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Wow... So, Mozilla's apparently giving up on IRC[1]. My money is on them trying
to move to Discord, and giving FOSS and the community the middle finger, since
that's what Chris Beard's rule seems to do at every turn.

What I find worst of all is the list of what they're looking for. Specifically,
"We are evaluating products, not protocols." Yes, because so many have lasted 
for long periods of time without an untimely and sudden death due to stupid 
management. GTalk, Google Hangouts (Business only now), Skype (around, but 
sucks), AIM, Yahoo! Messenger, Windows Live Messenger...

Seriously, I don't know what's going through their heads right now, but I'm
worried about Mozilla as a whole. It's moving so far away from the FOSS 
mentality that it hurts, and I've been a Mozilla user since the early days with
the suite. It's why I use /SeaMonkey/ as my main browser, since I love the 
all-in-one nature of it. It's why've backed Mozilla for so long, only to really
get pissed off when they started turning their backs on the community.

Unless they're moving to Matrix or Zulip, they're gonna be looking at
completely closed-source alternatives, and Discord is the only one that would
even moderately work at their level. I mean, their Rust team already uses it.
It has about as much accessability for the blind and visually handicaped as a
silent movie, but hey, who cares? It sure seems like their management doesn't.

(Disclaimer: I've never met Chris Beard, but after losing my beloved FirefoxOS,
watching as the close-knit community was pretty much ignored during their
"rebranding", watched as everything that made Mozilla awesome was turned
corporate, and now this? I'm convinced he's either a Google plant to ruin the
foundation, or just doesn't get what made Mozilla such an awesome team outside
of MoCo. Yes, I'm still bitter about what the LGBTQA+ community did to Brendan
Eich, and I'm trans*. But I'm more bitter about losing FirefoxOS, and all the 
promises MoCo.)

Yeah, I'm being harsh on them, but given their track record for the last few
years, I don't think it's without merit. I mean, the Mr. Robot incident was a
/really/ good indication of that[3]. To give up on an internet standard instead
of improving it is sad to see. Especially with the likes of XMPP still being
around.

And to give up the reins of keeping the service in-house gives me pause, since
there's no guarantee that whatever service they choose will honor any sort of
privacy guarantee for its users if they're ever bought out. Protocols can't be
bought out, only companies and services, and Mozilla's walking straight into 
that very trap.

(Aside: I actually use a heavily reduced version of Discord through an IRC
gateway via bitlbee. It's reduced because there really aren't APIs for the more
advanced features, but given that the best alternative client is pretty much a
"use at your own risk" according to Discord's devs, I don't think they'll be
coming any time soon. It took *years* for basic presence indications to show
up.)

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In other news, I knew iCloud Mail was blackholeing emails, but I didn't expect
GMail to be doing the same[4]. Granted, GMail is less /email/ and more /"we're
doing what we did to GTalk those years ago and building upon something open
until we have enough of a base to make our own proprietary thing."/

I don't use GMail anymore, and I don't want to use Outlook or iCloud, but right
now, I can't get time to set up my own in-house mail server to keep running, so
I've gotta have something to use. I've got my own domain[5], it's just the 
server itself and all the setup it needs.

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[1]: http://exple.tive.org/blarg/2019/04/26/synchronous-text/
[2]: https://blog.rust-lang.org/2019/04/26/Mozilla-IRC-Sunset-and-the-Rust-Channel.html
[3]: https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/16/16784628/mozilla-mr-robot-arg-plugin-firefox-looking-glass
[4]: https://www.tablix.org/~avian/blog/archives/2019/04/google_is_eating_our_mail/
[5]: gopher://gopher.prismdragon.net/