Mozilla is giving up on their IRC server

http://exple.tive.org/blarg/2019/04/26/synchronous-text/?s

by ori_b • 7 years ago

355 360 7 years ago

exple.tive.org

Dylan168072• 7 years ago

I don't really understand how switching to a different system is going to do anything about levels of abuse and harassment.

I'm sure it will be easier to use, at least. IRCv3 was trying to solve some of this but I haven't heard a peep in years.

hopscotch• 7 years ago

It can put registration and private messages, etc, under their control.

They they can raise their anti-spam bar arbitrarily high to block alt registrations and enforce bans. Sight of all PMs could be used for anti-harrassment too, but don't know if they'd do that.

newscracker2• 7 years ago

The post says the new system will enforce authentication, and hints at dealing with bots and spam accounts. But it’s not going to be easy without inconveniencing users to some extent (or a greater extent than now).

Dylan168072• 7 years ago

IRC could enforce authentication without much effort. You could use email registration, etc.

Maybe there's some black magic in other services to do better anti-bot/spam than that?

ve55• 7 years ago

Spam can be difficult to stop on IRC compared to modern webchat applications. From lacking things like javascript, captchas, cdns, and so on, to having a distributed network architecture and fewer ways to verify users.

josteink9• 7 years ago

From lacking things like javascript, captchas, cdns, and so on

In what way are any of these technologies relevant for a chat platform?

joepie91_• 7 years ago

having a distributed network architecture and fewer ways to verify users

You have exactly as many ways to verify users as are implemented in your NickServ, and pretty much every snazzy web-y proprietary chat platform has a "distributed network architecture" as well.

IRC has plenty of real problems, but your particular list of arguments seems completely irrelevant.

Samis2001• 7 years ago

....JavaScript?

nullc• 7 years ago

Accessibility, especially from bandwidth efficient light weight software or text only devices is at odds with blocking automated spam.

If you make it much harder for anyone with unusual software to connect, you make it harder for spam (and also a lot more legitimate users than spammers, but those don't count because they don't cause issues for operators).

ori_b4• 7 years ago

Registration solves this rather well. Especially when paired with requiring an email account to get a registration password.

josteink9• 7 years ago

I don't really understand how switching to a different system is going to do anything about levels of abuse and harassment.

It’s just another failed attempt at trying to find a technical solution to a social problem.

IfOnlyYouKnew4• 7 years ago

Do you have any social solutions to the “social problem”?

orev2• 7 years ago

As an IRC user since the early 90s (EFnet and freenode), I can say that it really feels like it is dying. There are still a few popular channels with helpful people, but the vast majority of channels are silent with no one but afk users logged into a seemingly forgotten ‘screen’ session. And of the channels that do have real people, those people often seem to be there for no reason other than to tell people to RTFM, play topic nazi to such an extreme level that apparently nothing is actually on topic, or just generally berate people for having the gall to say something in the channel. Ops are extremely touchy and seem willing to immediately kick people rather than have actual discussions about things that challenge any of their beliefs about a particular topic or how the channel is being run (any such challenge, no matter how genially presented, is perceived as combative and results in a swift kick).

The heyday has past. People moved on, had families and other responsibilities, with no time to sit idly chatting anymore. The newer generations are on various messenger apps, Slack, or Discord.

Though The Lounge looks pretty nice.

travbrack• 7 years ago

those people often seem to be there for no reason other than to tell people to RTFM, play topic nazi to such an extreme level that apparently nothing is actually on topic, or just generally berate people for having the gall to say something in the channel. Ops are extremely touchy and seem willing to immediately kick people rather than have actual discussions about things that challenge any of their beliefs about a particular topic or how the channel is being run (any such challenge, no matter how genially presented, is perceived as combative and results in a swift kick).

Funny, it's been my experience that IRC culture was always like this, especially in the late 90s when I started using it.

bamboozled• 7 years ago

Came to say the same, I can hardly remember participating in a constructive conversation over IRC within the last 10-15 years. Not saying they don’t happen, just my experience has been the same as the parent posters.

orev2• 7 years ago

There’s always been some of these elements, and RTFM has always been a prerequisite, however there were also other people who were not as strict so it was diluted. With the reasonable people gone, the harshness is now more obvious and keeps reasonable people away.

progval4• 7 years ago

And of the channels that do have real people, those people often seem to be there for no reason other than to tell people to RTFM,

It depends a lot on the community. I started using IRC in ~2010 as a teenager and I don't remember ever seeing someone being told to RTFM (except ironically).

play topic nazi to such an extreme level that apparently nothing is actually on topic,

I've seen some topic nazis, but in most channels, discussions can go very far away from the topic.

or just generally berate people for having the gall to say something in the channel.

what?

Ops are extremely touchy and seem willing to immediately kick people rather than

On most channels I'm in (mostly tech channels, freenode/oftc/mozilla), I don't even know who the ops are.

DCoder• 7 years ago

Looking through Mozilla's IRC quote collection [0] also shows very little recent activity. Not sure if that's because their channels are less active nowadays, or just because fewer people are submitting new material.

[0] http://quotes.burntelectrons.org/top

Razengan2• 7 years ago

play topic nazi to such an extreme level that apparently nothing is actually on topic

This is the same state of many subreddits on Reddit. Moderation should be limited to spam and blatant attacks on users. Let the voting system handle all the rest.

eterm• 7 years ago

And then everything ends up like the 'defaults', with memes and easy to vote up pictures utterly dominating.

Despite scrapping the office "defaults" list, there is still clearly a rotation that get set up as default and they are by and large garbage.

stevewillows• 7 years ago

TheLounge is very very limited. I will always prefer weechat to everything, but if you want a webUI, glowing bear is alright.

Like you, I've been on IRC since the 90s. I find that support channels are great if your question to the group shows that you've actually exhausted your options and need help beyond what you can think to search. Often the documentation is perfect, and if there is something someone doesn't understand, asking specifically about that typically yields a positive response (at least in my experience.)

One issue I've always had with IRC is the Founder choosing bad ops for their channel -- often based more on time-spent in the channel than actual ability to resolve issues with troublesome users.

I've always op'd a few channels and have chosen some of these people -- the type that view the cinnamon bun / status as something special or powerful, rather than the janitorial job that it is. This really sets the tone for the channel and can destroy it in the long run. Bulk the on-topic nazis in here. It's toxic behavior and should be addressed by the ops.

Anyway, long story short -- IRC isn't like it was in the 90s-00s, but its still going strong. The support channels are not a good litmus test for IRC as a whole.

_Marak_• 7 years ago

We started using a hosted version of The Lounge for providing web based IRC and it's been working pretty well so far.

newscracker2• 7 years ago

We are not rolling our own. Whether we host it ourselves or pay for a service, we’re getting something off the shelf that best meets our needs.

I sincerely hope it’s not Slack and some restricted search archive platform. Moving away from IRC to a newer system could provide long lived archives to users. But if privacy is very important, then a “no archive” option would be fine (similar to IRC). Anything in between, like “search the last 10000 messages”, would be a disaster for active channels with many members.

It needs to be accessible to the greater Mozilla community. We are evaluating products, not protocols.

I’m sure whichever the chosen product is, it’s going to be based on HTTP to allow “schools, colleges or corporate networks” to be able to connect. It seems weird that we’re dumping everything on to HTTPS, and one day in the future there would be a world where only port 443 would be open and all the mess, and the holiness, would flow through it, and it alone. In the name of securing networks, we seem to have gone to an illusion of security by moving to one port for almost all communications.

We aren’t picking an outlier; whatever stack we choose needs to be a modern, proven service that seems to have a solid provenance and a good life ahead of it. We’re not moving from one idiosyncratic outlier stack to another idiosyncratic outlier stack.

I still hope it doesn’t come down to Slack or Hipchat or some commercial offering. Maybe host a Matrix instance? Or Mattermost? Or Rocket.chat?

edoceo3• 7 years ago

We put our FOSS community on Mattermost - it's awesome!

garaetjjte• 7 years ago

It lacks administration features - kicking, banning, etc.

negativegate• 7 years ago

Hipchat is dead so you don't need to worry about that.

wahern• 7 years ago

Matrix shows how thorough the switch to HTTP has become. Like with DoH, what makes Matrix most attractive is the ability to implement solutions using pre-existing web application stacks, like Node.js. It's a sort of path dependency where the easiest way to implement a simple solution starts with a very complex, mostly superfluous foundation.

The fact that port 80 and 443 are less likely to be blocked is a distant, secondary factor. Frankly, I've never been on a network that blocked other outbound ports. And I've definitely never seen a network where hosted services could only ever receive traffic on port 80 or 443. Rather, I think it's more (if not entirely) a matter of people justifying the use of web stacks to implement services which cry out for simpler solutions.

bigiain• 7 years ago

On anecdata point.

I have several (all government) clients who cannot access port 8080 from their office network. We now have a bunch of aELB rules that forward a specific path prefix to port 8080 internally. I have not yet been accused of intentionally circumventing their firewall. But I live in hope...

djrenren• 7 years ago

Don't forget that if it works over http(s), it's a lot easier to build a web interface for, and that's a big win for ease of use!

type0• 7 years ago

You could run IRC server on whichever port you like and many servers do, the biggest benefit of matrix is that it's decentralized and easy for non technical people to engage in, no need for znc bouncers and things like that.

bartread• 7 years ago

Frankly, I've never been on a network that blocked other outbound ports.

That's just down to who you've worked for. I've worked for two companies, both well-known brands, both operating in the consumer space (nothing secret/shady), where most outbound ports were blocked.

In one case it certainly was possible to get them unblocked for access to specific hosts or endpoints but you'd have to go through an approval process that took about a week. I never had a request refused but it certainly could slow progress, although I got into the habit of trying to get all of us to anticipate what we might need and front-load such requests.

zamadatix• 7 years ago

Everything being encapsulated in HTTPS is the result of waiting so long to be secure by default that the base network abstractions had ossified too much to realistically change.

TLS would have made sense as well but if you're already at that point you might as well bump up yet another abstraction layer because the programming ecosystem is bigger and it frees you from being tied to one security abstraction forever e.g. now you can use QUIC.

meribold• 7 years ago

I had a question for the Firefox UX team a few months ago and went to #ux on irc.mozilla.org. The channel was completely dead. Someone that wasn't from the UX team was still there and told me they all moved to a private Slack channel.

stupidthrottle• 7 years ago

Someone that wasn't from the UX team was still there and told me they all moved to a private Slack channel.

So private channel and closed platform.

Excellent discoverability and excellent UX, eh?

superconformist• 7 years ago

Mozilla's talk:

Our mission is to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all. An Internet that truly puts people first, where individuals can shape their own experience and are empowered, safe and independent.

Mozilla's walk:

Fuck it, spin up a Slack room.

kibwen• 7 years ago

You could levy this complaint if they actually end up picking Slack (or something similarly proprietary like Discord), but that seems quite premature. I'll miss moznet as much as anyone, but there's no denying that IRC has been left in the dust this past decade or more.

ori_b4• 7 years ago

It seems that by left in the dust, you mean "remained lightweight and simple". The popular alternatives so far don't seem to have any clients I find pleasant to use, and are rather strongly discouraging anyone from writing third party clients.

progval4• 7 years ago

Rust is moving to Discord https://blog.rust-lang.org/2019/04/26/Mozilla-IRC-Sunset-and...

josteink9• 7 years ago

Yeah I had the same feeling when reading the following bullet point.

We are evaluating products, not protocols.

What a disappointment.

okasaki• 7 years ago

Users seem to have given up on Mozilla a long time ago.

axaxs3• 7 years ago

You're not wrong, even if it is an unpopular opinion. It's really sad to me as an early internet user. Their side projects have all seemed to fail, and Firefox has never been further behind. I don't see them as being solvent in as little as a few years.

tannhaeuser2• 7 years ago

That's too harsh IMO. FF is working absolutely great on my desktops, phone, and as dev browser. And Rust seems extremely popular with a vocal minority on HN at least. But yeah, I'm concerned as well - Mozilla should focus on producing a good browser rather than pouring energy into side projects such as Rust and especially WASM which do not contribute to that goal.

nwmcsween4• 7 years ago

Irc unauthenticated? IRC has supported auth services since what 1995? There are also plenty of web irc gateways so I don't understand the reasoning to move to something more complicated for little gain, want history? Run ii in a tmux session and tail to a file, want to post images with a fancy GUI taking a gig or so of ram use slack.

incompatible• 7 years ago

They apparently want anyone to be able to easily connect and talk to developers, except for trolls, scammers, spammers etc. I'm not really sure what kind of authentication provides that, but they seem to have something in mind.

maximilianburke• 7 years ago

Perhaps something like being able to browse and search without registering, but if you want to chat you need to create an account?

nwmcsween4• 7 years ago

OK easy peasy have the auth services send a captcha that has to be entered to register.

neiman3• 7 years ago

I'm not really sure what kind of authentication provides that

KYC combined with sms confirmation, CC details and a Google account. All "normal" people have and share that, what's wrong with you?! weirdo.

Welcome to the web of 2019:-)

petre• 7 years ago

What are they replacing it with?

Sphax• 7 years ago

It's right there in the blog post:

Very soon, I’ll be setting up the evaluation process for a couple of candidate replacement stacks

They don't know yet.

syntheticnature• 7 years ago

Reading the comments, it amuses me that those who support Linux fail to realize that IRC is the microkernel (i.e. Minix) approach in messaging. Want authentication/security/archiving/etc.? Layer things of variable quality on top, and hope there aren't any holes on them!

doomrobo• 7 years ago

I just want to say, for all it's worth, that the #rust channel on MozNet has been by far one of the most healthy and productive IRC channels that I've participated in. The channel is always active, and there is a constant presence of extremely qualified and patient folks in the chat (and often Rust core members as well). I hope that whatever they switch to will be able to foster a community as open and welcoming as their IRC.

floatingatoll2• 7 years ago

Rust’s post about this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19761836

Perceptes• 7 years ago

Please, Mozilla, choose Matrix. https://www.ruma.io/docs/matrix/why/

TheSwordsman16• 7 years ago

As an admin helping out the Go Slack workspace, which is about to cross 39,500 registered users, they would be ill-advised to go with Slack if moderation is one of their goals. Full disclosure: our Workspakce does have some sort of agreement with Slack, so our space isn't a free space (we have full history), and even then we aren't able to get them to provide support around moderation of users.

There is no mechanism to ignore a user, mute a user, or temporarily suspend a user if they need a timeout. The first two are completely impossible, while the latter today is manual / mostly possible using undocumented APIs and mechanizing of HTTP requests. Users reporting spam is done by them sending a message to an admin, or in the admin channel, and requires someone to manually intervene and moderate the message. So we effectively need to aim for follow-the-sun moderator coverage, which is a bit painful.

In terms of usability and accessibility, some of the things Slack does (e.g., threads) are not super-inclusive or accessible to users who use screen readers. Today, based on feedback I've gotten, IRC is still superior for users who rely on screen readers due to some form of visual impairment.

Whichever product they go with, it'd be nice if they provided an authenticated IRC gateway which would allow this class of user to have a better experience using the platform as they could use one of the text-based IRC clients that has served them well.

For everyone who is saying they hope Slack isn't the choice, I'm fairly confident with these issues today they won't pursue Slack. If anyone from Mozilla, or any other org, would like to discuss some of the challenges we've had using Slack as an open community I'm more than happy to schedule time. I'd like to help you provide the best experience and community for your users.

pcwalton• 7 years ago

That experience report is valuable, thanks. I'll bring that up internally.

carbocation• 7 years ago

On the user side of things, I work at a large academic institution where I occasionally get unwanted contact (overly invasive, won’t stop messaging even when asked).

I totally get that at an office workspace, the solution here is HR. But this is a loosely federated place, and even in my own opinion the conduct doesn’t merit such a response. I just want to be able to mute people.

carterschonwald2• 7 years ago

I recently evaluated a number of options. I was surprised to realize discord has by far the best moderation / permission / access conctrol management. Plus unlimited webhook and boy support.

Granted, it has to handle gamer communities.

BenTheElder2• 7 years ago

Kubernetes also had (has?) pretty major issues with these, but a community member built some tools using what APIs they do have to make the moderation aspects easier at least: https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/slack-infra

E.G. Reporting: https://twitter.com/KatharineBerry/status/110594147072323584...

Bulk-Deletion / banning: https://twitter.com/KatharineBerry/status/111310119103288934...

They've been really helpful, but Slack still seems _far_ from ideal for this.

TheSwordsman16• 7 years ago

As I understand it, to support things like timed bans your only options are undocumented APIs which can change at any point in time. So while some things are documented and possible, not everything is and that's not the level of support we need.

iforgotpassword3• 7 years ago

So it sounds like regarding moderation, slack is at best on par with irc. And while on orc you can pretty much script and automate anything you want to facilitate the moderation job, with slack you're at the mercy of having some documented or undocumented api call available? One step forwards and two steps back...

TheSwordsman16• 7 years ago

Well, in general you can also ignore people on IRC, you can ban people from channels, and some IRCds support restricted DM permissions which require a user to share channels with you and be _validated_ to message you.

We don't have these sorts of controls in Slack because it's built to support companies with Human Resource departments. Communities like ours don't give the Slack shareholders value.

So in some ways it's worse than IRC.

IfOnlyYouKnew4• 7 years ago

And yet, slack has seen exponential growth, while IRC was always available but rarely used.

We have seen this before and we will see it again. If OSS wants to be widely used, it needs to take UI seriously, and not dismiss it as frivolous “eye-candy”.

It’s ok so say ‘no, we are fine within our niche’. But then you don’t get to arrogantly explain to them how they are “taking one step forward, two back” by not embarking on the joyful journey of fiddling with config files.

lewisl9029• 7 years ago

I used to think Discord was the clear winner in this space, providing good moderation tools (being a platform designed originally for gaming), with better scaling characteristics than Slack and having unlimited history, but the Apollo team's recent post on why they chose Spectrum changed my mind: https://blog.apollographql.com/goodbye-slack-hello-spectrum-...

TL;DR: being able to have posts & chats indexed by search engines and allowing users to read posts without signing in is a killer feature for open-source communities. Plus the product itself is open-source.

jlongster• 7 years ago

Spectrum is good for lightweight communities but it is nowhere near the capabilities of something like Discord, which something as big as the Mozilla project needs.

TheSwordsman16• 7 years ago

I use Discord all the time; it's a mess. Its permissions model is complex and hard to reason about, obvious UX decisions in Slack that make for a good experience aren't present in Discord. Like being able to click on someone's name and go to the dedicated DM view for them.

Discord is the one thing I dislike more than Slack, even if their backend tech is fucking stellar.

snazz7• 7 years ago

I feel like search engine indexing is a feature that should be covered by mailing lists or a forum, not chat. I don’t think that finding a years-old chat log provides nearly as much useful context for solving an issue as longer-form communication.

IshKebab• 7 years ago

It's not hugely surprising that Slack lacks spam/moderation tools. Their target market is companies, where "I'm your boss, please stop doing that" is usually sufficient!

gtirloni3• 7 years ago

Agreed. It's surprising open source projects picked it.

xfitm3• 7 years ago

Slack is trash and hostile to users, but unfortunately, it has significant momentum. I wouldn’t be surprised if Mozilla switches over.

sumedh3• 7 years ago

Slack is trash and hostile to users

It seems better than Skype and Hipchat and whatever Google's latest chat app.

morganvachon• 7 years ago

As others have said, Slack is fine for businesses that can afford its extra features, and it's "good enough" for a small business with less need for search history and more of a "run anywhere" instant communication platform.

But I agree with the sentiment that it's not a good fit for open source projects. For that, an open source Slack-like tool like Mattermost or similar would be a better idea.

erikpukinskis• 7 years ago

In my mind, Mozilla is an open source company though. One of the preeminent open source companies. Didn't they create Bugzilla?

It would be really strange to me if they used a closed source community messaging platform.

m-p-3• 7 years ago

It could be worse and they'd switch to Discord.

vertis• 7 years ago

I can't fathom open source projects and communities using slack as a communication platform. I like slack, it's a great product for business, where you can pay $X for each user in your org.

However, OS and non-profit communities quickly run into the history issue. There is no way that some of the communities I'm part of on Slack could pay for all the users. For example, the "Maker's Kitchen" slack has 1500-2000 people.

How much information and knowledge is lost and questions re-asked?

TheSwordsman16• 7 years ago

As I mentioned, in our community we have some deal with Slack so that we are paid (up to a point) and have full message history retention. Search can also go through all of those messages too. This is extremely valuable, and is a selling point for Slack if you can somehow get on to a paid plan without breaking the bank.

But in my experience, many don't use the search anyhow. :P

I'll admit, I don't know the full details of the relationship we have with Slack as I'm just an admin and not an owner. It is paid for by someone, but I don't know how much we're paying per head or of it's a flat rate.

BurritoAlPastor• 7 years ago

I thought IRC didn’t have message history either? I’m not saying Slack is good for open-source communities, but it seems like “not having history” would be the status quo.

hanniabu2• 7 years ago

Have you tried Discord? I seems like it would meet all these desires. We switched to it a year ago and it's been great.

_m7bj• 7 years ago

Discord has aggressive security measures. I can't use it, because it won't let me access it from my desktop unless I give it a phone number. I guess it's decided I look like a headless browser or something.

Certainly I'd say discord is a poor fit for an organization allegedly dedicated to web freedoms, such as mozilla.

I'd suggest rocketchat or mattermost, personally. Well, to be honest I'd suggest IRC, but if that must be abandoned, rocketchat is pretty good.

TheSwordsman16• 7 years ago

I have another thread I commented on where I discuss Discord very briefly. Most times I used Discord I'm hella annoyed, Slack just has me slightly frustrated sometimes. To each their own, but the Discord UX doesn't do it for me.

That said, watching them migrate voice servers seamlessly between regions is fucking impressive, though. Kudos to them on that.

consto• 7 years ago

Isn't Discord burning through VC money right now to aquire users?

nonbirithm• 7 years ago

Discord works okay. For me, the only issue is not being allowed to use third party clients without being banned. I was hoping I could integrate it with tmux or Emacs like I was used to doing with IRC.

auscompgeek• 7 years ago

Discord has terrible accessibility - its themes are low contrast.

The GFW is also a concern here.

varjag2• 7 years ago

The change is generational. New kids grew up on Discord and Slack, it's what they are going to use.

seancorfield2• 7 years ago

I'm an admin on the Clojurians Slack workspace where we have about 15,000 members, of whom about 1,400 or so are considered "active" for Slack's purpose -- which is still an unaffordable amount for an open source community. Over the years since we created the Clojurians Slack, we've tried to create communities on a broad range of alternatives. None of the others have gained traction, unfortunately. I think Zulip is probably the best alternative and it offers a free option for open source projects with full history/searching, and that's probably been the most successful alternative so far. Clojure's community on IRC was in the hundreds. Slack very quickly became thousands. It surprised us. The fact that none of the alternatives have grown has also surprised us but people go where people go.

tjpnz• 7 years ago

There is no mechanism to ignore a user, mute a user, or temporarily suspend a user if they need a timeout. The first two are completely impossible, while the latter today is manual / mostly possible using undocumented APIs and mechanizing of HTTP requests.

I've been using IRC for almost two decades now and I can't help but feel this is a good thing. A lot of big IRC channels have become very good at alienating members of their communities through excessive moderation - if you don't believe me spend some time on Freenode on any given day. Having to go through a few additional steps seems like it could benefit many communities.

unicornporn• 7 years ago

Only Matrix would make sense.

Here's something worth paying for if they don't want to selfhost:

https://www.modular.im/

https://medium.com/@RiotChat/introducing-modular-awesome-hos...

deanc2• 7 years ago

I don't understand what moving to slack is going to give them, which is inevitably where this is going to lead (or a similar web-based chat).

IRC has the same tools for banning users as Slack, if not more powerful as you can ban ranges etc. You can require people to register with an email in the same way slack does, although I'd argue being anonymous and being able to talk without an account is one of IRC's best features.

I can't say I ever went on Mozilla's IRC, but I have spent almost 20 years on other IRCd's. Seeing it be replaced, just to be able to use rich messaging breaks my heart.

josteink9• 7 years ago

You can require people to register with an email in the same way slack does, although I'd argue being anonymous and being able to talk without an account is one of IRC's best features.

As someone from the “old” and free internet I agree, but there seems to be a new generation of users who seem to have the ability to perform censorship as a core requirement (although they prefer to call it “governance”).

It’s sad to see the direction they are pulling the internet, one of the few truly free platforms which has ever been created.

laughinghan4• 7 years ago

How would you have them deal with harassment and spam, or do you not believe it is as much of a problem for them as they claim it is?

ignoranceprior• 7 years ago

IRC isn't really anonymous or private. Your IP address is visible to everyone by default.

deanc2• 7 years ago

Which is incredibly easily to get around with a bouncer and shell company in eastern europe or pretty much anywhere. We're not talking state-actor anonymous, but anonymous enough.

neilv• 7 years ago

Freenode works for other open source projects. Mozilla might even be able to direct a little resources and governance influence their way. (If Freenode didn't work out, it was worth a try, and an easy move from irc.mozilla.org.)

j_koreth• 7 years ago

Mozilla has some channels on freenode

Svoka• 7 years ago

Rust has unofficial channel on Freenode, and it's mentioned in Rust team announcement for moving away from IRC: https://blog.rust-lang.org/2019/04/26/Mozilla-IRC-Sunset-and...

I am sure other products/teams have channels there too, they just won't be official go-to place to chat.

mschuster91• 7 years ago

As you are considering multiple alternative stacks, may I suggest Mattermost? Runs decently across all major client OSes, supports Slack-style hooks and thanks to multi-team capability can also be used to further the development of other OSS projects.

josteink9• 7 years ago

We are evaluating products, not protocols.

So not using the open internet protocols Mozilla claims to champion.

What a disappointment.

kentrado• 7 years ago

It is! This is one of the things where they can be principled instead of pragmatic because their browser share will not diminish due to this decision (unlike the inclusion of DRM).

neiman3• 7 years ago

I use IRC quite heavily. Especially for cryptocurrencies and local hackerspace channels. They're all very active.

But I agree with the post, "irc is not fine", and never was fine if you want to communicate with "regular" people.

It doesn't have spam filters, easy GUI or easy registration process. You could build all of those on top of IRC, and I'm sure that some people did, but there's no "standard" and most people just can't be bothered.

As the post said, often "IRC traffic isn’t allowed past institutional firewalls".

Besides, when was there a time in the history of the internet that irc was used to communicate with laypersons? If that's Mozilla's goal, they're right to switch.

That said, irc is fine, or even the best, for some communities. Especially communities of internet-savvy people.

It's decentralized, open, easy to access and inclusive. Such communities rarely meet the need for spam filters, and each of their members possess a well-distilled taste for personalized tools for irc.

That's why cryptocurrencies or hackerspaces channles are great on irc. That's why #rust channel is fantastic.

I still didn't find any modern substitution as good as irc for those communities. And yes Matrix, I'm looking at you! You're just not there yet.

obhmt3• 7 years ago

But I agree with the post, "irc is not fine", and never was fine if you want to communicate with "regular" people.

That's cool. I don't want to communicate with regular people, I want to communicate with hackers. If I wanted to communicate with regular people I would use Twitter.

gtirloni3• 7 years ago

And you're not Mozilla (which does want to communicate with laypeople) so...

mlw8gNBXBYouyps• 7 years ago

I wrote a spam filter for freenode in a week. Even if Mozilla can't afford a week of work, their IRCd already has one.

I'm kind of convinced that this change is culturally, rather than technically, motivated.

bayareanative• 7 years ago

The danger of giving up on IRC and going with a hosted corporate product is the chilling effects on free speech by being at the whims and mercurial mercy of corporate interests. They ought to stay with a self-hosted product that cannot be shutdown by whichever government or corporation decides to ban or restrict speech, thereby ceding what should've been public commons to being under the thumb of a particular government or corporation, and what they deem acceptable, not the community/community leaders deciding. I suggest hosting it somewhere like Iceland.

obhmt3• 7 years ago

I sometimes feel bad about Mozilla dying, then I see all the stupid stuff they do and I realise it serves them right.

fulafel2• 7 years ago

There's really a need for IM interop. These fragmented islands stall the network effect (Metcalfe's law) that is needed to sustain and grow communities.

I guess the best thing for the current situatio would be a headless service that would connect to your IM identities, and buffer messages, from many different IM identities and protocols. You would then have intermittedly connected web or terminal or mobile apps as its clients. Does something like this exist?

ATsch2• 7 years ago

sounds like matrix.org

fulafel2• 7 years ago

I think bridges are not a good enough level of integration. You really need to have your personal connection to your IRC servers.

(Unless the matrix IRC bridge connects to the IRC server with a server-to-server type connection and can thus address messages from/to virtual users on the IRC protocol level. But that would need a lot of coordination and authorizations from IRC server administrators, which brings in so much friction that it probably kills the idea.)

edit: it seems possible that the matrix irc bridge will make a new client irc connection per bridged user, which sounds like a better idea. hard to make out from the docs though.

waz0wski• 7 years ago

this is what IRC ... does. The xmpp standard and ecosystem of clients/servers has also provided this for a decade plus.

If something 'modern' is required, Matrix protocol and its ecosystem is a contender. Also look into the world of ActivityPub federated applications, which cover everything from replacing Twitter to blogging.

My personal setup is to use bitlbee or libpurple to connect to every major chat network that exists today, bridged to my irc client via znc. This provides a consistent presence, status, and ui across desktop/mobile, push notifications, filtering, and behavior under my control, all with chat client that doesn't take up 1GB+ of memory with phone-home telemetry and useless emoji

42wim2• 7 years ago

Take a look at https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge which bridges a lot of protocols.

It only support public channels at the moment, but we're planning to add user/user communication too.

andai4• 7 years ago

If I'm reading this correctly, the main problems they have with IRC is that it's too "old"/obscure, and too open — simultaneously too difficult and too easy to access. Hard to control who gets in and what they say.

I haven't seen much spam or harassment on IRC, but I haven't been to Mozilla's server.

As for newbie accessibility, doesn't a web gateway solve that? You could change the font family from monospace to Lato and it's instantly 20 years more modern :)

andai4• 7 years ago

And when we’re talking about blind spots and invisible social access controls, of course, what we’re really talking about is privilege. “Working in the open”, in a world where computation was scarce and expensive, meant working in front of an audience that was lucky enough to go to university or college, whose parents could afford a computer at home, who lived somewhere with broadband or had one of the few jobs whose company opened low-numbered ports to the outside world; what it didn’t mean was doxxing, cyberstalking, botnets, gamergaters, weaponized social media tooling, carrier-grade targeted-harassment-as-a-service and state-actor psy-op/disinformation campaigns rolling by like bad weather. The relentless, grinding day-to-day malfeasance that’s the background noise of this grudgefuck of a zeitgeist we’re all stewing in just didn’t inform that worldview, because it didn’t exist.

http://exple.tive.org/blarg/2018/11/09/the-evolution-of-open...

saalweachter• 7 years ago

Given ... everything ... about the internet, do you ever think we're at the "throw one away" point of the dev cycle?

progval4• 7 years ago

As for newbie accessibility, doesn't a web gateway solve that?

Until this week, Rust's Community page [1] linked to Mibbit, which allowed you to join IRC just by entering a username and pressing Enter.

Now there's only the Discord button, which works the same (besides an extra click to accept the ToU), and you get a popup and a red banner asking you to register.

[1] https://www.rust-lang.org/community

repolfx• 7 years ago

I suspect the amount of spam and harassment on MozNet hasn't actually changed over time, or given Firefox's decline may have even got lower (as fewer people care about Mozilla anymore). No evidence was provided that times have actually changed w.r.t. spam and harassment even though this appeared to be the primary motivation to shut down IRC.

Rather, I suspect Mozilla's increasingly sensitive SF bubble-immersed culture has created an environment in which ever more mundane disagreement and conversation is relabelled as "harassment" and what they want is a system that allows for much more controlled speech. Seems a part of the general zeitgeist of the Valley in which techies are concluding free speech is harmful and they should control what's said.

detaro2• 7 years ago

too easy to access. Hard to control who gets in and what they say.

I don't really get that for an org that runs their own IRC servers. Requiring external registration, rate limiting, content filtering, ... all are available options. Just because the majority(?) of IRC networks allows access freely doesn't mean you have to. I'm not sure what other systems would add in this regard an IRC server can't do.

spystath• 7 years ago

It's a shame that IRC usage is dwindling especially in techie circles. However I can understand it if it doesn't work for them any more although in my opinion IRC has a lot of moderation tools available. In any case, the "problem", of sorts, is not abandoning IRC but what comes next. The web is choke full of proprietary communication protocols that cannot talk to each other and you have private entities acting as gateways to online communication. Instead on relying on protocols and let clients decide how they connect to the network you have users being herded into walled "communication" gardens. This goes beyond Slack or Discord or chat-app-of-the-month. Having a flagship open-source project behind a proprietary platform for communicating with the users and developers can't help but leave a sour taste in the mouth.

Well, at least there is still Matrix to hope for.

josteink9• 7 years ago

This goes beyond Slack or Discord or chat-app-of-the-month.

I can probably name up to 10 chat-networks and products which is existed in the 90s. None remain.

IRC does though. Exactly because it wasn’t a product, but instead a protocol specification.

Whatever rationale Mozilla has for this, it’s going to be proven short sighted.

gtirloni3• 7 years ago

It depends. If they choose something open like Matrix or XMPP, it could work well in the long-term.

microcolonel• 7 years ago

Part of my issue with Mozilla IRC is that it is not sufficiently similar to Freenode.

segmondy• 7 years ago

A slack like interface can be built on top of IRC. I'm a bit amazed that no one has decided to do that.

cagenut• 7 years ago

check out irccloud

agentultra2• 7 years ago

Textual is pretty great IMO.

eadmund• 7 years ago

We’ve come to the conclusion that for all IRC’s utility, it’s irresponsible of us to ask our people – employees, volunteers, partners or anyone else – to work in an environment that we can’t make sure is healthy, safe and productive.

I don't know about healthy or productive, but I am fairly certain that IRC is safe.

What worries me is that 'safe' has become a bit of a euphemism to mean 'unchallenging,' and what this really means is that the organisation which booted Brendan Eich really wants to unperson anyone who blasphemes this week's orthodoxies.

IfOnlyYouKnew4• 7 years ago

‘safe' has become a bit of a euphemism to mean 'unchallenging

I doubt the concerns are about people discussing Rust vs C++. And, this being Mozilla’s semi-internal technical discussions, even the most intellectual, data-backed hot takes on the culture wars de jour are probably out of place: getting DMs like “here are twenty proven statistics girls are bad at math” because you happen to use a female handle is still harassment, even if (hypothetically) true.

acd• 7 years ago

Matrix and Riot is good open source replacements for IRC. With Matrix and Riot you get a modern interface yet can bridge out to IRC open source networks and channels!

Here is links to Matrix and Riot. https://matrix.org/blog/index https://about.riot.im/

Please support open source projects! The Internet was built on open standards.

agustif• 7 years ago

Mozilla could be interested in the greatest new chat product from the getstream.io folks. It looks like not an outlier, being used by PH, unsplash, and other great websites.

Maybe worth checking out!

https://getstream.io/chat/

miki123211• 7 years ago

I know there were/are a few blind people working on Mozilla's stuff and the move to anything that is not open source will make it much harder for them. There was a person[1] who had done significant work on the Rust compiler and said that he would have a much harder time doing it now, since the move to Discord and that he might not be able to participate in the community after the switch[2]. Proprietary solutions are a little bit better for the 80% of people, but way worse and/or unusable for the 1 to 5 percent, depending on how techy the community is. We have to realize that those solutions have big gains, but they also have huge tradeoffs. IRC inconveniences some people. Discord excludes some completely.

[1] http://camlorn.net/posts/April%202017/rust-struct-field-reor... [2] This thread https://twitter.com/camlorn38/status/1121879891035602945

_mdpn• 7 years ago

It's really frustrating to me how inaccessible Discord is. At its heart, Discord is text and voice chat, which you would think would be the easiest forms of communication to make accessible.

Due to a genetic condition I have that predisposes me to blindness I have preemptively installed NVDA on Windows and Orca on Linux, and the inability of either of these tools to deal with Discord the last time I tried is shameful.

spicytunacone• 7 years ago

Bryan Smart's reply to that Twitter thread depresses me.

Don’t worry. They’ll totally fix Slack and Discord around the time everyone is using VRChat and VisualTeam. It’s always been this way. Accessibility is catchup work. The next big thing always destroys our gains.

The language at the end of the blog post "We are evaluating products, not protocols" and "We aren’t picking an outlier" almost guarantees we're looking at solutions as heavy as Slack and Discord which I would not have been able to run on my laptop back when I was involved in the switch to Firefox Quantum. It's challenging enough having to advocate for "niche" (my words) features and work out their implementations, but IRC was also necessary to keep track of which builds on what dates would introduce which breaking changes, since this information was published nowhere else, and also to minimally participate in decision meetings that ended up in video chats anyway. If they do move to a heavier, but closed, solution, I hope they also find ways to make contribution less reliant on chat.

For what it's worth, I thought Mozilla had a fairly decent wiki page for IRC[0]. I always believed a streamlined quickstart section, suggesting one or two clients at most, walking through steps to registration and configuring authentication with ghost killing, and how to get activity from when you were offline either via bouncer or just logs[1] would more than adequately address ease-of-use without rolling out a newer, modernized client. Even working from libraries wasn't an issue for me using web-based clients like Kiwi IRC.

[0] https://wiki.mozilla.org/IRC

[1] https://mozilla.logbot.info/

norswap2• 7 years ago

I never see addressed the biggest reason (according to me) why IRC loses, so let's spell it out.

IRC isn't persistent (i.e. you can't read messages delivered while you were offline) unless you setup an IRC shell. This is technically difficult (much more so than dicking with nickservs and so, which is already a pain point). Hosting it is also not free. Count 5$/month on CloudOcean or some such.

https://www.irccloud.com/ is a great service that alleviates the pain, but now you're paying 5$/month and you just have IRC — you can't run other services on your server.

If you value 5$ or your time more than the idea of "fighting for freedom by using IRC", you just don't use IRC unless you're forced to. This is not unreasonable, so many people do that, and consequently, communities miss out on these people.

You want to save IRC? Make a free (as in free beer) clone of IRCCloud. Easy.

swalladge• 7 years ago

I wonder how much work it would be to extend the IRC protocol and popular implementations to include some sort of persistence. It's such a shame that a simple, open, accessible protocol for communication is being lost simply because of this and that it's "too difficult".

the84726• 7 years ago

IRCv3 has history replay message types. It's there in the protocol. But it's only useful if both clients and server or proxy support it.

theclaw• 7 years ago

Very simple - the server can push to the client when joining a channel. This would require the channel to be logged server-side and that the user authenticates with nickserv before joining channels. It does not need client-side changes so you could still use any client.

mirkules3• 7 years ago

Once all the chat systems without persistence have disappeared, some new hip company will come along touting “no persistence” as a feature, maybe even a privacy feature.

But seriously, I don’t understand why persistence is such a huge deal to people. Chat is for transient chat - it is meant to be non-persistent just like verbal communication.

There are so many mechanisms for persistent messaging (forums, text messages, emaills, and everything in between), I don’t understand how an entire industry spawned from a concept we already had?

caltelt• 7 years ago

I know I hate it when I join IRC channels and have no context as to what anybody has been talking about, as there is no history to quickly go over. Even just having the past days history would help in this regard, at least for more active channels.

It's the same as just barging into a conversation a group of people are having. You don't want to just join and start talking about a completely different topic. So you join, and wait for a bit to get a feel for what they're talking about before piping in. But with IRC, sometimes it can take _days_ to get that amount of information, depending on how active the channel is. The same thing could easily be accomplished by being able to read the last 10 messages in the channel.

T-hawk• 7 years ago

Why do people use chat services? They want responses. Getting responses is what Slack and Discord are optimized for and why they've gained adoption.

The chat services enable responses, by making it low friction, by giving the feel of being informal and real-time in a way that email and forums don't. They also enable asynchronous responses by being persistent, that your message won't go lost and unseen by a moment without network connectivity, unlike IRC. They also enable responses by being cross-platform and device-independent, unlike SMS. They also enable responses by centralizing account control of who participates, so users can join a ready-made group organized by an administrator, unlike say Facebook messaging.

Users seek maximal interaction. The Slack/Discord model achieves this by supporting both synchronous and asynchronous responses. The former requires an informal real-time interface, the latter requires persistence. That's what came together on these services that hadn't before.

progval4• 7 years ago

some new hip company will come along touting “no persistence” as a feature, maybe even a privacy feature.

That's exactly Snapchat

TheRealPomax4• 7 years ago

Then presumably you never did work over IRC. The fact that you can have discussions in asynchronous real time out in the open makes (made?) for a far superior developer experience compared to forums, text messages, emails, and everything in between, because everyone could _passively_ follow the conversations that were happening. IRC is the ship's "always on" walkie talkie: do you need it? No. Does it provide a layer of common knowledge that you never even stopped to think about made everyone feel like they knew what was going on even when they couldn't tell you what was going on, thus making everything run impressively smoothly? Absolutely.

And remember that IRC has been around since 1995, when the idea of separate protocols to do different things was common place. IRC has been dying a very, very slow death.

(and despite nostalgia: IRC was never big. Even the largest of IRC servers only had around a hundred thousand users. That might sound like a lot, but we're talking globally: the most popular IRC server had a fraction of the users that CompuServe did, and CompuServe was decidedly worse at being a chat system, even though that was the main reason you'd use it)

josteink9• 7 years ago

IRC isn't persistent (i.e. you can't read messages delivered while you were offline)

It’s chat, not email.

That’s a natural feature of the medium.

In the age of Google, why on earth would you want to record everything?

intertextuality4• 7 years ago

At least for me, I participate in a lot of programming channels. I've saved a lot of stuff for later, that would otherwise be a pain to ask someone to answer it again. I log basically all of my irc chats because

1. storage is cheap 2. you never know when something could be useful later

Let's not pretend individual nerds in IRC chat recording history is anything remotely close to what google is doing.

valeg• 7 years ago

https://thelounge.chat/ is quite easy to install and provides persistence. Also, IRC channel history through Matrix bridge is persistent.

linuxftw• 7 years ago

Chatting isn't about always being online and getting messages. Somebody else in the channel should be capable of responding to a request. That's the whole point of a community, IMO.

Need to make sure something important is captured from an IRC discussion? Put it on a wiki/mailing list. There's also things like meeting bots. Most communities I've seen, there's very little value in an IRC chat history for conversations other people had (eg, just stuff like 'help me with x').

OrgNet• 7 years ago

It might not be persistent by default, but there is a lot of its content that is being logged and made available on the web...

TheRealPomax4• 7 years ago

Yep. Easy. So I assume you already did this, what's the frontend website for us to start using?

(As a long time IRC user, I'd love a free irccloud with all the features of Slack and the freedom of IRC. However, setting that up scaled for "thousands of concurrent users" with normal, modern, administrator interfaces for all those tasks that the IRC RFC themselves left up to individual implementations is REALLY EFFING HARD, so no one has actually set up a service like that, to date)

norswap2• 7 years ago

I'm part of those who don't really value "fighting for freedom via using IRC" so I use Slack & Discord. I have no stakes in saving IRC.

Also, building and maintaining a free IRCCloud clone is worth much more of 5$/month of my time.

And seriously, it's not that hard. I know people who master the ins and out of much more complex server stacks as a hobby. A nice example is the implementation of World of Warcraft private servers. IRC is nowhere near as complex as that. I do concede that it's a long-term effort though. It's certainly not just a "weekend project".

Still as far as "saving things" go, this one is easy enough that a single person could build the tech on his free time and then you just need (a) patron(s) to pay for the infrastructure bill.

bmn__• 7 years ago

clone of IRCCloud. Easy.

https://github.com/leedo/alice

bastawhiz4• 7 years ago

When I worked at Mozilla, "talking to a room full of bouncers" was a common joke on my team. In a fully distributed team (we were spread out across the northern hemisphere) this is a terrible way to work. You don't know who is online or whether you can contact them. There's no guarantee they'll get your message if you send them something urgent. Everything that's not "typing text in real time" is harder and worse (search, sharing files, sending long messages, mobile support, etc.) and everyone has to scrounge for their own tools to work around these insufficiencies. In a work environment, using a tool that only does part of what you need it to do is a crazy irresponsible use of resources.

IRC might be useful in some circumstances, but supporting team communication—especially for remote teams—is not one of those circumstances.

izacus• 7 years ago

How is that different from Slack though? Did people use bouncers that don't set /away ?

bastawhiz4• 7 years ago

On slack it shows whether someone is active or away. It also guarantees they'll get the message. You're not praying that you picked the right bouncer to direct your message at and that it's configured to let them know when they get back.

0xcde4c3db• 7 years ago

You don't know who is online or whether you can contact them.

I've actually had this problem with most, if not all, IM/chat systems I've had to use for serious work. They have better UX design for indicating availability, but I can't think of one where it's consistently worked the way I expect it to. Some explicitly allow people to fake/hardcode their status; others have some mixture of caching/update issues and strange criteria for deciding whether a user is "active" or "present" such that the indicator isn't very reliable in practice.

bastawhiz4• 7 years ago

Some explicitly allow people to fake/hardcode their status

That's not an issue with the tech, it's an issue with the people. I'm not shooting off messages with no idea of whether they'll arrive, I'm at least trusting the person's intended availability. If they're just being an ass and marking themselves as perpetually unavailable, that's an issue I'd take up with their manager.

In my experience, modern systems like slack and discord (and even hipchat) work well enough with their availability indicators. Chat apps five years ago I would not trust as much.

itchyjunk• 7 years ago

Looks like I am too late to this party. I just recently started visiting the mozilla ircd. There are lots of channels and very little way of navigating around. I was trying to figure out who to talk to about network support or if such a channel existed and no one had an answer. People come in asking support questions but no one has an idea of which channels to best ask in. #firefox, #introduction and #newbie are 3 channels doing the same thing and the questions just get split off. If they can't maintain their ircd, maybe just register a project on freenode who seems to be able to handle roughly 80k people just fine.

Edit: Just checked, freenode has a #firefox, not sure how official or how maintained it is.

pojntfx• 7 years ago

Please use Matrix. Please.

lenkite• 7 years ago

Please Mozilla! Use an open alternative like Matrix/Riot or even better - BUILD one of your own if you think Matrix doesn't cut it. A foundational OSS company depending on a closed source product and closed protocol for such a fundamental need such as communication is simply wrong.

ParadisoShlee• 7 years ago

This is a good watershed moment for FOSS as a whole and I hope Mozilla decide to fork Mattermost or something similar and expand it to suit their needs over using Slack if that's the direction they head.

Something federated and encrypted like Matrix/Riot would be fun. Having something that's federated would be lovely to see other members of the FOSS community start to come together over time.

but there is a lot of problems with those rich text/react/Electron thick apps can be "painful" tho

swiftcoder• 7 years ago

Off of the main topic, but this blog is basically unreadable to my form of colour-blindness. The link colour is unreadable against the page background, and the right nav is so low in contrast I can't read any of it without using text selection to artificially improve the contrast.

zgramana• 7 years ago

I’m more than a little surprised nobody has chimed in advocating Openfire, which is Apache 2.0, standards based (XMPP et. al.), extensible, and also has some pretty nice browser clients out there (e.g. conversejs).

j--r• 7 years ago

There are way better XMPP Servers now ;)

agentultra2• 7 years ago

That's too bad.

Personally I dislike this trend towards a plurality of chat "services" and "apps." Now each project I interact with has their own chat service. I have to maintain accounts on all of them and install several applications to interact with each. It's a pain to manage.

Not to mention that most of these services use Electron-based chat clients which exclude a bunch of people who cannot afford the kinds of machines required to use them or they have to suffer a poor experience on lower-end hardware. It also excludes people who use accessibility software or automation that doesn't integrate with web-based clients.

The user experience on IRC scales better. Anyone can write a rich, easy-to-use client or server. If you happen to be a programmer you can write your own tools to manage your own user experience. The drift from casual user to power user isn't stopped by a walled garden of a tightly-controlled user experience that doesn't integrate with anything.

car12• 7 years ago

I hope they move on to using Matrix. I think the successor to IRC ought to be not slack or any other closed source chat app but an open source one.

peterwwillis• 7 years ago

Are Riot and Matrix compatible with irc clients? If so, wouldn't that mostly solve the problem? You have a way to phase out legacy clients and time to work the kinks out of an open solution.

zzo38computer3• 7 years ago

Many things mention about other services are still possible with IRC; in some cases by the client side and in some cases by the server side. Server side logging is possible (and I have implemented this once) with IRC. Still, you can make it available with multiple protocols, and you can alter an implementation of a IRC server even if you do not have it available with other protocols too. IRC is also easy to use without any special software.

I currently have a NNTP server set up, but not IRC or any other kind of chat system (but if I do set one up, it will almost certainly be IRC).

ivank• 7 years ago

Discord is blocked in China, and a large number of people in China are not willing to use VPNs.

Discord uses themes that do not meet minimum contrast guidelines (#747F8D on #FFFFFF is 4.06:1, failing WCAG AA for normal text).

Discord says third-party clients[1] and even client-side CSS modifications violate their ToS https://twitter.com/discordapp/status/983359562458849280

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/8tukek/ripcord_...

mcguire6• 7 years ago

Whatever happened to XMPP?

Mozilla is giving up on their IRC server

Related Stories