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Comment by JshWright | Hacker News Reader

I am a long time IRC user (irssi is my 'daily driver'), but I'm pretty sure IRCv3 is called "Slack".

Hooray for centralised, proprietary tools controlled by a single corporation! /s

Seriously though, I think this is exactly what is needed for IRC: a facelift. IRC is hugely superior to centralised tools like Slack for obvious reasons. But if people are moving to Slack it's not enough to say they should not do that, but try to actually offer a competitive user experience.

I can't say it's bad to update the IRC protocol, but I don't think it would make much difference either. What people don't realize with "decentralized" services is that they don't have a good ecosystem anymore. The web stack, which favors centralization, ships with usable encryption, user interface, distribution etc. To achieve similar end results with "conventional" stacks you will spend far more effort with far less developers to choose from.

People tend to dismiss web application development for being careless, but at the same time forget that this is what made these clear text fairly rudimentary protocols popular. Until we get encryption built-in, more robust programming languages and figure out distribution on the desktop it's unlikely that the ecosystem will come back.

If people are moving to other tools, you really can't say IRC is "superior for obvious reasons"

It's sad to me that open source projects so quickly reach for proprietary workflow tools like github and slack. There was a time when you would be laughed out of the room for suggesting that open source developers hinge a project on proprietary stuff.

Even though open source is "cool" now, I can't help but feel it's mostly people working for companies that just want to export their technical debt for free and use open source as a marketing tool.

> Even though open source is "cool" now, I can't help but feel it's mostly people working for companies > that just want to export their technical debt for free and use open source as a marketing tool.

I think it's more that originally FOSS developers/users were hard-core's who were into the tech and the ideology of 'Free Software'. The user-base now has many people who are into 'open source' for the collaborative (group motivation) and perceived technical benefits at an infrastructure level. It's a benefit because there's more 'free' code flowing around, but the downside is that as soon as a proprietary thing is better the user-base moves to it - they have no link with ideology, they're linked to utility.

God no. Please no.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11300687

I don't get this. Slack was made for small to medium teams. There's so many Slack chats are that unbearably slow (or expensive) because it can't handle that many users.

Also, I have to get invited, check my email, sign up, and skip the tutorial every time?

I'm realizing an emoticon might have helped clarity here... ;)

Eugh. You could at least choose an open standard like Matrix. http://matrix.org/

I hadn't heard of this. I just spent the last hour setting up my own federated server and playing with some clients. This is pretty great! A lot like Slack in terms of UX, but without the corporate walled garden.

Why?

To answer that question for yourself just requires reflecting on the benefits of open source vs. proprietary software.

Also, in this particular case, Matrix also appears to be a well thought out platform for decentralised communication, one that is likely to be flexible enough to meet the needs of multiple different forms of communication.

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