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Comment by CornCobs | Hacker News Reader

The identical experience of libera chat makes me realize how useful open protocols are, and how much harder it would be to do something like this with some platform like discord

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I don't use Discord but apparently there was some pretty drama a couple of weeks ago because they made a bunch of changes to the UI of the client that apparently the community didn't like.

If you want to have control of your platform then don't use closed source, proprietary solutions!

While I do hate that Discord is being used for all chat needs instead of just sticking to being a replacement for Ventrilo or Skype for gaming groups, I want to point out that the drama is a massive overreaction. Discord made very minor style changes and slightly modified their logo, wordmark, and brand color scheme (with the logo being the only one of those you really end up seeing inside the application).

As a colorblind user, the redesign decreased the accessibility of the application. Other users with visual impairments have reported similar issues.

It's just the logo though, no? The actual UI is still the same and no color changes have occurred within the app (for both light mode and dark mode).

There were a couple color changes made. I'm on the dark theme and this is what I saw:

They made the blue on some buttons more saturated. I don't really have a problem with this.

They made the highlight color of user and channel mentions more brighter. This hurt readability as the text is white. Making the background of the text brighter decreases contrast.

I thought they seemed like trivial changes as well, although not being a user myself I couldn't really form an opinion.

Still, it should serve as a wakeup call that the users really aren't in charge and that it can potentially suck. It's a taste of things to come whenever Discord decides to more aggressively monetize themselves for instance.

But apparently the conclusion was more that they should insult the devs on twitter and reddit instead.

I use Discord (grudgingly) and I have to admit

I did not, and do not, give a single shit about the change. It's a god damn icon for like 99% of people

I guess some people just want to sit and gawk at their start menu for hours on end and Discords change has broken that zen-like meditation for them or something

I feel it's a classic example of bikeshedding. Except this is 2021, so the obvious solution is apparently harassment, anger, and vitriol.

Someone up-thread made mention of the stylistic changes being problematic for people with visual impairment or low vision, which would seem to me to be a much more serious issue than a stupid icon.

But, what do I know? When they announced the change, I had an incredibly difficult time feeling anything other than indifference. Why people would be upset is beyond me.

I use discord almost daily and didn't even notice any changes. The UI is still garbage and it still makes random notification sounds with no indication as to why.

The random notification sounds are because default server notification settings are set by the server owner. So when you join a server, its notification setting could be "all messages" or "mentions only" depending on what the server owner set. This setting only affects the notification sound (it doesn't badge the server or anything), so it's easy to misunderstand.

If it's easy to misunderstand then it's bad UX. Discord's chat could learn a lot from Slack and Mattermost (but then again, so could Signal, Skype and Teams). Their videoconf however is top notch.

Oh, yeah, I agree it's bad UX. I just wanted to explain what you as a user can do about it.

You also forget to mention they changed the font of certain UI elements to the same as the wordmark, namely the server name. The legibility of the new font is objectively worse than the previous one, though as long as it remains exclusive to the server name I agree, it's not that big of a deal.

Thank you for the clear description of the change. It seemed like this was a teapot typhoon, but I was not quite interested enough to lift the lid myself.

Yeah, I did not like the change but it was a tiny change so I agree with that it was an overreaction.

They just changed their logo and primary brand color slightly. Although I agree it is worse, hardly can call that "UI changes"

also fonts were replaced and the background colors of mentions/reactions made less prominent

Not too long ago Slack supported IRC gateways, with limited features of course.

It was a good way of appeasing people who prefer IRC/XMPP and getting them to accept the walled garden.

A good trick because once slack is adopted it's very difficult to get rid of it for most companies.

When the IRC gateway stopped working, I found https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack worked pretty well. But I switched employers months ago and no longer have to use Slack, which is even better! (So, I don't know how well it works today.)

You have to install it as an app on slacks side. Some employers don’t allow that.

It's not IRC, but there exists a working libpurple plugin that you just auth as with your normal user account:

https://github.com/dylex/slack-libpurple

I just use it with Pidgin, but there are curses clients too (I'm aware of bitlbee, there are probably others) if you prefer the IRC-style experience.

There used to be two variants that worked; I think the other is "session tokens?"[0]

Not sure if that approach still works, or not.

[0]: https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack#get-a-session-token

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish...

I think that's just because of the simplicity of IRC - migrating off of discord would entail a lot of friction because of the features it gives you, like super granular permissions and access to channels. IRC channels are just places to chat with minor access control, so moving is easy as long as the community/people move.

It would be enough for each node, to know the whole contact graph, and have that stored in a open format?

Like a xml adressbook, that could be parsed by any software and could be created even with limited apis as provided by discord etc.

It's not the network, though - it's the experience. When some community decides to up and move to libera, I connect and register with the new server and it's literally the same thing.

Clients create the UX and the community creates the content.

Now I imagine trying to get a community off discord to a different platform with slightly different interactions, slightly different "channel" styles, different reactions or role-setting, would be a much harder sell.

That being said, I have nothing against discord - I think they've made a really compelling product and have certainly set a bar for what a future open protocol should cover if it wants to be relevant

Good usecase for Solid (https://solidproject.org/).

It's also a good use case for a good old .vcard, which already has semantics for plenty of contact fields, so I wouldn't be surprised if there are some for IRC.

Modern phones have done their utmost to end these. If you even find the option to load a vcard they will (often sneakily) copy the contents to Google Contacts or similar, and you don't know if the phone is even keeping the vcard updated. It has made the approach feel unreliable.

I've switched to self-hosting my contacts with Radicale[0] (with "backups" to a git repo) synced via DavX5[1], with no problem of them mixing with Google Contacts. It's pretty annoying though that basically no current contacts app recognizes common fields like the nickname for a person.

[0]: https://radicale.org/

[1]: https://www.davx5.com/

I fully expected some blockchain nonsense opening your link, I'm pleasantly surprised.

It seems like an interesting project but I wonder if it has any chance of reaching critical mass. The incumbents have no incentives to interoperate with such a protocol as far as I can tell.

The same is true for any open protocol, at least at first. Any open protocol has to reach widespread usage first, and only then will incumbents have to adopt it. That's an extremely difficult task, but hopefully not impossible.

Is there a single example in recent memory of an open protocol achieving mainstream success without being sponsored by a large company?

I really wish something like this Solid protocol would succeed, but I don't see how you could generate enough momentum for it at the moment.

I'm not aware of any, no, and there's 0 incentive for any large company to sponsor one.

Which large company sponsors Bitcoin?

ActivityPub?

Matrix (before they landed their gov contracts etc)?

I wouldn't say it was a 1:1 identical experience; registering was a pain as there was no process to take over user registrations or channel registrations from freenode.

But, assuming you did those things smoothly then it was pretty identical and as simple as changing your client config to connect to libera instead of freenode.

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