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Comment by navait | Hacker News Reader

For talking about a race, Wired seems to have neglected a crucial technology: ircv3[1].

I'm not very fond of IRCv2, and have moved away from it where I previously used IRC. But IRC is popular, has a lot of clients, and v3 has a lot of promise. Why didn't the author bother to mention it?

[1]: http://ircv3.net/

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IRCv3 lacks a logo, a startup, and VC funding. So people who write tech news seem to often be unaware that it even exists.

Not sure why you were downvoted. What you said is true - there's little to write about for pure tech projects like that when there's no flashy video to show off. You'd have to figure out how to message it to reach a wider audience which honestly seems difficult to me.

It's also lacking adoption (which is understandable since it's not "officially released" yet).

I believe twitch uses ircv3.

Wow, you're correct. I did not know that. Fun!

Twitch is fairly-conforming to IRCv3... they don't prefix their non-standard capabilities with their domain in CAP LS. :>

I'm sad because I applied to Twitch directly stating what I'd want to work on with the IRC portal and never got a response. My entire work history is IRC. XD

Doesn't it also lack a common, arguably nice, frontend? With integrations to everything under the sun pre-built, requiring no management by the implementers? Built in bouncers, searchable history, etc?

A frontend is actually the one thing it's not lacking. IRCCloud.com supports ircv3 and is a very nice "slacky" UI to IRC.

Sadly IRCCloud is still lacking one 100% crucial feature: a backlog search. I've been a paying IRCCloud user for almost 2 years now and back then they already had the search feature on the roadmap as "coming soon". The only way right now is to keep scrolling and scrolling and then some more scrolling until you find what you are looking for. In a busy channel this is pretty much pointless.

Completely tangential but if you use quassel, check this little thing I built for a channel we own:

https://github.com/jleclanche/quassel-weblog

There's a demo in the URL field (not hotlinking here directly because it's a weak server). I didn't really document it but there's backlog search, ?highlight=<nick> functionality and it's straightforward to add functionality.

I agree it's "Slacky", but the interface itself is very much traditional IRC.

Hi, I wrote the Wired article in question. I hadn't heard about IRCv3, but it does sound like it would plug some of the holes in IRC that Slack users complain about. It wouldn't really have been a good fit for this article, since I was mostly focused on the two Slack-alikes with most traction, at least according to Black Duck's data (an imperfect measure to be sure) and IRCv3. As for why I didn't mention IRC in general, well, I alluded to it in the first sentence, but as many other people have mentioned, IRC just doesn't hold a lot of appeal in the business world, for various reasons.

Yet, in the open-source world, IRC is one of the primary mediums for community support and developer collaboration.

> Black Duck

Black Duck are not any kind of neutral source in free software matters.

>Why didn't the author bother to mention it?

It's a submarine for Mattermost which released a new version today

There's also Matrix.org. There seems to be a lot of overlap between the two projects.

Matrix is very different to IRCv3 actually - you can think of Matrix more as a openly federated object database with pubsub semantics and a standard HTTP API. One use happens to be group chat, others include WebRTC signalling, IOT data exchange, etc. Meanwhile IRCv3 is very much an evolution of classic IRC - it's still closed federation, uses the IRC line protocol, and is all about group chat. We're looking forward to bridging it into Matrix :)

I for one welcome our Matrix overlords, where all our communication needs are done over HTTP json requests, and you can have interop servers into every other network through federated gateways.

Honestly, it is the future. Everything except Ring / Tox* should just pack up and start contributing to Matrix :p

* Because there is still use for anonymous fully peer to peer messaging, but the marginal utility IMO does not outweigh the incredible tradeoffs you have to make to implement it for normal people (ie, no history, the need to pass around account tokens between devices, slowish message propagation).

IRCv3 has been around since 2004 and seems like it has largely failed to gain any traction, even among IRC networks - why would that change now?

The ircv3.net organization and the movement behind it started in 2012 and gained traction in 2014-2015. You're thinking of something else.

There's also this, which may be what I'm thinking of, and perhaps not official, but one of the first things I recall:

http://achurch.org/irc3/

Dating to 1999.

Some of the few features that are rolled into IRCv3 like SASL or CAP negotiation were widespread and specified on their own for long before IRCv3 was a thing.

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