Hacker News Reader

Setting those up isn't quite trivial for the non-programmer user and they have problems with some IRC servers (it's almost impossible to connect to EFnet via thelounge in my experience and convos had a variety of problems).

View on HN

Agreed. On the upside, you need one technical friend that can set it up for many friends to use. For EFnet and several other networks, you need to get permission from NetOps/NetAdmins or an individual server operator if you don't need the fail-over resilience.

These types of arguments tickle me. Why isn't instagram just a shiny web frontend to a newsgroup?

I am not arguing, just providing alternate options. They are not for everyone.

FWIW, there are also shiny front-ends to NNTP. That would actually be a great way to have a threaded messaging system and attachments.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com