Mozilla IRC

» see irc.mozilla.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

I ran Firefox from the 1.0 era onward and never once opened irc.mozilla.org. That was the ordinary relationship people had with it. Moznet was not somewhere you went to chat, it was where a software project held its working day, and the crowd in there was the crowd writing the code.

IRC at Mozilla was inherited rather than chosen. When the project opened in 1998 it was the only synchronous tool going, so it became the default, and then it stayed the default for twenty-two years while everything around it changed twice over. Channels accumulated by the hundred, from #developers and #thunderbird down to localization rooms in more than forty languages.

What made it matter is that the rooms were open. A student could join #developers and be sitting in the same channel as Brendan Eich, and the archive of a decision was whoever happened to be reading at the time. David Humphrey, who arrived in 2004, put #developers at roughly three hundred people back then, and wrote later that the tools do not matter but the people do.

By the mid-2010s Mozilla's internal traffic had already gone to Slack, adopted around 2014. IRC stayed on as the community-facing door, which meant outside contributors were being pointed at the one room the organization had largely stopped living in.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the moderation problem ~

Mike Hoye posted the decision on 26 April 2019, under the title Synchronous Text. The case he made was about safety and he made it in plain words: IRC was an ongoing source of abuse and harassment for colleagues, and there was no authentication layer to hang any accountability from. Spambots were endemic. He wrote that it was irresponsible to ask people to work somewhere Mozilla could not keep healthy.

The second argument was duller and probably just as decisive. Connecting to IRC in 2019 was a real technical barrier for anyone arriving at Mozilla through a web browser, and school and corporate firewalls blocked the ports anyway.

~ the vote ~

The evaluation ran through 2019 and came down to four finalists: Mattermost, Matrix with the Riot client, Rocket.Chat, Slack. Each got a one-month trial. Mozilla announced on 19 December 2019 that it had chosen Matrix, hosted by Modular, with Riot on the front. Accessibility was one of the deciding factors, worked through with Mozilla's own accessibility team during the trial, along with the moderation tooling IRC had never had and could not have been given. The new home opened at chat.mozilla.org.

~ the day it died ~

Mozillians started turning up in Matrix rooms through January 2020. irc.mozilla.org went dark at noon Eastern on 2 March 2020, and the Matrix team marked it the next day with a post titled Moznet IRC is dead; long live Mozilla Matrix.

One thing went with it that no replacement could carry over. The network had been hosting the coordination channels of projects that were themselves already dead. Shumway, Mozilla's attempt at rebuilding Flash in JavaScript, ran its whole development in #shumway. Instantbird, which was an IRC client, was built by people talking on the server their client connected to.

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