@mhoye The unfortunate thing about the move to Matrix is significantly more discussion started happening on Mozilla-internal Slack at the same time, and that really killed some of the open-by-default vibes, with some people scarcely checking Matrix.
Oct 15, 2026, 9:38 PM@gsnedders That didn't happen at the same time; the reality is that IRC usability was, compared to what was available, just so bad for so long that long before a single Mozilla slack instance was blessed, long before I was sent to get us an alternative to IRC, there were already _dozens and dozens_ of private shadow Slack instances all over the place for various teams and projects. Like, on the order of 180 of them. One of the biggest impetuses for moving to Slack was... most people already had.
@mhoye My recollection is very much that enough people were vaguely on IRC, even if a lot of the discussion was happening in the Slacks, to an extent that is no longer true with Matrix?
Like, you had both having to change the communication channel that was infrequently used by many people, plus the single Slack instance made possible more cross-team communication to happen within the private channels.
Certainly the stuff I was around (mostly platform, and especially a bunch of the tools & automation stuff), it was very much around the time of the Matrix move that much more discussion moved into private spheres.
(And like, I’m not gonna say that other corporate driven projects are better in this regard, but forcing people to transition to a new tool can definitely make this worse. And I’m certainly not defending IRC here, but it was at the time of the migration that things got worse as an occasional contributor.)