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Comment by ddevault | Hacker News Reader

IRC still works fine 30 years later, in case you were wondering.

When even was the last major freenode outage that lasted more than a couple minutes? Its especially noteworthy since freenode is basically a bunch of volunteers and not a big silicon valley company with big operations team.

> a bunch of volunteers and not a big silicon valley company with big operations team

This is probably the key, as they're happy to keep using simple, proven tools that worked for decades and will keep working.

They're not worried about "scaling", "microservices", creating problems so they can solve them and brag about it at conferences & on the (seemingly mandatory now) engineering blog, etc.

It's just a bunch of people running the thing in their spare time and their incentive is to make it so that it requires as little time investment as possible, instead of over-complicating the stack on purpose so they can fill up their resume with buzzwords.

Though I wonder if it would perform as bad as Slack if people were forced to use an Electron client in a web browser.

I mean... no one is forced to use an Electron client to access IRC, so. That's kind of one of the main benefits of using an open, standard protocol like IRC.

Slack used to have that benefit when they had their IRC and XMPP gateways online. I know there are clients out there that leverage the API to do the same thing, but it's essentially re-inventing the wheel covered by numerous existing IRC and XMPP clients.

wtf is irc

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