Some people enjoy investing the time and energy into setting up something like this and maintaining it. I am one of those people.
However, it’s just not realistic to propose these things as solutions for the average user or even average developer. Cloud services like Discord are popular because you don’t have to think about it or invest time into maintaining anything. Click a few buttons and you’re in.
I think that fact is lost on a lot of devs who invested the days and days into setting up their own servers, learning things like Quassel, smoothing out all of the issues and so on. It’s easy to forget that every piece of that solution came with a lot of labor and learning spread out over years of time.
On the other hand, I suspect a lot of the people who propose these as alternatives actually like the barrier to entry that it all represents. If only the people dedicated enough to learn all of these steps and maintain their own infrastructure can fully participate, it represents a barrier to entry that makes the group feel more exclusive.
It is, but the the average user's perspective is not that they'll set up an IRC bouncer (which odds are high they don't even know exists) so they can have message permanence and cross-device sharing.
Instead they'll say that IRC has no history / offline support (which is, technically, true) and will use discord because it does.
What we learned from the Freenode implosion is that for most IRC users the concept of different networks was entirely alien. IRC was Freenode for those people.
It doesn't help that the authentication story for IRC is a bloody mess. In Discord, I have one account and can join any server^Wguild and have a different nick in each (and the nicks support unicode, and emoji). If I want to have different nicks on different channels on an IRC network I need 2 separate logins.
I’m sorry that the new update for quassel and quasseldroid is taking so long :(
Please see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netsplit
netsplit is a disconnection between two servers
Again, going to highlight it's such a short-sided POV, this sort of thinking "today it's free, it's better, and thus it is the right choice for the investment of my time, my community's time, even my project's time." Such short sided thinking in favor of convenience right now is way too common leads to a lot of problems (in society generally but that's another discussion). I really want people to have a longer term view of utility for the sake of longevity and stability of things as important as our channels of communication.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29711001 this was just posted a few hours ago.
I'm not against people choosing discord for some projects, but there's nothing so terrible or oppressive about choosing IRC. It doesn't deserve the "considered harmful" treatment. Hopping on IRC is a very low bar for a potential contributor to clear.
Mosh is the only thing that actually works in those cases.
But using Mosh means having a server, seting it up and so on. Yeah, Mosh+IRC is better from a FOSS perspective. But it comes with usability drawbacks too.
Is this now solvable? Okay.
I have limited time & limited yak-shaving energy. In the choice between something whose problems are solvable and something whose problems are adequately solved, I am going to conserve my time/energy by choosing the latter 95% of the time.
Why should "I don't want to spend time on stuff that's not interesting to me" be concerning?
> I feel that today people don't enjoy stuff as much as my cohort, I go at work,
Your "cohort" is apparently hardcore computer people who are fine doing computer-related stuff both at work and in spare time. Well, tech people toda is a much bigger "cohort" than that.
> but do you people have a passion for tech related stuff
Yes. Yes we do. And tech-related stuff is often emphatically not fiddling with Raspberry Pis to set up obscure servers to maintain chat history.
For you it's configuring email servers and compiling linux kernels. Why not dig trenches for power cables or build towers for wireless communications? If the answer is "but I don't care enough about those things, I just build on top of them", that's exactly what others think about compiling linux kernels, writing boot loader configs or configuring email servers.
Again. Even if 100% of people on HN are devs and sysadmins, why do you assume that your particular interests are a must for everyone on HN?
Or that everyone on HN would be interested in spending time to set up a Raspberry Pi with a media server and IRC bouncer?
I'm a dev. I have far more interesting things to do in my spare time than that. Far more interesting to me.
I feel like to have something in common with my coworkers I should have to watch unlimited amount of netflix and marvel movies.. which of course every one lives the way it wants, but I am more frustrated because loneliness is bad and not being able to find common passions feed that, I guess I gone OT ^^, but yeah I got your point, you're right I guess this argument is saturated now
> loneliness is bad
You can say that again.
> I've noticed this pattern about tech people today
> I am not sure how old are you or what is your background, but I feel that today people
> I feel like to have something in common with my coworkers I should have to watch unlimited amount of netflix and marvel movies..
Step 1: stop being condescending and assuming moral superiority just because you have an interest in a random list of things you assume everyone shold be interested in.
Your approach is the classical "kids these days" that is so classical even Aristotle and Horace have said the same things.
Step 2: Accept that people are free to do in their spare time whatever the hell they want to. Watching unlimited Netlfix? Good for them. Setting up IRC bouncers? Couldn't be happier for them.
Step 3: if truly interested, you could try and figure out what exactly interests people in tech, and why they do it. Could be it's just because it pays more than the alternatives and they are much hapier carving out wooden dolls on the weekends.
If that's not your cup of tea, there are now communities around any and all things any person could be intersetd in, no matter how bizarre or "out of fashion".
A. I’m interested in the problems that the open source project focuses on.
B. I was in the middle of solving a different problem and see the project as a path to achieve that.
My disinterest in solving the problems of IRC is because I want to avoid context-switching from my problems or your project’s problems to IRC problems I encountered over 10 years ago. If I’m forced to kerp context-switching, I lose hope that I can stay focused and get my current problem solved. I would rather have a way to pay money and get support than to try to solve an ever-growing yakstak of problems all at the same time. Progress is better than futility or overwhelm.
The cool thing about technology is that there is progress. We can do more, we can do it faster, easier, better, etc. Twiddling with the same shoddy tools from decades past is the opposite of that. A long time ago IRC was a cool new capability that was worth putting effort into setting up and using. These days all the hacks and workarounds involved are still required, but all they get you is an inferior chat platform. So, no. The tech that excites me are the new ideas and inventions that people are coming up with today, not some chat platform that is older than I am.
disclaimer: i have 80 buffers in my irssi session, but i know why most people aren't me
I've set up bouncers, ran my own email for years, and at some point I just became immensely bored of doing those things. There's an ungratifying sameness to having to fiddle with self-hosted email or hunt down why my irc bouncer crashed/went offline. This kind of friction extends up and down the stack, too, which irc client works on my phone? There are a few I might choose from, do I spend time trying them out over a period of days to see which is a decent one? Oh, well I still don't have threads, even if one client or another will auto-preview image URLs. And on and on.
I am disinterested, as you say, not because I don't want to learn it, but because I have.
Most of the stuff is broken in known ways to a terrible degree. Usability sucks. You can literally see the brokenness. Most of the stuff does not work properly, is slow, insecure and just stupid. It does not do what it is supposed to do, at least not without risking you harm.
Some stuff is a little bit better and only broken in more subtle ways. Some edge cases might not work. Some obscure security holes might be in there.
Then there is some very rare stuff, which has exceptional quality. But even then, we all know it probably is still technically broken. On the unlikely chance that the thing actually works and no mistakes were made, there is certainly a bug deep down in the Kernel or somewhere in the CPU.
You take some of the very rare stuff of exceptional quality. Does it do all the things you want it to do? Probably not. So at best it somewhat works, does most of the things you want it to do and only has unkown brokenness, hopefully very deep down and hidden away as far as possible.
Now comes the biggest problem: Even if you choose the least broken stuff, you know have to start maintaining it. Things below it will start changing and reintroduce more brokenness. By using it, you sign up to fight it.
Now I have this superpower to actually fight it. I make things less broken. But I am fighting an ongoing avalanche of brokenness. My day has 24 hours, I need to sleep some of them and the avalanche just keeps coming. Some days I like the amount I have shovelled away. Some days are ending with me still up to me neck inside it.
I am not like Sisyphos, other people are using the space where I shovelled most of the brokenness away. So it does make sense and is fullfilling. I have fun, when I look at a small area, where the brokenness will stay away for some time, even though I know, it will come back at some point.
I am not immortal. I can probably do this for another 50 years. So 50 more years of shovelling but vast mountain chains all around me.
So I have to be very careful to only pick the most precious areas to clear.
The way I see the tech space today is that everybody likes pizza. Except back in the days, you'd have to go to the grocery store, buy your ingredients then cook it at home.
Today you have to drive for a 1-2 hours to find those ingredients, as people are simply not interested anymore in cooking, stores started just selling ready made pizzas.
In a few years you'd probably need to build a farm and start raising cattle. Or you could chose one of the five most popular pizzas from the supermarket. That's it, only five. It was deemed, by popular vote, or maybe "data shows", that those five pizzas are good, every other recipe is cancerous so it's outlawed.
Part of the problem is that I've been burned by enough hours spent on 30-second tasks.
I can't believe how delusional some people are. And sorry for being so rude.
In 2021 everyone expects history and other things. You can't realisticaly expect everyone to "just have a fully set up always-on raspberry pi and install some server on it". That's why IRC and XMPP are mostly dead.
> I have a dedicated server running my email and media server where I also put
Good for you. The absolute vast majority of users, however, don't.
That's the big value of mailing lists over most of these chat solutions.
People are more thoughtful about email only because it's slow and relatively low volume. You see the same on stack exchange.
The general idea of group chats was to facilitate ad hoc real time communication. People were not assumed to be always online and messages were only of interest for the discussion happening in the moment. There are much better options for sharing information that might have a longer lived scope of relevance anyway. Plus remembering some chats that I hung out with friends, it had a sense of intimacy, sometimes I wanted to share the information exactly with those online at the moment, so no history was a feature. Popular open source IRC channels have archives that one could look up if need be anyway.
Of course there is also the modern idea of work-oriented chats like slack that have a powerful search function and are mostly about async communication, being a bit of everything, a way to share information with lots of people, a documentation system, discussion and so on.
I really don’t understand how people can think that having everyone self-host and maintain things like Quassel on a Raspberry Pi is a perfectly reasonable solution to the UX shortcomings of IRC, but then also insist that having to spend 30 seconds adjusting the basic settings in Discord is an unacceptably difficult task.
At some point, this conversation isn’t actually about UX or functionality. It’s about hating the new thing and clinging to the old ways.
I would argue that those Raspberry Pi based solutions are nice to have but not needed. In fact I argued you don't need history most of the time and that not offering central storage of history can be reasonable.
IRC is still used by countless open source projects and there are many public XMPP servers everyone can use. I switched my family and most of my friends to XMPP this year and no-one runs an XMPP server at home.
You freely chose to post the insult, so you are not.
> In 2021 everyone expects history and other things.
I should hope I am included in "everyone" and I do not expect that. I think IRC rules and I think chats are better when they are ephemeral. I know people disagree with me; that is the point of discussing it. It's strange (a cheap rhetorical trick, really) to point out the expectations of a group of people in the current year as if that was an inevitability and that is how things always shall be unto the ages.
See - it's "solvable" versus "solved". People seek solutions, not possibilities.
Ask ten people and they’ll likely tell you ten different solutions (not to mention the feasibility of such solutions). Most people just want to set up a chat space for their project, or ask a question and get an answer; they don’t want to make a million choices about something they don’t understand before they are allowed to do what they set out to do.
It's still consuming your time and energy and that's a running cost by itself. I'm also a long-time Quassel user in addition to be a long-time IRC user, but I have no more energy to manage my own Quassel server and my current instance has been long neglected.