IRC will never get popular again. Server-based history and connections shared across devices are just too useful.
1. https://www.quakenet.org/articles/99-trust-is-not-transitive...
https://web.archive.org/web/20170629073046/https://www.quake...
The argument is that there's no way to move the whole IRC ecosystem to use TLS (including with enforcement of certificate checks on the client side) and so the security benefits will be radically degraded by patchwork adoption, because if even one channel participant accepts a MITM attack, all channel participants' communications will be exposed.
This seems correct to me, but I still don't find it to be an argument against TLS on IRC, just an argument that security indications perhaps shouldn't be presented to users to confirm that their communications are secure since they do depend on behaviors of remote clients that the local user's client can't confirm easily. After all, suppose you're in a channel with only 3 or 4 people and all of them are enforcing certificate checks. Then you have gotten lucky and received a tangible security improvement. Likewise for direct messages with one other user. But indeed, in the common case of a large heterogeneous IRC channel, probably there will most often be no security gain in practice against a powerful network adversary.
(And it's also a benefit for a user who's individually concerned about a nearby network adversary more than about pervasive monitoring.)
Which does not map all cases. Queries are still far from dead. And you don't want to set up a small IRCd for shady things because that might tick off law enforcement a lot more than sticking to some established network whose security you trust.
Saves me the trouble of writing it out myself I guess
QuakeNet != Rest of IRC.
IRC has deficiencies that ensure that only a small cabal of power users will endure it. I prefer to be part of communities that are more accessible to more walks of life than the person who was bothered to install irssi on his spare EC2 instance.
People who suggest that IRC is the pinnacle of chat really seem out of touch to me. For example, look how every Twitch streamer and subreddit have a Discord and almost never an IRC channel.
Then why argue for IRC to be updated with features? Why not go somewhere else and leave the cabal alone?
The key is in the clients, not the protocol.
I've been in, and now run, a channel for about twenty years that, at its peak, had about a hundred active users.
Most of those people were normal folks, from all walks of life, many of whom barely knew how to use a computer.
I would argue that it's only power users who want chat history in the first place. Normal people don't want to go back and read god-knows-how-many lines since they last logged in. They just want to chat.
Offline messaging is a valuable feature for everyone and can be improved by services, without needing a bouncer. Many networks have a "memoserv" that does this. Improve the UX of something like that (should be transparent, no different from a normal pm) and you have good offline messaging.
P.S. You only need one IRCCloud sub for _all_ the channels + servers you want to lurk in.
Of course I mean 'very easy' for someone who is used to the technical side of things. A normal user of GUI webapps likely isn't interested.
Then it's not "very easy". It's "mildly complicated" at best. For IRC to succeed it needs to actually be very easy for all users, going down to very basic users who likely have never even heard of the terminal, let alone touched it.
Note that it doesn't support mobile devices (in theory someone could submit a pull request to change that, but they'd probably need to write an additional QT GUI that worked correctly for them).
There's a neat app for Android called Quasseldroid!
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.iskrembile...
That way you could have full history of the channel provided someone remains in the channel or keeps it pinned.
Maybe it's an entirely new protocol but it seems that we don't need a centralized server to fulfill your requirements now.