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Mallory's Musings & Mischief's posts Post Back to profile
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Faith has purple hair! :v_tg: :v_lb:

@smxi @tarajdactyl @malcircuit Oh, IRC definitely sucks. It lacks a ton of super useful features like emojis, file upload, link embed, and the like. It's also severely lacking in moderation tools. Matrix, though, only barely solves a couple of those problems and comes with its own giant pile of pain.

2 January at 5:55 | Wall-to-wall | Open on anarres.family
20 comments
smxi

@faithisleaping @tarajdactyl @malcircuit irc is for communicating in real time. Works as intended. You type. They type. No eye candy. Easy to run. Add irc bots for extra features. Like real time email except everyone on channel sees exchange. I have several channels. Libera is good. Oftc.net good. Not javascript based. Huge bonus. Very efficient to operate. When freenode tried to monetize entire userbase split to new libera overnight. Program irc bots for more features.

2 January at 6:14 | Open on fosstodon.org
岩田志明 shimei

@smxi @faithisleaping @tarajdactyl @malcircuit LOL are you for real? something like file uploads (at least images!) should be a BASIC feature, not something extra.

sorry my friend, but this isn't gonna fly

2 January at 11:48 | Open on disabled.social
Mac Berg

@faithisleaping @smxi @tarajdactyl @malcircuit For everyone criticizing Matrix, are the problems something that can be fixed with updates to the clients or is it more like system design problems?

2 January at 6:19 | Open on mastodon.online
smxi

@macberg @faithisleaping @tarajdactyl @malcircuit I love not chasing this stuff and not wasting time relearning wheel building. I'm glad to say I've never heard of matrix til this thread here since irc works to transmit text live never needed to find solution to problem that didn't exist. Email also still works well. These were well designed open protocols.

For sticky data forums good. Very good. Spam bots huge issue for forum operators. Not to be underrated. Hard to do now for amateurs.

2 January at 6:23 | Open on fosstodon.org
Mac Berg

@smxi Yes well Matrix, Discord etc aren't just for text. They're for text, emojis, gifs, voice, files, and other built in features. I miss IRC, but most people don't think IRC holds up for what they expect from a modern group chat client.

2 January at 6:34 | Open on mastodon.online
smxi

@macberg I'm glad I skipped that stuff. Imagine how many bytes I've avoided sending through cables by just typing text. I find it hard to take seriously a claim that emojis and gifs are meaningful communication devices. Not too long ago those were considered kid stuff lol.

People can't type anymore is my guess. Touch typing was worth learning looking back.

But good thing about never using such things is being able to truly not care about them.

2 January at 7:04 | Open on fosstodon.org
Mac Berg replied to smxi

@smxi I can't say I disagree, but if a platform/service/whatever wants a meaningful market share they have to give the masses what they want - and the masses demand animated things and graphics in their chats. And to be fair, some things are much more easily conveyed with a suiting gif (although it can also make an unbelievable mess of a large group chat, but people seem to not care).

2 January at 7:24 | Open on mastodon.online
Baŝto replied to Mac

@macberg Memes, reaction GIFs etc is in some way a language itself. They can express a lot more than text smileys, which is what they compete with. You can paraphrase all that with plain text, but that makes you depend stronger on certain natural languages. Memes and GIFs are more based on shared culture than shared language.

2 January at 12:06 | Open on chaos.social
Simon π man ⚛️🇬🇧🇺🇸🇺🇦

@macberg @smxi IRC was an amazing decentralized technology way ahead of its time. Nothing like a net split to remind you of how tenuous your connections are.

I believe that Slack and a few other platforms are still compatible with IRC, they even have some slash commands.

2 January at 8:13 | Open on mastodon.social
Kiki

@macberg
@smxi
I don't think it can do voice or video chat on its own, but for a text-based group chat with file upload and emojis... I'm kinda surprised that no one has suggested Zulip yet.
We use Zulip as our main chat at work (remote company, so almost everything is done via chat) and I like it waaay better than Discord, Slack, Rocketchat, or Matrix.

2 January at 8:54 | Open on chaos.social
Mac Berg replied to Kiki

@flauschzelle @smxi Never even heard of it. I see it's FOSS so that's great. Voice can be kind of important though, depending on the use case. Is it properly secure and fully e2e encrypted?

2 January at 9:08 | Open on mastodon.online
Kiki replied to Mac

@macberg
@smxi
We use BigBlueButton for daily video meetings. I think there's an integration that lets you start a videocall on some external service by clicking on a button in Zulip, but I never used that.

About the security/encryption: I actually don't know, never looked into it 🤷‍♀️
But I don't think Discord is encrypted...? So for an alternative to Discord, that shouldn't be required anyway.

2 January at 9:25 | Open on chaos.social
Faith has purple hair! :v_tg: :v_lb:

@macberg @smxi @tarajdactyl @malcircuit The fundamental problem with matrix is also it's supposed strength: tt's a base protocol with a set of extensions.

In theory, most of not all of the problems mentioned are solved by some extension or another. However, there's nothing forcing people to implement extensions and it often takes a while if it happens at all. The moment you have a client/client or client/server mismatch, you end up with the lowest common denominator which is often pretty low.

This is especially bad when it comes to crypto and authentication schemes. Every client and server has some set which it supports and some set which it rejects because it doesn't think they're secure enough and some set which it doesn't support yet because developers don't have time or someone's software is out of date or whatever. The end result is a comedy show of random authentication failures because they can't all agree on a common trusted and implement crypto/auth pair. 🙃

It also shows up in other features but then it usually degrades to "you can't do that" and not "message failed to send" for something that's just text.

@macberg @smxi @tarajdactyl @malcircuit The fundamental problem with matrix is also it's supposed strength: tt's a base protocol with a set of extensions.

In theory, most of not all of the problems mentioned are solved by some extension or another. However, there's nothing forcing people to implement extensions and it often takes a while if it happens at all. The moment you have a client/client or client/server mismatch, you end up with the lowest common denominator which is often pretty low.

2 January at 6:32 | Open on anarres.family
Mac Berg

@faithisleaping @smxi @tarajdactyl @malcircuit Oh yikes. That thing about protocol extensions sounds like a bad design choice if you're trying to create an entire network that is compatible with itself. Or at least it sounds like they made the base protocol way too bare. That's sad to hear. I'm still hoping it can be fixed though because I like the idea of matrix.

2 January at 6:45 | Open on mastodon.online
Natomic

@macberg @faithisleaping @smxi @tarajdactyl @malcircuit also it's tools for moderating communities are... Lacking, power levels are a tiny step above the admin-user system but are miles away from e.g. roles with fine tuned permissions (yano like video game clans and such have had forever and discord has), maybe it's possible to put roles on top of power levels but from my knowledge of the protocol I'm not seeing how. Add onto that the absolute mess that is VoIP "integration", the general incomplete and buggyness of many clients (looking at you neochat) and the absolute arcane and sometimes just wrong documentation of the protocol (hello description of valid resource URls which implies tighter requirements than the ones for domain names while including a domain name which must match the servers) and uh yeah... Maybe it can go somewhere but right now I don't think it's viable personally

@macberg @faithisleaping @smxi @tarajdactyl @malcircuit also it's tools for moderating communities are... Lacking, power levels are a tiny step above the admin-user system but are miles away from e.g. roles with fine tuned permissions (yano like video game clans and such have had forever and discord has), maybe it's possible to put roles on top of power levels but from my knowledge of the protocol I'm not seeing how. Add onto that the absolute mess that is VoIP "integration", the general incomplete...

2 January at 12:22 | Open on tech.lgbt
Mac Berg replied to Natomic

@natomic Uh that's sad to hear. What a shame. I've heard about the voice integration previously and it's, yeah, sad. Seems like a such a waste! Unless they manage to fix it. I've also seen people complain about the people behind matrix but I have no idea what that's about.

2 January at 12:37 | Open on mastodon.online
Islamic Audiobooks Central

@macberg @faithisleaping @smxi @tarajdactyl @malcircuit Instant messenger like groups are next to useless for getting stuff done. Need threads/topics like #Discourse and #Zulip. I've seen you can reply to a message in a thread on some Matrix clients but it's not even close to the same thing... Hopefully it improves.

2 January at 10:41 | Open on mastodon.social
smxi

@faithisleaping @tarajdactyl @malcircuit irc is a protocol. It has implementations. Libera handles spam well. I see basically none and few who slip through are nuked almost instantly. It's an open protocol like http or ftp or smtp or pop3. Saying irc sucks is like saying email sucks because you don't like aols implementation of the email protocols. Irc well designed. Servers good. Tools good. Stable.

2 January at 6:19 | Open on fosstodon.org
LisPi
@faithisleaping @malcircuit @tarajdactyl @smxi I'd kind of argue that's a benefit more so than a downside.

Link embed is a good way to test which participants in the chat are using vulnerable media codec libraries. (I hate how rotten that library ecosystem is.)

File upload wastes space on the server uselessly and is better served by either magic-wormhole, IPFS links or magnet links.

I'm not going to contradict the bit about moderation though. I entirely agree that it could *definitely* use some standardization and improvement for that.
@faithisleaping @malcircuit @tarajdactyl @smxi I'd kind of argue that's a benefit more so than a downside.

Link embed is a good way to test which participants in the chat are using vulnerable media codec libraries. (I hate how rotten that library ecosystem is.)
2 January at 10:05 | Open on udongein.xyz
Baŝto

@faithisleaping That’s quite client dependent. Link embed is something the client has to handle, since it’s only a presentation thing. The vast majority of the used IRC clients support Unicode, which supports emojis. Your client just needs to have an emoji picker or you need a separate emoji picker like rofimoji, it’s only text after all.

2 January at 10:40 | Open on chaos.social
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