Chat.mozilla.org, our Matrix-based replacement for IRC, has been up running for about a month now.
While we’ve made a number of internal and community-facing announcements of our progress we’ve deliberately made this a quiet, cautious rollout, letting our communities find their way to Matrix organically while we sort out the bugs and rough edges of this new experience. Last week we turned on federation, the last major step towards opening Mozilla to the wider Matrix ecosystem.
It’s gone really well. As of last week, Mozilla’s transition from IRC to Matrix is within arm’s reach of done.
The Matrix team have been fantastic partners throughout this process, open to feedback and responsive to concerns throughout; we’ve already shipped a lot of bug fixes and cosmetic improvements based on feedback from the Mozilla community.
We still have work to do, but this far into the transition it sure feels like winning. The number of participants in our primary development channels has already exceeded their counterparts on IRC at their most active, and there’s no sign that’s slowing down. Many of our engineering and ops teams are idling or archiving their Slack channels and have moved entirely to Matrix, and that trend isn’t slowing down either.
As previously announced, we’re on schedule to turn off IRC.m.o at the end of the month, and don’t see a reason to reconsider that decision. So far we’re happy on the new system, and it’s working well for us.
Thank you all for your help.
