30 years later and we have reinvented IRC, but worse as you can't use your own client, the protocol may not be public and it's harder to discover channels.
Then you realize you only finished the 0.01%.
That's about where IRC seemed to have stopped. "We're done. The clients can do the hard stuff that users actually want."
Slack and its kin are v2, capturing the requirements that have changed with the changing userbase. I only wish they were standardized, so we could have non-first party implementations (with the benefits that come with that).
It’s hard to see a future for IRC or something like it to beat the proprietary alternatives unfortunately.
If someone can figure out Facebook (and trust me, Facebook is far from intuitive for someone who doesn't know) or any other web-based service, they can figure out IRC.
The main reason people do not use IRC much nowadays is that other people moved off IRC to Facebook and other social places. It isn't a technical thing, it is mainly a social thing.
Yeah you can set up some always-connected relay on a server and bounce your client through it to still get the conversation backlog when you weren't online, but it's not reasonable to expect an average computer user even have an always-connected machine to run it on, let alone actually get a relay working.
If they can use Facebook they could use IRCCloud, but that's $5/month and Messenger/WhatsApp/Discord/Slack are free.
Sometimes I wish I didn't have so many messages saved forever tho, honestly.
In IRC, anything that happens while you don't have an active session just doesn't exist.
That might work for some communities, like programming language groups where I can hop in, talk about something with whoever's online, and hop back off.
But if I'm chatting with my friends and we're trying to make plans for the weekend, everyone really needs to see that conversation regardless of whether they have the client running right this second.
Other chat protocols fix this but lack the base, and are having trouble competing against the likes of Slack or iMessage in different use cases for example.
I'm excited to see how Purism's Librem 5 is going to play out with matrix as it's primary communications platform.
This is exactly why people who are pro-IRC are watching the sun set on IRC and they don't have a flaming clue why beyond condescending suspicions like "it's the users who are idiots."
As far as I can tell it'll continue to exist for communities that are on it, or maybe for new ones that are deliberately trying to select for the kind of person who's willing to deal with IRC's limitations. Those are both perfectly valid cases, not everything needs to be aimed at mass market adoption.
But beyond those groups, there are lots of nicer services that most people would prefer to use for one reason or another. And even if the self-hosted and/or free software leaning groups, Matrix looks more promising looking forward.
I am a 30-somthing software engineer who doesn't use facebook. The few times I have tried it out it was indeed incredibly confusing.
There’s more native FBM options as well as Slack and Discord combined clients (Ripcord) though the latter might not look or behave the way people want.
The IRC communities speak for themselves. Pretty much all regulars, no new blood, tiny, and opinionated grouches that are kinda hard to stand. You'd think #javascript or #node.js on Freenode would be pretty big. Nah, I'm on there every day and it's about 10 regulars. I could list off the usernames off the top of my head.
To put that in perspective, my Slack community for people who like building MUDs has more regulars and it's hard for me to think of a smaller niche. If you're trying to set up a community and you think IRC is good enough and you refuse to offer alternatives, your stubbornness is only disserving your users and community.
I can think of many more options too, like how Elm's IRC channel makes you think nobody uses the language, yet Elm's Slack community is thriving and more fun to participate in than #javascript and #node.js, and is far more popular.
But today, it's a hard sell. IRCCloud doesn't compete on features against alternatives services, it's strictly worse since it has less to work with.
When a user adds your community, it gets added to a list of all their other servers on Slack/Discord. The question has become "so why are you making us use this instead of setting up a Slack/Discord/etc server like everyone else?"
And I think you'll be hard pressed to answer them in a satisfying way. And for no real gain.
Like not being creative enough to read the same amount of information from ":)" and specific, rich, custom emoji like, I don't know, someone simply shrugging. That's some bizarre self-aggrandizement.
I encourage you to go on a Twitch channel and tell me the :) equivalent of all the custom Twitch/channel images you see in chat.
https://www.polygon.com/2018/5/14/17335670/twitch-emotes-mea...
Could you break these down for us?
Same for aim, icq... greedy killed all of those, not the ability to create better open clients. Namely msn and gtalk (not the jabber offering, which was a joke attempt of making federated icq for corporations, enterprisey java codebase and all)
Slack/Discord/whatever: they are proprietary, they are closed-source, they are bad.
IRCCloud (which is proprietary, closed source etc.): oh, it's so good, use it.
"We keep logs of your IRC communications until you delete your account with us, or a connection, or channel. This means that, even if you stop using IRCCloud for a while, when you next log in, it will be as if you never went away."
If that changed the average HN user’s attitude would probably change as well.
> Slack/Discord/whatever: they are proprietary, they are closed-source, they are bad.
> IRCCloud (which is proprietary, closed source etc.): oh, it's so good, use it.
Who exactly is "HN"? How did you even decide "HN" has opinion X or Y?
I'm fine with Discord because its mostly used for gaming. Given the previous options (Ventrilo, TeamSpeak, Mumble, Skype), it is miles better. And of these, only Mumble is fully FOSS. A clear disadvantage is however privacy-related, but for gaming that isn't a huge issue.
What I'm not fine with is being forced to use Slack for work-related material. You don't want such sensitive data centralized. You want to host such yourself, or have the private keys yourself.
IRCCloud, whatever it is, probably does not have the same amount of users as the previously mentioned two. But if it uses the IRC protocol (which the name suggests), at least that is open and there's no vendor lock-in like with Slack/Discord. Which, given that Slack is used for commercial endeavors, is worse for Slack.
and immediately:
> IRCCloud, whatever it is, probably does not have the same amount of users as the previously mentioned two. But if it uses the IRC protocol (which the name suggests), at least that is open
IRCCloud is a centralised, closed-source entity that stores all your chat logs in the cloud. So, no different than Slack/Discord (with the exception of the protocol).
> Which, given that Slack is used for commercial endeavors, is worse for Slack.
How is it worse for Slack? Slack clearly provides value that IRC (and XMPP) don't. I really wish people would try and see why Slack etc. are popular and used (including in commercial settings), and why IRC/XMPP are not.
(A very important exception.)
IRCCloud just appears to be akin to a BNC. If Bob decides to use IRCCloud or a BNC that is his choice. The rest of the team or group can still use their preferred IRC client because the protocol is an open standard. Would it be my choice for an IRC client? Hell no. But thanks to the protocol being FOSS: to each their own. Try that with Slack/Discord...
> How is it worse for Slack?
Because whatever gamers discuss is much less privacy sensitive than whatever businesses (with for example other people's data) discuss.
I'm also not really sure why anyone would compare Slack/Discord with IRC or XMPP when its clear that these are so vastly different while there are FOSS, open standard solutions for Slack/Discord in existence such as Mattermost (Slack alternative) and Mumble (Discord alternative). You can't even do audio or video over IRC.
If just one team member uses IRCCliud for chat, all tgat sensitive info is now stored on IRCCloud’s servers.
So, hiw exactly does “open FOSS protocol” help in this case?
> What I'm not fine with is being forced to use Slack for work-related material. You don't want such sensitive data centralized. You want to host such yourself
The moment you use IRCCloud all that sensitive data is on IRCCloud’s servers. How does “building a protocol in top of that (on top if what?)” help?
Given we're talking in circles I'll withdraw from this discussion.
How can they enforce E2EE if very few if any IRC clients support it?
What good does “owning the data” do if the data ends up on IRCCloud’s servers anyway (companies who use Slack also own their data).
It’s quite telling that people have such a strong belief in the magic of protocols.
You say "HN has a ..." but I use Discord for fun and have no problem with it.
There's no one type of person on HN. :)
See comments to every mention of Slack, or other modern chat software. you will see a lot of people saying that IRC/XMPP was better and suggesting open protocols and IRCCloud :)
There is a comment in the story about cross platform woes and incompatibilities.
I've never managed to install Whatsapp on my computer.
But none of that goes away from the point of both being intuitive.
The new SaaS companies integrate what used to be two (three) separate things - the client and the protocol (and the server). The way they do this forces everyone to use the common client that's not optimized for power users. Which is kind of nasty, because it's the power users that have to suffer the interface the most, as we use it day in, day out at our dayjobs.
I too would have liked an open protocol in principle, but looking at emails I am not sure it would have been a good thing. (As in eternal backwards compatibility and unchangeable architectural choices that might not suit a very different future use)
Are you saying these messengers have a feature that splits the group in half at random intervals?
You should really submit a bug report to imessage and friends if they don't do that-- otherwise it degrades the reinvented IRC experience.
Amusingly, I couldn't see why slack stopped doing IRC, essentially that's what it was. The one and only thing that let IRC down was the message limitation. Some clients didn't make it very clear when those messages were not sent.
Difficulty of finding channels is sort of the point isn't it? Exclusivity and tightly knit communities?
IRC never had any channel discovery, so how does modern breed of group chats make channel discovery harder?
IRC does make a lot of things we now take for granted harder (file/image/video sharing, search, persistent history, mobile support...)
wot? It didn't have server discovery, but once you connected to a server, you could definitely discover channels.
Same thing: find a server, connect to it. Boom, you have access to all channels (unless they are private).
2. There are many more “group chats” for the midern era. Ignoring them isn’t wise.
3. Even among those listed you have channel discovery, for example, in Facebook Messenger.
And no, a discussion on modern chats does not end with “IRC was better end of story”. It wasn’t.
Same thing: find a server, connect to it. Boom, you have access to all channels (unless they are private).