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Comment by swiley | Hacker News Reader

Apple killed IRC. If you still think what Apple does for software is good you're not paying attention.

I think the times killed IRC. People wanted an easier way to communicate with a lower barrier to entry. Even tech communities with tech people are now all on slack etc, it's just the way the world works now :-(.

I modified miniircd to work with the iPhone (including push notifications and message replay) but no volunteer maintained client will ever be able to support that because the person holding the keys used to publish the app is the only one Apple will allow to run the push notification relay server.

This makes maintaining chat clients on iOS prohibitively expensive for volunteers which is why all of them are centralized and either expensive or data hoarders.

It's not "just the way the world works" Apple has directly distorted the world with their policies.

I’d prefer plaintext chat, but most of the teams I work in would never move from slack to IRC. Probably the biggest issue I have with slack is that it’s entirely centralised, but guess that’s market power.

It's Apple's market power. Slack style apps are the only kind that Apple allows on the app store, see my earlier comment.

I just run irslackd + znc. I get persistent text chat over an IRC client. The team gets their animated gifs. Everyone wins. :)

Sadly that means pretty much only locked gardens all around - Since anything else is by definition too complicated.

It's not that everything just happens to be a locked garden, Apple's App Store policies prevent community maintained chat clients like the ones used for IRC.

What ate you talking about? There is a plethora of irc clients on App Store, both free and paid.

> Even tech communities with tech people are now all on slack etc

True, but I'd rewind the clock back a little farther. Even in the early 00's, AIM was more popular than IRC.

There are just a ton of messaging alternatives including SMS. I don't even really use Slack but I also don't think I've sent a message on IRC for years.

IRC is very much alive amongst some tech and tech savy communities including warez. Also, at our company, we run an ircd on the intranet as a last resort instant communications channel for when the likes of Teams & Slack are down and/or the internet is not reachable -- which is not a very rare setup.

I don't think the rise of products like slack have anything to do with what people want vs what investors want.

Investors want it because people want it.

I'm a longtime IRC user. I have native IRC apps on every device I own. Despite this, Slack/Discord are better in terms of user experience in almost every way, and users are clearly voting for a better experience. Listing just a few key features:

- Persistence: we don't use the internet the way we used to when IRC was created. It sucks that if you lose connectivity to an IRC server for a few minutes, you are presented with a fragmented view of the conversation. Slack/Discord maintain history reliably and natively.

- Search: there are pros and cons to this, but it's nice to have a community memory that's searchable and referenceable.

- Rich media: images and video are critical parts of internet culture.

I could go on. It isn't even close.

Not in my experience. At my workplace, dev teams started setting up their own Slack workspaces by themselves, sometimes funded by private credit cards. After more than a year, the company gave in and purchased an enterprise subscription to get integration with our internal SSO and so forth.

How did Apple kill IRC or play into this announcement?

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