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.
Speaking as someone who hasn't run their own bouncer in 10+ years.
I've never thought of matrix as a mature technology ever since.
even mastodon figured out 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.
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.
Welcome to Matrix. It's the best option there is, and it's not very good.
[1] - https://thelounge.chat/
[2] - https://convos.chat/
It just works.
And IRCv3 has chat history to provide that. But https://snikket.org/ (XMPP) is more likely aligned with what you are looking for
No wonder people don't want to join it.
(Saying that as someome who has his own bouncer.)
Email really could have been great, but html and bad actors have made it so much worse than it needs to be.
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.
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.
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.
Discord could well run on top of IRC the protocol and be open to federation without any change of UX.
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)
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.
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.
Because people invested/wasted their energy into building proprietary silos instead.
SASL support in IRC predates IRCv3.
Just looked it up and there is IRCv3 to fix this, but idk what the state of that is.
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.
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.
So in many cases, you don't need a VPN to prevent revealing your actual geographic location.
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.
Get a job.
UI(IRC) = MIN_{c \in clients : #user(c) > 100 } UI(c)
But even if you take "max" and not "min", it's still horrible.
I consider it a feature that acts as a filter.
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.
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
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.
IIRC they had a partnership with Yahoo around that time. Interesting to hear it went that deep. Notable: Yahoo Messenger was shutdown in 2018.
holy fuck, hahahaha! the only thing worth a damn they own other than Firefox, and they're enshittifying it. perfect timing too, now when LLMs probably halved the traffic it gets.
whatever happened to their Google money? they were so dummy rich they could afford spending millions on the three letter thing "advocacy" not so long ago. did that dry up or what?
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.
"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"
Thunderbird is no longer owned by the Mozilla corporation, so now you can donate directly to them.
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.
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.
I think it’s pretty safe to assume that forking the code is a low incentive for change
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?
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 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.
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.