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

If they wanted to communicate with laypeople they'd offer support over the channels laypeople expect support nowadays, namely Facebook. Instead they are going to choose some middle ground that will displease everybody; they will botch it, as they like to do.

They are already working on botching it, since they've moved the Rust channel to a closed source alternative with no expectations of privacy: https://blog.rust-lang.org/2019/04/26/Mozilla-IRC-Sunset-and...

Mozilla did not move the Rust channels. We did.

Are there really no good open source forum alternatives?

-- asking for a friend :-)

We already use an open source forum: discourse.

If you mean real-time chat, in my personal opinion, Discord is the best choice. Zulip is good, if you can deal with it being a bit weird. The other options are fine, but not great. You may have different opinions than me personally.

You mean the same Discord that's now majority-owned by Tencent, right?

I don’t know anything about their ownership, but I also don’t think you’re actually asking that question.

Sure, it may be a bad-faith question, but I think the point still stands. IRC, as an open communications protocol, will always, always, always be better than private companies with the potential to be controlled by anything. Richard Stallman would be rolling in his grave.

Christ, you scared me there. Stallman is not dead.

He's pretty old, I was making a statement about the future. Bit sloppy nevertheless.

It's simply pathetic that the handlers of one of the most important parts of Mozilla unilaterally decided to move the community to a closed source service and Mozilla didn't have teeth to do anything about it.

If Mozilla were able to do that, people would be upset by a company controlling open source. You can’t have it both ways.