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Heyo, I'm the head of snoonet. LTM provides servers for us, with no asks or meddling.

Andrew is passionate about IRC and has been for a very long time. This is just another outflowing of his vision and gratitude, not some kind of cash grab.

Re: University: It's a 'University' ON IRC, not ABOUT IRC. There will be partnered educators and developers teaching classes about many topics, likely a good portion development focused.

Re: Ventures: This isn't ventures FOR IRC, it's an incubator. The communication, application, and interaction will be centered on IRC, but the ventures will be varied.

The team working on irc.com has extensive experience of IRC communities and networks and will be opening the door to collaborations with others within the IRC environments, whether network operators or ircd developers and seeks to work closely with the wider community on these endeavors.

I know most of the people involved personally, feel free to ask questions if you want!

Since you offered, I'll ask. What's the down low on IRCv3? Is it actually going to ever have any sort of impact? It feels like too little too late. Far too late to ever have support in most clients.

IRCCloud implements it but servers don't, and IRCCloud feels kind of dead development wise. And it doesn't really solve the problems that Discord solves, for example.

The dream of instant messaging being built on top of open protocols, just like email, doesn't feel terribly far out of reach but it also doesn't feel like we're making progress towards it and the efforts spent on keeping IRC alive feel, at least to me, kind of futile compared to say, efforts spent on Matrix.

I don't think it's crazy to leave IRC behind, and most people who mourn it will either do so out of nostalgia, or because of the loss of an open protocol. I'd rather centralize on something that has a future though.

>What's the down low on IRCv3?

Well, it is, but it's slow. IRCCloud and KiwiIRC both use it, and IRC.com will support it as well. There are some exciting new plans surrounding encrypted voice and video on the Kiwi side, for example.

>doesn't really solve the problems that Discord solves

What specifically? Hard to address that one without more granular discussion points.

>it also doesn't feel like we're making progress towards it

It could be argued that IRC.com is going to be a major step toward more rapid progress, between the foundation funding development, and the likelihood that it will be an enormous network that's V3 compatible.

I've heard that Twitch implements some of IRCv3 (or at least uses that format for some of their custom message attributes); however my impression the last time I gave just a glance at IRCv3 was more of a cautionary learning example.

My biggest issue with the protocol is that if I want to develop for an advanced data interchange protocol there shouldn't be any optional extras. Everything should be in the spec and required of real clients. (I can, however, envision a protocol in which 'relay servers' exist that don't need to fully understand a message to pass it's content.)

Protocols which have a minimum implementation are fine. Protocols which prohibit extensions end up with them anyway.

Trust me, I attempted to veto a few things in IRC's early life, they are all in there now, can't stop them.

I'm part of LTM and starting to build up irc.com, along with founding kiwiirc.com.

I can say that London Trust Media does not impact freenode in any way - they purely fund it to keep it running so that they can focus on other areas.

As for the issues with IRC - I agree. Major improvements has happened already but it has a long way to go and that's why were putting money into it to boost these efforts. We have open source projects and fund open source projects, each one focussing on what the project communities and developers believe in.

What really is needed IMO is a place that can work on these things full time, prove that IRC can in fact work at scale and solve these problems, then others may hopefully follow. We fully intend on growing the IRC community as a whole - not just ourselves.

I’d rather see irc dead than turned into something else

How could any of this kill IRC? It's an open standard.

Embrace Extend Extinguish, the root of Electronic Evils. Hopefully it doesn't happen with IRC as it has with other lovely parts of electronic history. Microsoft was the origin of the term with their browser and OS products of old, yet it has been unfortunately more and more relevant with Google, particularly email and android openness (gmail only features and Google play services, respectively).

That didn't really answer the question that was asked. IRC is an open protocol. Whats your fear?

There are some seriously paranoid people on HN these days, and it is rather disenchanting to have to sift through all the negativity. Failure to embrace new things and new ways of doing things is a surefire way to irrelevancy.

London Trust Media owns the networks where almost all users are, and either funds and closely works with most client developers, or directly employees those.

That’s the fear.

The IRC protocol isn’t great, nor worthy of protection. The users, the community are.

If tomorrow freenode and snoonet went down, IRC would be forever changed.

It's being extingushed right now because nobody is extending or embracing it.

RSS is an open standard too, but Google effectively killed it.

They really didn't. Most websites that publish articles in any form still have RSS feeds, and there are plenty of feed readers out there that work.

“This is the kind of divisiveness that has paralyzed our country.” - Richard Stallman [1]

[1] http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/109

he seems to be purchasing influence/control by offering "jobs" to the people in charge of various IRC projects, publicly: freenode[1], kiwiirc[2] (and presumably snoonet) -- I've been told there are others (not public info)

he's also brought on board the disgraced mt. gox CEO as CTO -- what on earth is he up to?

[1] https://freenode.net/news/pia-fn: "Some of you might also find yourselves dealing with me in my new role as Director of Sponsorship and Events at Private Internet Access"

[2] https://kiwiirc.com/blog/Kiwi_IRC_gets_sponsored_by_PrivateI...

[3] https://www.newsbtc.com/2018/04/19/disgraced-ceo-of-mt-gox-a...

I’ve heard a lot of that, too – client devs getting approached and offered jobs with PIA.

I’ve gotten an "offer" once, too, inofficially, but I assume it was just a joke from them.

What was the offer?

It never got that far. They asked if I’d be interested in a job with them, I said no, never, and it stopped there.

As said, I assume they didn’t mean it seriously.

Kiwi IRC developer here that was sponsored and hired by LTM back in November, so I can give you a first hand account of how things are playing out.

Andrew is very passionate about IRC as you can see from the post. Most people developing IRC projects do it in their spare time which makes progressing them difficult. This was my personal position back in November. Since I was hired, I have been able to work on Kiwi IRC, introduce many new features and grow the project, all while the project is still open source. The biggest part - Andrew/LTM does not own kiwiirc. That is purely a separate project that he wanted to grow and he did so without taking ownership of it.

I have always been pushing for open sourcing projects - especially in the IRC community as it needs projects to flourish to compete with alternative and closed sourced messaging systems. I am now starting irc.com with funding from Andrew and London Trust Media with the exact same mindset. Hopefully we can combine and push IRC standards with the existing IRC community - that is, existing IRC server and client developers that may not have anything to do with irc.com.

For the IRC networks such as freenode, they are a vital network for open source developers and communities which I think we can all agree would be very upsetting if that was to be interrupted. London Trust Media has had no interference with the running of the network and does not plan to, other than providing sponsor support to keep the servers running.

those are nice observations you have as his patron, but you didn't really answer my question

it's not normal for a self-described businessman to give out money for free: so what's his long term plan behind all of this?

> For the IRC networks such as freenode, they are a vital network for open source developers and communities which I think we can all agree would be very upsetting if that was to be interrupted.

this statement is so disingenuous it sounds like the product of a PR department

running a large IRC network in 2018 can be done on AWS/GCP for hobby scale money, so it's not as if freenode risks disappearing without his patronage... however your/christel's income would, hence my (and others) concerns about the purchase of influence

(personally: if my "employer" hired Karpeles as their CTO I'd be out of there so fast it'd make your head spin)

> it's not normal for a self-described businessman to give out money for free

If that’s not normal then I don’t want to ever be normal.

I love this statement.

You're confusing business with charity. Business should never give out money for free, it wouldn't make sense.

Not all people work for money, sir.

I don’t.

His long term plan as his post mentions, is to grow and push IRC so that we can support large communities on IRC instead of them migrating to closed platforms. It's not normal for a businessman to spend so much money on this type of plan, I perfectly agree. But I've seen it happen, along with other IRC and open source projects that have nothing to do with LTM. See here for all the open source projects that a VPN supports without anything coming from it. https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/pages/companies-we-spo...

As for running a large IRC network, it's not just about the cost. It's the management, the running of the network, dealing with its users, etc. Protecting yourself from DDOS that still unfortunately happens amongst other attacks. It's not as simple as throwing it on "AWS/GCP for hobby scale money". (I say say that even though I don't run freenode).

IRC has fine support for emojis, works for me on a CLI IRC client.

it's up for your input method to allow inputting them, and up for your fonts to display them, and up for you to not force a stupid encoding.

Slack is today's version of a modern accessible IRC client.

It doesn't preclude from the issues of slack being solved by another group.

edit: For the IRC uninitiated who enjoy drive-by downvoting: Slack is IRC-inspired - the concept of channels, usernames, private messaging and bots.... in slack is almost all directly inherited from IRC.

Slack deprecated their IRC and XMPP gateways, so its no longer an IRC client.

And it never was an IRC client, there was just a somewhat limited bridge you could use to connect your IRC client into Slack network, but never vice-versa.

Slack is inspired by irc and uses irc's core approach of channels, usernames, messaging, bots, and more.

And how exactly does that make it an IRC client?

It doesn't, nobody said it was. Re-read the comment.

"its no longer an IRC client" definitely implies that it was an IRC client in the past.

Didn't say it was an irc client, but that it's today's (equivalent) of an irc client.

It's kind of laid out like some irc clients, have you used an irc client before?

I'm well aware they are deprecated.

Besides taking my comment literally (I now have clarified), lets look at it from a higher level:

The concept of channels, usernames, private messaging in Slack is almost all directly inherited from IRC. There is some great new functionality on top of this core, IRC inspired experience.

I'm not sure why everyone is downvoting this. To repeat myself from another thread: give people generous readings. Slack isn't literally a modern accessible IRC client, no, but it's "today's version," i.e., today's equivalent. Slack is absolutely IRC-inspired, and services like IRCCloud[1] suggest that it'd be possible to build most of what Slack "adds" to IRC on top of IRC's existing protocols.

[1]: https://www.irccloud.com

In a lot of ways, I think Slack's biggest advantage has just been ease of use in modern times: you don't need to know anything about downloading a client and configuring it -- even the friendliest IRC clients I've found are still pretty fiddly compared to "enter your team name, your email address, and your password, boom, done." But this seems like it'd be a relatively easy problem to solve.

Slack wins in ease of use. Although strangely their sign up process is cumbersome in their own way.

I suspect downvotes are from people who aren't comfortable with the idea of what's new... Is actually old and improving.

> server-side storage of history

You can do that with a bouncer. Slack and Discord are essentially a chat server with an integrated bouncer.

> mobile-friendly data usage

How is IRC not mobile-friendly? It only transports the raw text, not even "X is writing a message" notifications.

> first class support for emoji

Most clients support UTF-8, isn't it only a matter of fonts?

Though setting up an IRC bouncer is not exactly a trivial task. (It's one of the things on my summer to-do list.)

znc is apt install ... And a few edits in a config file.

Aren't there services that offer bouncer hosting, with some default config?

I recommend also trying Weechat running in screen/tmux on your server, connect to it over SSH.

Znc+mirc did work for me but things like scrollback and access from multiple devices are much nicer now with just my Weechat instance.

I used znc for a bit, but I'm trying to get weechat up and running (but, of course, using Emacs' ERC as my client) on a Rpi.

It's not mobile friendly because it requires a persistent connection and eats a lot of battery. That could be fixed with the right bouncer/client combination, but I haven't found it yet.

The Lounge works very well on a mobile: https://github.com/thelounge/thelounge

I'll check it out

> first class support for emoji

If you look at Twitch, as an example, I say that emoji support is absolutely fine. Though, I guess you somehow excluded that when you said: "[...]in its current form"? Nevertheless, it does show that implementing such a thing is not that much of a problem.

> first class support for emoji

I'm sorry. Even in 2018 I cannot take seriously any claim that "support for emoji" is being used to make business case decisions.

Having used slack at a business, emoji reactions to comments are an extremely valuable business feature -- they allow people to react without having to make a full-sized comment, which helps keep conversations compact.

for instance: https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2018/04/30/metoo/

There is nothing about emoji in this article.

The article is very relevant, it's using "reactions" instead of a full "me too" comment or email.

Slack just happens to express reactions using emoji.

I wish email had this feature. Sometimes I might ask someone to do something, and when they reply like "Done", it would be nice to just react with a thumbs up or something rather than continuing the chain of emails with a "Thank you" etc

Surprisingly, Office 365 Exchange + Outlook has this now. https://support.office.com/en-gb/article/like-an-email-messa...

> emoji reactions to comments are an extremely valuable business feature

How is it better than just having upvotes and downvotes like what's done on websites like HN, reddit, and Slashdot? Personally, I don't see much value when seeing 5 different reaction emojis right under a comment I post in a Slack channel.

You'd be surprised but I work at a company who has a product that is a Slack competitor in the business space (although they've repositioned to not go head-on at it any more..) and "doesn't have emoji/custom emoji" comes up A LOT. Probably the #1 most requested feature.

I watched as a Lack of emoji support took down a critical production database for over 100 non-profit organizations in 2015 and made ripples across the charitable giving sector.

All because someone included a smiley emoji while making a donation to a local community foundation. Lessons were learned because of poor planning admittedly but if you don't take emoji support seriously it's probably because you haven't suffered through a critical outage from poorly supporting character encodings.

We aren't a chat company. We don't even write email clients. We process transsctions. And we lost millions because of a single emoji.

There are different levels of emoji support - and I totally agree that "not crashing when emoji enter your systems" is a vital one to have these days - as is preserving those emojis unmangled.

For me the parent commenter's phrasing of "first class emoji support" goes rather beyond that, e.g. with friendly emoji pickers, maybe reaction emojis, custom emojis, different skin-tone emojis, etc.

I'd view that bigger level of support as extremely optional for a transaction processing company like yours, though less so for a chat system intended for broad appeal in 2018.

Sounds more like "Unicode support" or even "input sanitization" was the missing feature there. As long as you have bytes in = bytes out and you don't crash on unexpected input, you never need to know that emoji even exist to avoid these problems.

Yep, and this sounds even more fishy because the idea that no unintended unicode characters wouldnt be copied and pasted into a form field is a joke.

I would love to read the post-mortem on this one!

Times have certainly changed drastically. I remember when Google Talk was announced and the tech crowd of the day embraced it precisely because it didn't have emoticons (or custom fonts and colors, or games, or a host of other features MSN/AIM/etc. had and were beginning to be considered tacky). Maybe it's cyclical, and in a few years we'll be back to minimalism.

:) or nothing.

I know it's not the most popular, but I'm partial to =)

I've never minded =) but have always used :) for some reason.

So... you want to rebuild Slack? Why not just use Slack. I don't imagine the vast majority of people still using IRC want or need any of the things you listed as "common needs of today." I've been using IRC almost daily for a couple decades now and can't think of a single instance of someone saying "you know what we need? persistent logging and profile pictures and a graphical picture of poop!" Don't do this. You're making a mistake. IRC isn't a product for a market. It's a standard protocol that is so simple that it can be used via telnet. Don't ruin that.

You don't hear people saying things like "I want to be able to send/receive messages while offline on IRC" because they just use something else.

Just like you don't hear me wishing that PHP or Fortran had certain features.

It's not very good evidence.

>You don't hear people saying things like "I want to be able to send/receive messages while offline on IRC" because they just use something else.

Almost. They still use IRC - but they extend functionality "outside of IRC" with bots. You don't hear this because people make bots with .tell commands that supplement this functionality. The next time a user logs in the bot will /msg them something like "You have 1 message. Use .read list to see a list of unread messages" then they ".read 1" they can then .reply or send their own .tell

Anything IRC "needs" gets supplemented by a bot that takes care of the functionality.

I hope you're aware of how convoluted that sounds in 2018 :)

Except the opposite is true. I know plenty of people who intentionally use IRC because it _doesn't_ do those things. It hasn't been the victim of feature creep. Hell, even networks with services (chanserv, nickserv, etc) are often looked down upon. There's no walled garden, a very low barrier to entry and everyone speaks the same protocol. Think of the mess of incompatibilities you'll end up with, when someone's using ircII and someone else is using mIRC and yet another person is using shiny-new-feature-laden-client. If you'd like to see what that looks like, go back in time six months and connect to a slack IRC gateway. It was a mess (but it was the only way to get /ignore).

IRC is fine.

Maybe to extend a good open standard. Which would also be of benefit to people currently using it. Personally, I'm not keen on using some proprietary, inflexible solution like Slack. To me referring to this as 'rebuilding Slack' is sort of like talking about Thunderbird or Gmail as 'rebuilding Facebook Messenger'.