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Comment by amorphid | Hacker News Reader

I don't see any compelling reason to adopt IRC. It does nothing that I care about that Slack doesn't do. If Slack completely implodes, I would search for Slack alternative. If IRC really was my only option, I'd use it just long enough to write a basic alternative myself that replaced or extended IRC w/ the features I really want.

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For one thing, an IRC client doesn't pin a core of my cpu at 100% and consume half a gig of ram...

(But I realise I'm well out on the losing end of this argument, even in groups of old-school hard core technical friends/colleagues, I've been given the "crazy look" when suggesting we just use irc for chat... )

Slack isn't perfect; I agree with that. I haven't experienced the CPU issue, but it does seem to like RAM quite a bit. I just opened it w/ one account active, and it was eating maybe 400MB of RAM. I bumped that up to 6 open accounts, and now it's chewing up maybe 2GB of RAM.

I'm quite fond of emacs-slack, which is a much better client experience than the Slack 'web' UI.

> pin a core of my cpu at 100% and consume half a gig of ram...

I'm not doubting you, and I acknowledge that I hear that kind of thing with some frequency, but I've not seen Slack (running in Chrome on Ubuntu) use anything like those amounts of resources.

I've had a pretty busy slack client running for several days, and it's using 204,484K of memory and 2.0% of one CPU.

200M/2% is still pretty bad, isn't it? IRC clients worked perfectly on machines with less total virtual memory 20 years ago (and before).

    USER        PID %CPU %MEM    VSZ    RSS TT  STAT   STARTED      TIME COMMAND
    fubar      2922  0.0  0.1  61648  26668  2  S0+    19Mar18  22:58.73 weechat

I hear you! I've been using the Internet most every day since 1988, and am still occasionally struck by the amount of resources seemingly straightforward programs use these days.

Re: Slack resource utilization: I'm not passing a value judgment as much as expressing confusion over multiple claims I've noticed about Slack utilization that is far, far greater than anything I've seen.

If I had an irc server/service were I could easily login/control access with a Google domain account... <3

I had this problem with Slack. I switched to using it within Chrome. I can't be sure why it performs so much better that way (Chrome throttling it?), but it does.

I don't see any compelling reason to adopt Slack. It does nothing that I care about that IRC doesn't do. If IRC completely implodes, I would run my own IRC server.

IRC is horrible on phones (shitty history when you drop out of an internet connection, no cross-device unread-count synchronization, no encryption or login, etc). There are add-ons that try to fix that, but it's still a giant pain.

I personally love Riot and Matrix as a "modern IRC".

The Lounge is an IRC client that solves the problems you describe (persistence on any device, synchronised unread counters, push notifications) - https://github.com/thelounge/thelounge

It does require having your own server to host it on though.

Hadn't seen this before. Looks nice. I tried the demo, smooth other than the /j is not an alias for /join, which I think is an obvious oversight.

> I would run my own IRC server

That's nice for you personally, but how does running an inhouse bespoke IRC server have anything to do with whatever line of business your company is in?

I like this approach very much.

IRC is just a particular implementation of chat. The only thing keeping it relevant is the several hundred thousand people currently connected to servers.

Within a more defined context, such as work communication, adoption network effects become irrelevant. You can just build your own system and set everybody up to use it.

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