Synchronous Messaging at Mozilla: The Decision

Hi @mhoye,

thanks for leading the immensely important infrastructural effort for Mozilla’s communities. Your collaboration style including consultation, alignment, decision-taking, and broad & deep listening stands unrivaled.

This decision will most likely impact generations of Mozillians to come. Thank you for handling it the way you did.

I am looking forward to signing up to the new service in January.

Onwards,
Henrik

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The Matrix blog post mentions one:

It’s also worth noting that even though Moznet is being turned off, matrix-ircd exists as a very promising project that exposes any Matrix homeserver as an ircd - so for all you IRC die-hards, Moznet can absolutely live on in the afterlife!

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Nice. I do hope we’ll have something like that available, so that those of us who prefer IRC don’t have to use the web-based stuff. It’s unfortunate that a change from such a simple protocol has to take place simply because a few people had issues using IRC modes for moderation, but I guess that’s the way things are headed these days. The times sure are changing.

I fear you might be slightly connfused. Matrix is no more web-based than IRC is. Riot is a web-based Matrix client, same as Mibbit is to IRC.

Though most are in an alpha/beta state, there are a lot more Mtrix clients than this one. Here is a partial list.

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The Matrix protocol is based on HTTP requests. IRC is a simple TCP protocol, so simple that you can literally connect to an IRC server using netcat, if you don’t mind sending PONGs manually every now and then.

Purely out of curiosity, do we expect our Slack workspace to be shut down as we transition to Matrix? I could be wrong, but I suspect that many people would be tempted to keep using it unless we officially shut it down.

Great decision! As I said in my feedback, Matrix might not be perfect right now, but it has a ton of potential. Thanks for all the work y’all have put into this.

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My understanding is that the internal staff slack is not part of this plan, so no expected changed there.

Which is somewhat sad as it means that employee chat and volunteer chat will stay segregated (at least for now), but let’s see how that develops in the longer run. Hopefully more and more stuff will move to Matrix over time and we’ll have a common and FLOSS setup for sync chat across Mozilla.

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I suspect, and hope, that any employee and project that engages with contributors will have a place at Mozilla’s Matrix, which should avoid any communication gaps.

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Same. I thought the goal was to make FxA mandatory to anyone who wants to join the server. @mhoye can you confirm the server will be federated or not?

:ballot_box_with_check:

Smart decision. Thanks, folks.

Reactions in Reddit:

For users of the web interface to Riot:

Matrix-Static (debatably the most lightweight web client – read-only) is described as stable but I often find it down, or not working as expected.

Both of these lead to an error, I don’t know whether it’s expected (maybe some tightening of security) or a bug:

  1. https://matrix.to/#/!pARsEKXMEpjlJYVLqk:matrix.org/$1572455070917976sWSXy:matrix.org?via=matrix.org
  2. https://matrix.to/#/!GiBpZSGcdzTfkNXmer:matrix.org/$1572364800135220hTPCc:matrix.org?via=matrix.org&via=cybre.space&via=haun.guru

Matrix Static - Alias ERROR

Unable to Join Room.

This Room does not exist or does not permit guests to access it.

The second is somewhat peculiar because on the IRC side, there’s a public log e.g. https://mozilla.logbot.info/firefox/20191029#c16723019

There’s no way to know if a logbot’s in an IRC channel from the matrix side though. In general, the moznet rooms are all set up with the same minimal rights as far as I know on the matrix side. So this seems like an accurate error.

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OK,

Yep, I just found e.g. https://matrix.to/#/!OkcrSgHxzzzLELqtai:matrix.org/$157676883021227HipBM:matrix.org working as expected. Thanks :+1:

Hopefully no more extended down-times …

@mhoye would you like to remove the http:// link from the IRC address in the opening post? For it to appear as shown in this (modified) quote:

It’s not linked at your http://exple.tive.org/blarg/2019/12/19/over-the-line/ so I guess that the link here was automated by Discourse, not intended.


For curious readers:

What is the timeline for making https://chat.mozilla.org/ accessible to everyone? Many employees seem to have already switched to using it and IRC is unusually quiet.

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We’re aiming for tomorrow.

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Is there a documentation somewhere, especially for mobile users?

AFAIK, not yet. But don’t hesitate to join on the desktop version and ask questions :).

If it helps, I wrote this for the desktop version:

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