Agreed, this is a huge relief. I was getting quite worried that Mozilla would go to Discord, like Rust and other projects have done. I don't know anything about Matrix, but I know it's free, and if it has Mozilla's endorsement, now I'm actually curious to try it... maybe even via an IRC bridge!

FYI #rust-beginners is on discord, but many of the teams have transitioned to Zulip because it has threads. I'd love if Zulip was OSS, but at least it's a highly innovative company that's improved a lot on the UX of IRC (far beyond not needing to setup a bouncer).

The mismatch between Discord's targeted audience of gamers can get funny at times. One rust dev has had their status we to "playing systemd" for days.

Edit: How did I miss that Zulip is open source??? Thank you to the commentators who pointed this out, you made my day :)

Edit2: Just learned what I said about rust decision-making was totally wrong. Thanks to Rob Pike in the other thread for his detailed comments.

You're talking about https://github.com/zulip/zulip, right? It was open sourced in 2015.

I wouldn't describe Zulip as coming from the IRC tradition -- it was built by MIT students as an improvement on MIT's Zephyr. There's a split between line-at-a-time messaging like IRC or Slack, and paragraphs-at-a-time messaging with per-message channels like Zephyr, Gale, and now Zulip.

I really miss the paragraphs style.

Wait, why can't you type a paragraph at a time in IRC?

I said "paragraphs-at-a-time", not "paragraph-at-a-time". You can't type paragraphs at a time on IRC because a single message can't contain newlines.

But even then, paragraph-at-a-time is hard on IRC because there's a max line length that's surprisingly short (and usually just truncates the rest of your message once you exceed it!), and just because you'd stand out as being the person writing much more than everyone else and being slow to reply. IRC simply isn't a medium designed for carefully considered thought like that.

> a medium designed for carefully considered thought like that.

"Sorry this is so long. I didn't have time to make it shorter."

You can type a paragraph if it is not too long, but you can't write several paragraphs.

I know I'm not supposed to talk about voting, but I'm going to anyway. Why are people upvoting me? The comment is completely useless because almost everything in it is wrong.

I upvoted you because "playing systemd" made me laugh. Also I hadn't heard of Zulip. Upvotes are cheap.

Zulip is open source: https://github.com/zulip/zulip

Where’s the other thread with Rob Pike?

There isn't one, because ... I'm not even sure what I was thinking, except that I probably should have gotten a few more hours of sleep last night.

Maybe I was thinking about this comment by someone else when I wrote that???: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=kibwen

> I was getting quite worried that Mozilla would go to Discord, like Rust and other projects have done.

Just so you know, the Rust Embedded guys went with Matrix back in June and several people do use the IRC bridge.

https://github.com/rust-embedded/wg/issues/357

Matrix can bridge in IRC, Slack, Gitter and a few other protocols very nicely, it reminds me of Pidgin but with much better UX.

I haven't managed to properly use Matrix myself, but I am part of a number of Gitter rooms that includes people using the Matrix bridge. I certainly wouldn't call that bridge "nice": all their messages are posted by a single user called matrixbot, that simply prefixes it message by their Matrix username in backticks. I'm not sure if the people in the room who aren't aware of Matrix understand that that's what's going on.

Maybe a limitation of the gitter api? Better than nothing, but improvement welcome

I understand why it works this way and I wouldn't know how to do it better; it was more of a general critique of the bridging approach, I guess, and hence a reluctance from my side to call it nice.