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nopacience

Long live IRC

There will always be new platforms like slack, discord, gitter, and whatever. IRC was and still is great.

IRC is simple, its text, its stable. Its simple to program on and a lot can be done above it.

IRC is open.

The basis of old internet protocols are simple, open and powerful

Email, IRC, HTML, FTP

And as the article points out, irc has no face. IRC was a time people had to ask for a picture. Different from the newer trendier platforms. Back then people used to engage a lot more before they became curios to put a face on a nickname.

The internet has been inundated with the "average" people who unfortunately are not interested in "aplications" like mIRC/irssi/bitchX. Looks like average people need apps that are simpler to use than IRC, apps that allow them to promote their profile to the next level, have followers and likes statistic. Which is alright, in the end they are just the average people that wont put effort to learn nonclickable platforms like IRC.

The web really exploded when the smartphone came and apps like facebook came also and made the average people go online and understand what internet was for. There was a time when only the nerds understood what internet really was. Nowadays the internet guy is not a "nerd" anymore. Nerd is not perjorative as it once was.

IRC is still open, IRC is still kicking.

If you are on IRC, dont let the shiny and newer take you out from IRC.

Long live IRC

View on HN

I used command line IRC clients in the 1990s. I wrote IRC clients in the 1990s. I'm not interested in going back to IRC, an "open" 7-bit effectively-centralized protocol with line-length limits and lowest-common-denominator clients that can't even show an image.

I don't use Mutt to get access to my email, anymore, either.

I guess that makes me "average".

IRC, FTP, and, yes, SMTP are all bad protocols from the 1980s era of protocol design. All are on their way out, some more gradually than others. Good riddance. How sad it would be if the Internet of 2020 looked the same as it did in 1995.

A protocol existing is better than no protocol at all.

In the modern age of surveillance some protocols could be actively worse. Sad times, but IRC has no real place in the world of someone hoping to preserve their privacy.

Are you implying that discord, slack, et al have a better privacy model?

Signal, keybase, iMessage all have a better privacy model.

Signal requires a phone number. Keybase is an identity service. iMessage requires a phone number and is not verifiable.

IRC on the other hand allows ephemeral usernames, you have the option to use e2e encryption if you choose, etc.

iMessage doesn't require a phone number. You can use it with just an email address.

I mean, you do need an Apple ID to do it that way. But I don't think there's anything stopping you from creating throwaway Apple IDs.

> "... IRC has no real place in the world of someone hoping to preserve their privacy."

Why is that? IRC supports SSL, of course, and many IRC networks offer "cloaks" (to hide your IP address from other users) and/or permit connections via Tor.

“Supports” is the real non starter. “Requires” is what we are looking for.

Most networks support a channel mode that only lets people connected to the server via SSL join the channel.

Some networks only let people connect via SSL.

The privacy story for SSL is no better than the privacy story that Slack offers. Basically, you're proposing a level of privacy that only asymptotically approaches the most popular unencrypted web chat program in the world.

Cloaks aren't reliable and there are a few tricks to uncloak a user anyway.

Tricks? Can you elaborate?

Like what outside of taking the scope outside of the IRC client (external link, etc)

An IRC cloak is programmed into the ircd itself ensuring that ones IP address is not exposed. I don’t think you can just hack that. If you use the external link trick, everyone is susceptible to that no matter what app/platform they use unless you use a VPN or Tor.

That depends on the ircd, but on Freenode you could decloak using the services to ban the user from channel using IP ranges and see if they trigger (I think. It has been a few years since I this trick used, and it might've not even been bans). Extremely inefficient, but if you have a bouncer with auto rejoin on...

In any case there are some really obsessed people who probably know a hundred ways to take over your channels at the very least. Seeing some of these people do their thing is one of the reasons why I steer clear of IRC these days.

Channel takeovers aren't really a thing on modern networks with good services.

The Freenode decloak trick still works, though.

Speaking as a freenode staffer:

1) There are a number of ways to decloak somebody purely via irc/ircd fuckery - though it's liable to require several minutes of dedicated effort to do so.

2) There's a non-zero likelihood that if you try any of those ways we will spot you and k-line you.

3) That likelihood is not a guarantee, so when cloaking people we always make sure to warn them first that cloaks aren't 100% reliable and if users really want to protect their IP address they want a VPS, a VPN, or tor.

4) No, I'm not going to be any less vague about 1, just because it's not actually hard doesn't mean I want to encourage it.

I think this is getting aside of the topic of what privacy really is for most people. IRC by default does not encourage endless selfies or oversharing that the modern social networks promote.

I've never seen an ircd cloak instruction page misrepresent what they can and cannot do. While protecting IP addresses is important (which the GDPR also believes in), I think it's also important to not lose perspective of the bigger dangers out there right now such as default user behaviour and conditioning. For example, IRC has never led to huge numbers of people publicly humiliating themselves by bitching about their employers, etc.

I would be happy if it looked like 1995. It was actually decentralized.

IRC, FTP, and SMTP are all decentralized. That's the good part about them.

If IRC is decentralised, then so is Slack and all it's clones. Except they're not.

Cool, I look forward to connecting to your Slack server.

Self hosted and centralised are two separate concepts. IRC is very much a centralised service even if you can host your own servers. Matrix would be a better example of a decentralised protocol.

> IRC is very much a centralised service even if you can host your own servers

IRC being an open protocol and having the option to run your own servers is what makes it decentralized. The various "major" IRC networks (EFnet, Freenode etc) are decentralized too, since they are isolated networks.

Slack offer neither of these - they own all servers, the protocol and controls the API (which is not the same as an open protocol).

Not only that, but it didn't require nearly as much bandwidth. AFAIK, most "modern" web services today would not be usable over a dial-up speed connection.

I agree that IRC is an obsolete protocol, but it's still sad that open standards lost the chat wars. XMPP improves on all of the things you mentioned but it looks like its moment in the sun has passed, and was never really used to its potential in the first place.

I wish open standards, and the tools that facilitated them, were more welcoming to the 'average' crowd. I used to use IRC in the past. I still do but it's just couple of logins a month. Even many of the support channels I used to frequent from OSS have moved to other platforms. Hobby channels etc have moved elsewhere long back.

I faced the same problem with IRC that I am facing with Signal today. Though this analogy doesn't really seem that coherent but I hope you see where I am coming from. No one I would like to communicate with via such apps/platforms seems to use it. IRC is great but I would like to connect it with people I know, are part of something I like or do, or are from the place I belong to. They don't. They have moved to other platforms, long back, or never really used IRC.

I believe a lot of existing IRC users, including me, are still around just because of the nostalgia.

They're not welcoming because they're fundamentally bound by the lowest common denominator of the platform. You can't provide any feature every client doesn't offer, or the feature just generates immense confusion and frustration.

What functional improvements are fundamentally incompatible with the "old" protocols? Longer lines could have been supported with a minor protocol revision. Giving customers the freedom to use clients that don't render images, or markup, is actually a positive.

I setup Mattermost for my company. The deciding factor between Mattermost and IRC was effort to get non-technical users a nice GUI. Functionally, IRC would have won.

it feel a bit biased when you say that IRC could have a protocol bump, but you wouldn't make the same modifications to hide pictures in Mattermost.

Additionally not being able to share images as a feature? I guess everyone will do the three step upload to imgur first.

In my world - if I could get away with less different clients I would. It makes it a nightmare to support.

The protocol itself doesn't bar you from implementing image sharing.

Imagine this:

You have a bot in your channel that accepts an "upload-image" command followed by a base64-encoded string representing an image (or a series of these commands if line-lenght is limited, I'm not sure about this part of the IRC protocol). The bot checks that the image is actually an image (to avoid weird injection tricks), saves it on the server and returns a link you can share or sends the link directly to the user/channel of your choosing.

This can be automated with a irc client, of course. Users using old clients will receive an actual link, users of this supposed new client see a clickable preview of the actual image inline.

Sounds like you're describing a new protocol.

Would you consider adding a new HTML element to be describing a new protocol instead of http? w3m still speaks http but is unable to render the IMG tag (and instead substitutes that with a descriptive text, if available), while, e.g. Firefox shows an actual picture.

I mean, this proposal is to build it on top of IRC, it doesn't need to change how the IRC protocol works. We're speaking a level above that.

IRC protocol is actually really simple, you just have commands and parameters. AFAIK it is not unusual for IRC servers to implement extra functionalities through bots.

For example to provide authentication many servers provide a bot called NickServ. There could also be a mechanism called ProfileServ that implements these functionalities.

The beauty of IRC is that you can open telnet, connect to an IRC server and actually be able to chat by typing raw commands.

The problem with IRC is that there is no standard specification, and there are many many edge cases. Therefore in my experience most IRC clients implement a small subset of the IRC protocol.

I've been trying to write an irc client in Go for quite some time (https://github.com/terminalcommand/irc-v2). It's been a fun experience, but there is still a lot to cover.

> standard specification

RFC 1459

Unfortunately RFC 1459 is just the shallow end. It both includes features that no-one uses anymore, and excludes widely-deployed features that everyone relies on. Lots of the de-facto IRC protocol isn't written down anywhere outside various client and server codebases.

The situation is not unlike that of terminal control sequences. The core VT10x functionality is more-or-less mostly in place, ish, in every terminal emulator, but some of the VT10x functionality is no longer implemented, and lots of subsequent useful functionality isn't well documented, so implementors are left to crib from other implementations.

I believe that https://modern.ircdocs.horse/ documents how the IRC protocol is currently used (and I'm not sure why they chose that particular tld).

Ircdocs.horse is an excellent resource but it is unfortunately not complete.

Irc also has a lot of -to me at least- obscure specifications for example involving channel modes. The functionality differs from server to server.

I have the impression that most irc servers are operated by programs with old codebases coded in C. New client implementations are continuing to get written, but I do not see a lot of server implementations around, probably because it is complicated to write.

I think the beauty of IRC and the previous way of thinking when we built the internet was just this - we could hack any change or additional layer into the software that we used.

IRC was, with the exception of simple clients, codable, scriptable, extensible.*

Software today is “what you get is all you get.” It’s pretty sad.

* It was a human body script that caused you to look at this “*”. Scripting is powerful.

> This can be automated with a irc client, of course.

And of course it was automated. There are any number of such clients. Slack. Facebook Messenger. WeChat. Viber. Dozens of them. Of course they don't use IRC. But they automate file delivery. And media inlining. And dozens, if not hundreds of other things.

Meanwhile the "nothing stops you from implementing" crowd implements nothing and keeps wondering why basically no one uses these wonderful open protocols.

> Additionally not being able to share images as a feature? I guess everyone will do the three step upload to imgur first.

Maybe I'm missing the point here: But IRC does have a file transfer feature, so what would stop people from sharing images just the same way like plenty of "content" has been shared over IRC?

Have you ever tried it? 90% of the time I tried it didn't work, in mirc or irssi.

dcc sends and xdcc bots were pretty influential in the early internet. It definitely works.

It does require that one open a port in their firewall for it to actually work. xdcc bots usually would indicate which port one needed to open.

Having open ports directly to the internet (by default) with dial up modems (before routers and NAT) used to be such a common practice. Things have changed, haven't they?

That's a pretty good point I totally forgot about. Tho couldn't that problem "simply" be solved by updating the protocol to account for these changes?

IRC used to be a pretty popular distribution channel for Warez, tho it's been like 20 years ago I used it for anything like that.

dcc and xdcc can only be used to send an image to a single client, so sending an image to a channel is a no-go.

> Additionally not being able to share images as a feature? I guess everyone will do the three step upload to imgur first.

That's a feature for me. If I wanted to be constantly barraged with images, I would have stayed using Facebook and Twitter. People on IRC posting imgur links gives me the opportunity to accept or decline (usually based on their reputation, the channel's response, or my boredom). With other social networks, images are almost always unsolicited and often only waste scroll space (good luck to those still on limited data plans and want to know the context of the latest notification).

Besides, text often can have more substance and precise meaning (even if it's not perfect all the time). After all, we're all communicating with mostly just text right here. Another example of something else that features mostly text are books, so it's certainly not deprecated.

Give me all the text please - in fact, if you give me an image with a caption, I'll read the caption first. I can happily find images through other mediums so IRC without embedded images isn't a problem at all here.

What's the problem? Just setup client to hide images unless you click the link provided - Slack have it, Discord have it. Works exactly the same way, no 3rd party involved. I'm sick when I have to go to imgur to open image and load tons of scripts and see other stuff completely unrelevant. You think imgur doesn't live for profit?

I use mutt. It's a big increase in security compared to the typical email client exactly because it's below the common denominator. And yet it does what a startup executive needs, except for the occasional message I forward to Other Devices to view. With one keystroke.

Then again, if you want to equate the badness of IRC and FTP, which is much earlier than IRC and much more of a security problem, you're making a poor quality argument anyway. Dumpster fires and garbage dump fires are different orders of magnitude.

The flaws you listed are qualities in the eyes of some. Still no better place to meet cool people where the face and name are an afterthought and at the end of the day, to me, that wins over technical merit.

I don't think people want IRC for the lack of functionality. I think they miss IRC because they see in Slack a real threat to decentralization, privacy and openness.

I don't use IRC. But I'd never use Slack either in a project I maintain/lead. We need a better alternative.

Matrix?

Certainly a huge improvement over Slack in that it's federated. It's not quite there yet, but certainly usable today - it needs to mature a little yet.

Also, slack is like a dumbed down version of IRC. As an example, on IRC you could run an auction or a 10000 person university lecture because there is a +m channel mode (moderation).

+m quiets all users in the channel and only allows you to speak if you receive the channel-user mode +v (voice) or have +o (operator status). Some ircds also have a +h etc.

You can setup bots like “RaiseYourHand” for people who want to ask questions and need temporary voice (+v).

Try that on slack, telegram, signal, etc. Its impossible.

IRC was ACTUALLY built for collaboration and communication. Slack was built to make money.

The difference in goals causes a different outcome.

While I get where you're coming at, but it is indeed possible in Telegram, not sure regarding Slack.

Actually, Discord does this pretty well. I honestly consider it a 21st century successor to IRC. The unfortunate fact is that Discord is still a closed system, with not even the ability to run your own instance, instead with the owners insisting on a cloud-run infrastructure.

Just imagine how much better Discord, Slack, et al. could be if you could host your own instances with your own rules and with your own extensions.

If it is closed (and nominally 'free' for the average user), you have to assume everything you say and do is being mined and sold to the highest bidder. How can something like that be the successor to anything?

> I don't think people want IRC for the lack of functionality.

I do, and I think it's a good constraint (better than the 140/280 char Tweet restriction). No excessive notifications by default, no impatient people (at least largely not because they don't tend to hang around anyway). The pace is more predictable and consistent, and it's easier than ever to have a 24/7 detached client/bouncer.

For some years, fancier services like Facebook robbed creativity and time from me but lately I've returned to a more simple flow that isn't affected by Eternal September.

IRC has a certain barrier of entry, so that tends to keep a lot of the low quality noise away (where it remains on other platforms such as Discord and YouTube).

I recognise that Slack and Discord have their own objectives, but IRC covers its own niche well.

IRC is centralised as well, but the protocol is documented. So it is possible to apply encryption on top of it within your client with a plugin or whatever. I'm not sure if that's possible with Slack? Look at it from this angle: would you want a for-profit entity to have access to your internal debates about development? Including the potential security implications? Things like these are a goldmine of data, and a time bomb waiting to explode.

No frelling way you'll get rid of it (https://xkcd.com/1782/).

For the last 10 years, been working on open source software for a living. Been an IRC user for equally long; `mutt` for the last five years. Thank goodness I do that. Nothing comes close to its effectiveness.

Lack of images on IRC is a feature; not a bug, dammit. It keeps me productive and removes utterly distracting crap. I'd be loathe to see IRC showing images and animated poop emojis (although the unicode 'pile-of-poo' renders just alright on my command-line IRC client, `irssi`).

I can handle video chat and in-person communication equally fine. But I prefer the clarity and vigor of the text-only approach.

"Clear writing is a sign of clear thinking."

Do you know of a good archive/paper/article that summarizes the bad design characteristics of the early protocol designs? Is it safe to try to get familiar with new designs and compare with the old to extract the bad lessons learned?

IRC has changed from the 90s, it's certainly not 7 bit.

You might have missed it, but in 2015, someone replied to you to explain that IRC of the 90s wasn't 7-bit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10490691

I remember the Ops, Sops, +v and all the medieval hierarchy that ensued.

I remember channel takeovers.

I remember the flooding and the script kiddies with their obnoxious scripts.

In a way, IRC let people show the worst of themselves, and I didn't stop using it because new technologies were better, I stopped using it because 90% was silly politics and power struggles.

> In a way, IRC let people show the worst of themselves, and I didn't stop using it because new technologies were better, I stopped using it because 90% was silly politics and power struggles.

This sounds vaguely familiar and I'm not talking about IRC.

> The internet has been inundated with the "average" people who unfortunately are not interested in "aplications" like mIRC/irssi/bitchX.

You know, I have a hard time blaming "average" people for not wanting to use bitchX. That's a pretty huge unforced error in terms of marketing.

One man's stumbling block is another man's competency test.

One man's competency is another man's elitism

One man's pithy saying is another man's frustrating truism.

Weird, I felt physically compelled to upvote this just because I used to use IRC a lot. I regret that I had a lot of great BBS and IRC friends with whom I lost touch over the years.

> The basis of old internet protocols are simple, open and powerful

> Email, IRC, HTML, FTP

FTP sucked back in the day and it still sucks. Otherwise, yeah.

While I agree with GP's sentiment, FTP is not what I'd call a simple protocol.

In what way I never had any problem using ftp

IRC is and always will be, the greatest social network :)

yep, despite Zuckerberg's attempt to turn a social network(s) into an online stalking tool for your unrequited lover.

But its not really a social network...BBSs were/are great too! Plus BBs let you actually manage content versus just chat and link. IRC is great and always will be but a social network it is not...and I doubt we are gonna see any real revival.

Irc created more new social connections than many networks that came after. Same goes for bbs. We need to find the next thing that truly connects people.

"Locality"?

BBSs were more of the than not local, with some federation in that the operator or someone he trusted would exchange data between the local BBS and some distant BBS.

Similarly IRC used to house a high number of very local channels back when i first came online (and one tried to pick a server on the network that was in one's own nation or a neighboring one to avoid finding oneself on the wrong end of a net split).

Social networks offers much the same via various means (groups on facebook, sub-reddits on reddit, etc).

Honestly IMO, what killed IRC was IM and SMS. This because now the schoolyard cliques could once more ostracize.

Locality, interesting. I'd agree on BBS'. My experience of IRC, thought on efnet was expanding past my local calling area.

IM definitely took the bite out of IRC because it was far better at creating beginners that never made it to IRC, and a lot of IRC users got pulled to IM. ICQ, Yahoo, AIM, MSN created a new type of connection.

IRC always felt to me more like a public forum, whereas IM was private conversation.

The best private conversations start by branching away from a public space. It's that juxtaposition that makes each half all the more special (think noisy club/bar vs outside). I think the biggest failing of IM is that it's easy to end up with a declining circle of people whom you communicate with. Without a public space to replenish ideas from, privacy becomes a curse. IRC allows both.

This is exactly why I loved IRC and continue to use it to this day.

What to you defines a social network?

I met some of the most important people in my life through IRC. I would not have chosen my current career path without the guidance of the many friends I made over the years on various IRC networks and channels.

It was also a great place to vent anonymously when I was at the lowest points of my life, in a judgement free environment. I don’t think any social network will come close to capturing the effect of IRC. Decentralization and federation are what makes it a great protocol, IMO.

Usenet isn't that bad either :)

You so nailed it, man. Thanks for that. I really miss those old days. I'm turning 33, but I'm constantly chasing old nostalgia these days and realizing all the old things that used to make me happy, _still_ make me just as happy. (and you're damn right I still use BitchX)

IRC is dying because no one invests months and years of code into server protocol extensions and client user interface for non-engineer users.

Write an IRCv3 scrollback and search extension, and you’ll win the hearts of millions.

https://github.com/ircv3/ircv3-specifications/pull/292

Kiwi IRC actually implements this and has a ZNC module being released soon for it. Hopefully soon, other bouncers.

These type of specs and actually getting them implemented in clients and servers is exactly the type of things the irc.com foundation will be supporting.

> IRC is dying because no one invests months and years of code into server protocol extensions and client user interface for non-engineer users.

I never understood this sentiment. In the '90s and the previous decade, I corresponded with many people over IRC and usenet who were definitely "non-engineer users". What changed in the last 10 years to make many people believe that one has to have a technical/engineering background to be capable of using things like IRC?

It's probably just relative. I would think the proportion on IRC is now more technical than ever before.

Twenty years ago, you would need to know where to plug a cable in to even have a computer turn on. For better or worse, the barrier for entry these days is a lot lower.

IRC has remained relatively the same while other services like Facebook or even MSN Messenger promised the world.

I don't agree that IRC is dead. It will continue to outlast many companies.

I resent that you resent "average people".

I'm an average person (with 17 years of professional programming career behind me). I wouldn't give two craps about IRC in 2018. Yes, I really enjoy having a smooth cross-platform experience with inline media, public and private chat rooms, search, file transfers etc. without having to set anything up and without having to deal with half-baked poorly implemented clients who can't even agree on a feature set between each other, and can't produce a single decent mobile client.

Same goes for XMPP.

BTW, it's extremely hard to make a decent product for the "average user". Self-proclaimed über-men should try it sometime.

Back in the day, lots of 'normal people' used irc too.

I like things with open standards, so that people can use the tools that work for them. Bob can use the Gmail web interface to send and receive email, and Sally can use gnus in Emacs to send and receive email on her own local server.

Only for Google to spam-hole anything sally sends...

It really boggles my mind that a few actors were able to essentially lock down a federated protocol.

Exactly. That actually causes me anger. Email is so decentralized as a protocol and implementation and yet Google, Yahoo, etc now control email and then made it hard to send email using SPAM as an excuse.

Back in the day, the IRC crowd had a lot more 'normal people' than Usenet, which was the other social outlet on the Internet.

> Back in the day, lots of 'normal people' used irc too.

"Back in the day" they had no choice or little other choice but.

And even then "normal people" would prefer things like AIM and ICQ for reasons obvious to anyone except the self-proclaimed not-normal above-average über-men.

But mIRC was (is?) also easy to use.

AIM, Discord etc. have the 'word-processor problem': the protocol and the interface are inexorably intertwined. You're stuck with whatever user interface they provide.

And this 'word-processor problem' is compounded by the 'normal people' issue, or, even worse than that, the 'lowest common user' problem. It's optimisation not for the best or the most powerful or even the prettiest interface, but rather optimisation for ease-of-immediate-use. (I.e. the interface for word-processors, whether LibreOffice or Word, are miserable environments for actually creating in, because they're tailored to not even 'average users' but to 'inexperienced and lazy users' - those who want to be able to sit down and use it without any training.)

With an open standard, you can have good interfaces for 'normal people' and an interface for 'lowest common users' and interfaces for other types of users, and this enables all of these types to be able to interact.

> With an open standard, you can have good interfaces for 'normal people' and an interface for 'lowest common users' and interfaces for other types of users

Please show me a cross-platform good interface for "normal people" for either IRC or XMPP: that supports all the latest standards and is on par with, say, Slack. Where cross-platform isn't Windows-Linus-Mac, but desktop-mobile.

For IRC I'm aware of none (except the ... closed-source web/electron-based irccloud, the irony). For XMPP there's just Conversations for Android, and that's it.

I also like the tech bro considers "normal users" to be bad, be cause there's "even worse than that, the lowest common user". There is a reason why people don't use the crappy half-baked barely usable crap that tech-bro non-normal above-average über men produce.

thelounge works great on both desktop and mobile.

Strange that you mention XMPP as you can have all that (including mobile - Conversations) plus end-to-end encryption (OTR, OMEMO, PGP - take your pick), message carbon copies and a server-side message archive that synchronizes all your clients.

But hey, XMPP is passé so everyone prefers a vendor lock-in.

It's not strange. Because Conversations exists only on Android (and the server you connect to has to support all the dozens of XEPs many of which are still in experimental stage).

So, with Conversations I'm locked into a single client on a single platform. Yay, XMPP :-/ (There's no desktop client I'm aware of that supports Conversations' features).

Oh, and I can have that only if I go through the trouble of setting up all the moving pieces myself. Because I really really really want to spend my time picking which flavour of end-to-end encryption to use (in which clients?) and how to make sure that a server-side searchable archive exists (accessible through which client??) or that media and files reach even offline clients (which clients???) etc.

You make it sound harder than it is.

Server-wise you want either ejabberd or prosody for the latest features. Yes, you need to set up a server once and read some docs, as with every self-hosted service. And if you don't care about encryption enough to read about it you can just enforce TLS for client-to-server and server-to-server connections. On the desktop, Gajim (win/linux/bsd/mac) supports all of the XEPs I mentioned. There are clients for iOS too but I don't know how they work as I don't own any Apple products.

Of course, if you'd rather spend money than time hoping that your provider won't have your conversations stolen, misused or disappear with them that's your prerogative too.

> Server-wise you want either

> You need to set up

> clients for iOS too [nope, no clients beyond the very basic abandoned ones — dmitriid]

So.... Why would I want any of that? To feel "not-normal" "above average", as this entire thread seems to imply?

> stolen misused yada yada

Let's leave these scary strories to the kids, shall we? We're supposed to be all grown ups here.

I don't understand why you pretend to be obtuse but it's clear you've already made your mind why.

The only ones being obtuse here are the delusional tech bros who are oh so sure that they are better than the "average" "normal" people.

> I'm an average person (with 17 years of professional programming career behind me).

I sense a contradiction in this statement...

You only sense the contradiction because you share a common HN delusion: that you are above average unique non-normal tech bro über man.

This delusion is what stops such people from understanding why Slack/Viber/WhatsApp/iMessage/WeChat etc. won and XMPP and IRC lost.

What perplexes me is that there are now even more competing messaging services than ever before. This suggests to me that none have won.

Indeed. And in the world of competing messaging services the world prefers anything but XMPP or IRC. This suggests to me that they lost.

This was literally my first comment when I installed Slack for the first time: Isn't this essentially what IRC did for many years?

Exactly. Slack is like IRC without the features.

Being blind about the actual tech involved, Slack is effectively IRC with a lot of the features that would be provided by external services bundled.

> The basis of old internet protocols are simple, open and powerful

> Email, IRC, HTML, FTP

These protocols are anything but simple. “Be liberal in what you accept” was a huge mistake we’re still paying for. E-mail effectively can’t be made private. There’s lots of room for improvement in open protocols. (Start by not making them text-based, please.)

> E-mail effectively can’t be made private.

It definitely can be both in transit and when stored.

If you run your own mail server and everyone who sends you mail makes a direct encrypted connection to it, sure. That’s not a solution for most people.

Text has a lot of advantages - I know as I had to debug OSI binary protocols - You had to dump it out to a textual representation.

unless you had spent years and could read the protocol in its binary form

That’s

- one advantage, not “a lot”

- very slight, because the tool to convert to and from text gets made

- vastly outweighed by the disadvantages

Ever had to debug an osi stack using a printed out x.409 decode ?

Have you looked at Matrix.org? It's essentially the "modern IRC" people are asking for. I strongly suggest giving it a chance.

I'm being semi facetious, but what does Matrix offer that I'm not able to get from my 24/7 tmux+irssi virtual private instance? Please don't say more notifications or addictiveness.

To me, it offered the ability of my fiancee and family (who don't have 24/7 tmux+weechat VMs) coming online. I now have them in my IRC client. It's wonderful, and I have wanted that for so long.

If only someone would pay Kanye to promote IRC

Yo XKCD Sucks, I'm really happy for you, I'm gonna let you finish but IRC did not have the best UI of all time!

> Long live IRC

> There will always be new platforms like slack, discord, gitter, and whatever. IRC was and still is great.

Here is XKCD[0] for this ;-)

[0] http://xkcd.com/1782

Do you connect with a 1200 baud acoustic coupler modem or are you average person who uses a fibre connection and off-the-shelf router?

Do you take a horse and cart to work or are you an average person who drives a car or catches the train?

Do you mill your own bread, or are you an average person who eats machine milled and produced bread?

Do you pump and sanitize your own water, or are you an average person who turns on the tap?

Calling people "average" for not using outdated and poorly designed applications that were written by 1 or 2 people in their spare time, versus applications and services designed by tens-to-hundreds of people, with the input of designers, UI and UX engineers, etc is moronic.

IRC, FTP, SMTP, Token Ring, etc are as good as they could have been at the time, but they are awful by modern standards. We should learn from them and design better successors.

Irc with proper roaming support and push notifications would blow discord or slack out of the water.

Newer is not necessarily better.

Aka a bouncer?

Yes, but baked in. Bouncers are horrible UX and a huge obstacle to onboarding.

"this service is only usable on your phone if you also sign up for another service" pretty much makes it a non-starter.

And logging and services that aren’t hacky god clients and user accounts as first class and...

IRC has had literal decades to be improved and only now do people get serious about it after Slack and friends sucked all the oxygen out of the room.

Older isn’t necessarily better either. IRC has stagnated hard, about the only thing it has on the competitors is that it’s free.

>about the only thing it has on the competitors is that it’s free.

It's more than 'free'. It's an open standard. You can write a slack client in your favorite language and it will continue to work for years.

Slack does not compete with that.

^"[IRC] client and it will work for years" ?

> ... it’s free.

And doesn't require 8 GB of RAM to run a client.

Ha ha that's crazy talk! Eventually they threw my IRC server off of EFNet because 8 total megabytes of ram for the server+OS was too little for the working set.

The lack of familiarity with irc from slack only users seems to reveal an unfamiliarity with irc being a connected universe of many slack sites being on one network.

The Lounge is a web client, so you can access it from any browser (PWA, push notification support). Since your IRC connection runs on a server, roaming and connection drops is not a problem.

https://github.com/thelounge/thelounge

Usability is a big and important consideration in creating beginners.

Slack has been excellent at introducing irc inspired, and irc borrowed concepts of bots, channels, aliases to the masses.

Oddly slack had a pretty painful sign up in the beginning to keep people on different subdomains.

I'm not sure if today's modern standards are going to look much better looking back in 5 years.

Maybe the measure of old techs is how much they still dominate from what is transferable and endures, like the concept of IRC->Slack, email->messaging, and forums to social media.

There is a fair question to ask how many new things are novel, vs rebooted or reincarnated. Bittorrent maybe, blockchain for sure.

Slack is not a successor to IRC because it's not a protocol. It's just another monolithic chat application.

Your implied comparisons are ridiculous. You're using this website via HTTP, which isn't much different in age from IRC. Age and the number of people who worked on them have nothing to do with their usefulness; some ideas last, some don't.

Mass produced cars, bread, and public water are all over 100 years old. It’s funny you only use ancient tech as counter examples for avoiding ancient tech.

Do you still use a landline or are you the "average" person that just has a mobile phone? This may differ by a few demographics, but I think there are more modern examples.

I’ve adopted the nineteen seventies tech, absolutely. Why be stuck in the 1800’s?

> Do you take a horse and cart to work or are you an average person who drives a car or catches the train?

Neither thanks. I ride a bicycle with an internal gear hub (IGHs, which are a technology that are over a century old,and put modern derailers to shame). I sometimes also walk.

Newer and more horsepower is not always better.

IRC being awful doesn't automatically make current alternatives not awful. I use IRC within my expectations, just as I do with other services.

Just because I expect a certain demographic in IRC doesn't mean I exclude myself from interacting with other ones too.

Without engaging the parent comment directly, the IRC user demographic is no longer average but that's okay. Average is also okay - there's room in this world for both.

Facebook and Twitter though, are trash as far as time sinks go.

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