would be OK for an actual charity where you work there because you believe in the mission. The problem is that Mozilla is confused and thinks they should be a for profit corporation with a bloated executive.

> I can't donate to Firefox or Thunderbird specifically, neither at the feature or product level. There is no way to ensure my donations go to enriching these products, instead of profit generating features that benefit the Mozilla corporation.

Thunderbird is no longer owned by the Mozilla corporation, so now you can donate directly to them.

How do we get this to happen with Firefox?

From their about page: "Thunderbird operates in a separate, for-profit subsidiary of the not-for-profit Mozilla.org. This structure gives us the flexibility to offer optional paid services to sustain Thunderbird’s development far into the future."[0]

The whole "Thunderbird Council" approach sounds good in theory, but I don't see any assurances that my donation would not fund for-profit service or feature development that could be locked behind a paywall, or that the whole product can't be sold off or transitioned to some closed offering at any time.

The core problem is not Mozilla specific. It's that our legal and political systems are now corrupted and offer no safeguards to prevent this type of fraud from taking place. Tech companies from the very beginning have been given carte blanche to lie, cheat, and pivot any way they please; to betray user/customer investment and change their entire value proposition on a dime. That was the growth and funding model of tech startups; build users by offering product for free (at a loss) until they become dependent on your product, then bait-and-switch. When companies are consistently rewarded for this, and there are no meaningful financial or legal reprecussions, I see no reason to believe that this will change any time in the near future.

[0] https://www.thunderbird.net/ach/about/

Can you explain what crime and exploitation you feel Mozilla is committing that should make them "criminally prosecutable" ?

I wouldn't say Mozilla has reached this stage of fraud or exploitation directly yet (to my knowledge), but the decisions they make consistently indicate they are on the path to that level of corruption and enshittification, and history has taught us there are zero guardrails in place to effectively prevent it.

In the Reddit example I gave, the crime is essentially a form of "bait-and-switch", false advertising, or charity fraud; scamming volunteers into donating their time and labor to build a product under deceptive and misleading pretences then, once achieving a certain threshold of success, changing the value proposition to a state where they would not have donated their time or labor to begin with. The same applies to an open source product which switches to closed-source. When you change the value proposition on volunteers like that, you have transformed their time and labor from a donation to unpaid wages, as they literally built your product and company for free, and are the reason your product exists at all. If you do not pay them out or backpay them in some way, or you can't, you are no different to any other white collar ciminal scammer, exploiting charity for profit.

Allowing this type of fraud to succeed, and become an accepted business practice, is socially corrosive and destructive. It's a strong indicator of corruption to the rule of law in the legal, political, and economic system.

They wouldn't be "exploiting" that goodwill if they were still following their original mission instead of larping as a silicon valley startup / tech giant (whichever is more convenient).

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