Mozilla previously used IRC to communicateWhich was seen as a serious barrier to connect newcomers to discussions. What's more, the moral and technical obsolescence of the IRC protocol was observed, which in modern realities is not so convenient, it is often blocked in firewalls and does not provide the proper tools to protect against spam and violation of communication standards.
In April of this year, Mozilla announced that it was closing its IRC channel., claiming that it created "unnecessary obstacles to participation in the Mozilla project", thereby the Mozilla IRC servers (irc.mozilla.org) will be discontinued in March 2020.
After that, few months ago (in September) mike hoye, Mozilla Community Engineering Manager, announced the four final candidates selected by the company to support the future of Mozilla's synchronous messaging system for the community. These were: Mattermost, Matrix / Riot.im, Rocket.Chat, and Slack.
These candidates were evaluated on a variety of axesMost importantly, the application and accessibility of the community participation guidelines, but also included the requirements of the engineering team, alignment of organizational values, usability, utility and cost.
We knew from the beginning that this would be a difficult process; that it had to be not just transparent but open, not just legitimate but seen as legitimate, that we had to meet our strict operational requirements while remaining true to our values in the process. Today, after nearly a year of researching, consulting, gathering requirements, testing the candidate stacks, and distilling everything we've learned in the process down to the essentials, I think we've done it. They commented on a blog post.
Mozilla announced recently that after almost a year of research, Query, Requirements Gathering, Candidate Stack Testing and Distillation, has finally managed to choose a candidate that unambiguously meets your institutional and operational needs.
"We have decided to replace IRC with Riot / Matrix, hosted by Modular.IM," said the group.
With the final decision from Mozilla, I argue the shift to the use of decentralized services for development of communication, built using the open Matrix platform. It was decided to launch the Matrix server using the Modular.im hosting service.
Matrix is recognized as optimal for communication among Mozilla developers, as it is an open project, it is not linked to centralized servers and proprietary developments, uses open standards, provides end-to-end encryption, supports unlimited search and viewing of correspondence history, can be used to transfer files, send notifications, and evaluate developer presence online, organizing conference calls, making voice calls and video.
The main criterion who guided the choice of Mozilla throughout the selection process of its new platform for communication in real time with the community it will have been the safety and accessibility of the community.
According to the Firefox publisher, the Riot / Matrix platform provides to individual community members effective tools for reporting violations of the Community Participation Guidelines Mozilla (CPG) and ensure your own safety.
Riot / Matrix was also the preferred choice of our team in terms of accessibility, thus avoiding the group having to choose between security and accessibility.
In this regard, he explained,
“While all candidates were found to be excellent tools for team collaboration and communication, Riot / Matrix stood out as an excellent tool for open community collaboration, with strong support for community accessibility and safety offering more services and autonomy to the participants, teams and communities that make up Mozilla ”.
Now that Mozilla has made its decision and formalized its relationship with the Modular.IM team, lThe company plans to launch the new service in January. Soon after, the Firefox publisher will begin migrating tools and forums to the new system, and no later than March 2020, it will permanently shut down IRC.mozilla.org.
Source: https://discourse.mozilla.org