Exploring new communication channels

[eeeeeta]

As far as I’m concerned, the optimal solution seems to be moving to a chat platform that has backwards-compatibility with existing IRC users whilst also making things significantly easier for new non-IRC users.

Gitter fulfilled these criteria rather well; I can connect to it with my IRC client, but regular users have a glossy web client to use instead. Discord is okay here; I can connect to it with bitlbee-discord, which works pretty well but is, as previously discussed, not something sanctioned by Discord staff. The question is: if Discord were to suddenly start cracking down on custom client users, as their ToS allows them to do, would the Rust team migrate away? If the answer is yes, I have no qualms with Discord.

Perhaps a better solution would be to set up something like discord-irc between the moznet IRC channels and the Discord ones, which both reduces setup time/faff for IRC users and moves us onto an officially-sanctioned way of using Discord.

To be totally honest, I can’t at all relate to the idea of not participating in a group where you have an important role to play just because you don’t want to install another chat client. I don’t think these two framings have anything like equal weight.

I think @aturon is pretty correct with this analysis - if all the discussion for Rust ends up being on Discord, most people will just use Discord. However, there are still some problems with this arrangement: blind users et al. are excluded, due to accessibility issues, and, perhaps more pressingly, the degree to which users idle on Discord would probably be reduced. IRC clients use very little CPU and RAM compared to the bloated Discord web client; therefore, some people will be unwilling to run Discord in the background all the time for notifications, while IRC remains usable for them. Essentially, Discord seems to sacrifice accessibility for some users (blind, having low-power computers, etc) whilst giving it to another set of users (new community members who aren’t used to IRC et al.).

[rishig]

Hi, Zulip developer here. At the risk of cross-posting with Where should the compiler team (and perhaps working groups) chat?, I just wanted to offer support, and answer any questions you may have about Zulip.

To answer some of the questions from this thread:

• Business model: We sell hosting on zulipchat.com, and enterprise support for on-premise deployments: https://zulipchat.com/plans/.

• Deleting of threads: Admins can delete messages and ban users, and also rename threads. Zulip threads are meant to be ephemeral, with the moderation (by design) happening on streams, messages, and users.

• Vendor lock-in: Zulip runs both in the cloud and on-premise, and we provide full exports: https://zulipchat.com/help/export-your-organization. The on-premise product is the same as the SAAS product, and there is no proprietary code (so e.g. running Zulip locally doesn’t need a a license.)

• Mobile: We’re working on it. We’ve put a lot of work on it since the beginning of the summer, and are going to continue to do so. The current version (released today) is already a lot more reliable than the version in July, and I use it pretty heavily when travelling.

• Bridging: It’s hard to satisfactorily bridge Zulip with IRC or Discord, due to the different conversation models, but we do bridge with email.

For accessibility: I suspect we’re considerably farther along than Discord is, and our goal is to make the main webapp a great experience for blind users. We’re not there yet, but I think we’ve gotten the basic framework right, and getting to good accessibility won’t involve throwing out lots of html.

Some things we have made a lot of progress on in the accessibility space are:

• Nearly everything in Zulip can be navigated via the keyboard (many of the developers of Zulip exclusively navigate Zulip from the keyboard, at this point).

• We have a terminal client (in alpha, but all of the basic functionality is there, and we’d love feedback).

• We bridge with email. It doesn’t support things like emoji reactions, but the basic “read and reply” functionality is there.

I’ll be checking this thread for a bit, but also feel free to find me on https://chat.zulip.org (Zulip community server) or at support@zulipchat.com at any time.

[Aaronepower]

Something that occurred to me after watching RustConf’s opening keynote, where it talks about the openness between the teams and the community. Is that Discord’s conversations aren’t able to be publicly linked. The team meetings should not be hidden behind a signup page, we should be able to link team conversations on the GitHub or Discourse with no wall to view them.

[steveklabnik]

Not every team has open meetings today.

[Aaronepower]

I didn’t say that they did, but we would be going from some(mostly?) open meetings to none. That is a step backward in being more open. I’m not saying all communication should be, for example moderation team shouldn’t have open meetings. But unless there is a good reason for it not to be we should have those meetings open and easily linkable.

[Mark_Simulacrum]

I would hope that we could work with Discord on making links to logs public for discords like ours where there’s no need to sign up (i.e., intentionally open), but even if that’s not possible, I think we can put together a bot that posts public logs…

[CAD97]

Just as a note, Discord is better than IRC in terms of logs, since Discord has a history to its messages (even if it is behind joining the server) whereas IRC has no intrinsic history.

If a history bot is appropriate for IRC in this regard, this isn’t a point against Discord in comparison to IRC. The bot is probably just as simple to get working as well, assuming you choose a language with bindings to the API.

A Discord log bot does have to handle edits in some manner though.

[Soni]

IRC is an open standard, it should be possible to add long-term, self-healing logging to it. And in fact I’m working on it.

[RalfJung]

You can scroll directly to the mention by clicking on the “@” button to see a list of mentions, either globally or filtered by server and channel. The button is in the upper-right corner on desktop, and at the bottom of the sidebar on mobile.

Turns out this does not work when you are on vacation for two weeks – that button only shows “recent mentions”. So I now have some 6 or so mentions from my time off that I have no way to locate. I guess people will ask again…

Gitter and Zulip actually track which mentions one has seen, and hence do not have this problem.

[est31]

So I’ve given this discord thing a try, and while the UI and everything is more or less bearable, one thing puts me off really badly: I’m being sent an e-mail every time I want to log in, and every time I’m getting a captcha. Why is this needed? Except of targeted harassment, I can’t think of anything else. You can prevent spambots very easily simply by sending an e-mail ONCE at account creation and requiring a captcha ONCE at account creation.

So I’m trying to use discord without an account now but guess what, you can’t write anything without being logged in.

Sorry but discord is not any more “user friendly” or whatever than IRC is.

[CAD97]

Do you happen to be connecting via VPN? (Or some other reason that your IP you connect from changes regularly?) The only reason I can find for Discord consistently sending emails to verify login is “new login location” protection. Apparently you can also bypass this by enabling mobile (QR) 2FA.

If it’s not a highly variable IP location that your connection comes from (or a high rate of device fingerprint changing), then it would seem the algorithm of malicious behavior has incorrectly flagged your behavior as potentially problematic, which is indeed unfortunate.

[est31]

Yes, sometimes I travel and change my IP address. Maybe I’ll need to set up a bouncer or something.

[RalfJung]

I also need to solve a CAPTCHA every other time I log in to Discord. Sometimes even two. And that’s despite discordapp.com even being whitelisted for storing cookies across sessions. In contrast, both gitter and zulip manage to just keep me logged in across a browser restart if cookies are preserved.

[notriddle]

I’d turn on TOTP 2FA, then.

[RalfJung]

I’d turn on TOTP 2FA, then.

Not sure how making logging in harder is supposed to help with login being too annoying.

But I have figured out what it was: I had configured Firefox to clean all “offline website data”. It seems that the cookie settings (which I set to “session only”) actually apply to this “offline data” as well, so I do not need to configure elsewhere again that it should be cleaned. Now at least it keeps me logged in across browser restarts.

[uberjay]

If you want (IMO) a great middle ground, check out the Cookie AutoDelete add-on.

With it, cookies for non-whitelisted domains are automatically deleted. There are a few options for when they are removed:

1. On browser close.
2. N seconds after tab close.
3. After domain change within one tab.

As with these sorts of things, they may cause unexpected breakage… It feels worth it, to me…

(OTOH, it does occasionally feel like I’m fighting a losing battle. ¯\(ツ)/¯)

[newpavlov]

Firefox can delete all cookies (except for white-listed domains) on exit without any addons and deny third-party cookies. See “Privacy & Security” section in settings. Though considering fingerprinting I am not sure about effectiveness of such measures.

[nox]

FYI Discord yet again changed their TOS in a stealthy fashion, including some new alarming tidbits.

https://www.dailydot.com/debug/discord-terms-of-service/

[Centril]

FYI Discord yet again changed their TOS in a stealthy fashion, including some new alarming tidbits.

Hey, so apparently Discord decided to quietly update their TOS with a clause that says you must forfeit your right to sue them or take part in a class-action lawsuit.

IANAL, and this may be of little consolation, but this may be null and void in some EU countries and elsewhere since you may not contract away some rights.

It might also violate GDPR, https://gdpr-info.eu/art-82-gdpr/

[gbutler]

Unfortunately, the U.S. people have decided that corporations should have more and greater rights than individuals in all cases and people should be subserviant to corporations. You can’t fight this on a case by base basis. It must be fought in the political realm through activism and, more importantly, intelligent voiting. Also, as @Centril points out, Discord could be setting themselves up for some real legal problems in non-US jurisdictions if they don’t watch it.