IRC technology news from the second half of 2021 | Hacker News Reader

IRC technology news from the second half of 2021

ilmarilauhakangas.fi

161 pointsbuovjaga101 comments

What's wild to me is how IRC was the wormhole that essentially got me out of my small hometown, and established everything I've been able to do over the last thirty years. It's scary to think about how much impact something like a chat server could have.

My gateway drug was ANSi art, and that whole scene. I made connections when I was 13 to folks who ran the groups, folks 6-10 years old that me, and was offered my first internship in the Bay Area through IRC. I drove across America in a beat up Honda Civic where the muffler fell off halfway there. But that was it: Through a bit of weird gumption and blocks of colored ascii, I was working at a design agency in Silicon Valley. Everything kinda barreled forward from there.

I think about this quite a bit: Unevenly distributed opportunity. There are a lot of smart, creative, emotionally intelligent folks stuck for lack of opportunity, and it seems like if you value GDP growth or general societal forward momentum on a whole, then maximizing access to those opportunity footholds should be a first-order priority of society.

Anyway, thanks IRC, and the folks who maintained / maintain it.

I share a similar story. I grew up on IRC, becoming a moderator for a jailbreaking website's support channel, and for the first time experienced friendship outside of school and outside of my typical age range. This directly impacted my career aspirations and is probably a very large reason why I felt like I could become a software developer and successful businessperson in middle school.

It shows that communication is important no matter what medium it's undertaken on. Humans thrive off of maximizing connections.

In 2008 a Google talent sourcer (their terminology) reached out to me via IRC. As far as he knew he was the only one using IRC for that purpose at Google at the time.

I often use that as an excuse to justify "wasting" countless months of my life on it.

For me, what killed IRC was the use of Bouncers. Once they became popular, channels would morph from having 20-30 actively-online users at anyone one time to having 200+ 'disconnected' users who weren't really there. So without any sort of 'presence' indicators, there'd be no indication of who was actually online.

So the experience went from real-time chat, to something like a feature-less forum, where'd you'd post a question and then wait for hours/days before someone actually replied (if you ever got a reply at all, despite the number of 'listed' users).

So channels just became a idling wasteland of ghost users, which is why I think a large majority of casual IRC users jumped ship to other chat platforms.

Now, if everyone just accepted that they don't actually need a bouncer, and understand that like a room in real life, that when you are not in the room you are not part of the rooms conversation, IRC would feel much more 'alive' and people would start using it properly again.

What does „actively online“ mean in a world where messages arrive as notifications on smartphones?

> So without any sort of 'presence' indicators, there'd be no indication of who was actually online.

IRC has exactly that, the away status. Good clients and bouncers show that in their UI as well.

I started using IRC when I was 12. I'm 37 now. I owe a lot to IRC. I learned a tonne from some good people, ran several of my own servers which led me to HTTP, FTP and more.

I stopped using IRC full time about five years ago when I realised it's basically dead.

I also find that whenever I return to it today, it's mostly made up of kids (who missed out on the golden era of IRC) and grumpy, old arse-hats who are angry that their platform is dying out and has been reduced to a very small sub-set of (technical) users.

I switched to Discord (here's my server for DevOps: https://discord.gg/devopslounge) and Slack, but now I barely use Slack (the client is just garbage.)

I'm happy to directed to a good IRC network with some good, well run channels on DevOps, programming, infosec and more. If anyone knows of any such places do let me know, but I'll not get my hopes up.

I’m just a couple years behind you and I fondly remember IRC, Usenet, forums ESPECIALLY. Looks like social media ate up a lot of the good online discussion-sphere. Thankful for HN because even my favorite subreddits are dying off these days.

>here's my server for DevOps:

It's not your server. I hope you have everything backed up and alternate means of communicated with your community. Discord has and will ban you from their platform for things as innocuous as making bots for Team Fortress 2.

OK Mr. Dramatic. I’ll be careful that my community about DevOps doesn’t make any TF2 bots.

I honestly wish Discord deleted messages by default. I really don't want a record of my casual communication.

Interestingly, one of the servers I'm in has people who feel the exact opposite. Some of them are upset that Discord doesn't allow them to download the entire chat history of a server. I think it's a good thing that it's not easy to do. Many conversations are better left as vague memories.

This FUD is not going to convince anyone to stop using Discord and IRC is not immune from this kind of childish meddling. Just a few months ago freenode underwent a hostile takeover and unlike most Discord communities, it is probably not coming back from that BS.

To be fair that takeover was only possible because the owner of freenode sold the server to a malicious party which is only possible because you own the server, so that kinda reinforces parent's point.

As a freenode user I have no say over who the freenode owner is, much like I have no say over Discord's moderation policies. It's the same puppet with different masters; neither situation really empowers me. Yes I can always start my own IRC server but if nobody wants to join it what's the point? 99% of the battle is getting people into the same virtual room.

You usually own the domain, unless you sell out of course. So you can start wherever you want from scratch on your own or on leased infrastructure. People will connect to the domain/irc network.

I'm not saying you should use IRC over Discord, but hey, that's how the web got centralised and why certain platforms have lots power: because people just gave it to them. If Discord decides to monetize by leveraging ads, good luck to you and your community.

You don't truly own the domain though. You rent it. You have to continually pay to maintain control over it. It also wouldn't be hard for the registrar to claim you violated their ToS and revoke your access to the domain (or if they don't think they can get away with that, then they can say that they failed to process your payment when the domain renews and then snatch it up instantly themselves so you can't get it back).

Yes you have to continually pay pizza money, yearly, true. Rent a country level domain and it won't be revoked without a judicial order. Also rent from a registrar with good reputation.

I don't know what a self-hosted service that lets every user have power over the instance would look like, but the original argument was that IRC gives you ownership over your own server.

Hell, the "no say over the owner" argument isn't even restricted to self-hosted services, there have been numerous cases of a discord admin nuking the server over some petty drama.

>IRC is not immune from this kind of childish meddling.

IRC is just a protocol, Discord is a service provider.

I'm in no control over what Discord deems appropriate and they can terminate my "server" (Guild) that they're letting me use at their own whim (or by accident) with little to no recourse.

I can run my own IRC server or use a variety of preexisting IRC networks which typically are fairly lax on over-enforcement unlike Discord.

>Just a few months ago freenode underwent a hostile takeover and unlike most Discord communities, it is probably not coming back from that BS.

Similar to Discord, Freenode is a service provider.

Should the folks who administrate a IRC network have goals that don't align with you (or there's a hostile takeover which changes the operation's goals) you can connect to a different IRC network, this is largely what happened in the case of Freenode -> libera.

If Discord decides to nuke your guild there's not an alternate discord to connect to, they must switch to a different client and service.

If an IRC network decides to nuke my channel I can just switch to a different network.

Overall the likelihood of a well behaving guild on Discord getting nuked randomly is low, but regardless of Discord or IRC you should still have alternative methods of communications and not put all your eggs in one basket. You don't want to lose connections with all of the people you talk with because some moderator or IRCop got bored.

You're still missing the bigger point: whether you're using Discord or IRC (as a service or not) if the server/network is taken away from you, your entire community has to almost start from scratch or pick up the pieces regardless of the platform being used.

You'll all still be displaced and will have to gather again elsewhere.

It's also complete bullshit that IRC somehow saves the day when it falls short on all the same points as Discord does with regards to saving messages, which it also doesn't do for, PLUS it falls short on some other critical points: too much client choice is a bad thing; it's complex to set up and is something you have to administrate; you have to keep it secure; IRC servers get targeted by (D)DoS attacks all the time - it's a hobby for some arseholes; people new to industry don't know what IRC is and are simply going to find it confusing; most of the teenage population on the planet is using Discord already (and as a primary communication channel).

IRC is dead. Get over it.

>if the server/network is taken away from you, your entire community has to almost start from scratch or pick up the pieces regardless of the platform being used.

>>regardless of Discord or IRC you should still have alternative methods of communications and not put all your eggs in one basket.

As previously mentioned, relying on any single platform is a risk that should be mitigated by having alternatives available. Some of the Discords I use extensively have telegram as backups for when Discord is down.

If Discord were to disappear tomorrow, you'd would be well served to have a backup of some sort to avoid losing contact with everyone, IRC has the advantage of being relatively easy to setup independently with extremely low hardware requirements.

>You'll all still be displaced and will have to gather again elsewhere.

Ideally you have somewhere off platform that people would know to look for updates (website, twitter, etc), but irrespective of what you're using such an event would always be pretty disruptive.

>falls short on all the same points as Discord does with regards to saving messages, which it also doesn't do for

Can arguably be a good thing in keeping chats a bit more ephemeral and more casual, but that's not necessarily a good thing depending on the topic. Regardless you can log client-side or with a bot plenty fine if it's critical to be able to reference the past.

>too much client choice is a bad thing;

Don't entirely disagree, but no client choice (Discord) is oppressive. I'd much rather have an open protocol where I can use open source clients I can trust aren't scanning my processes and sending telemetry without my consent. If I miss out on features that my client doesn't implement I'm fine with that as long as the basic functionality works.

>it's complex to set up and is something you have to administrate;

Many ircds are hardly more complex than setting up a web server, and of course there's still multitudes of existing IRC networks to choose from if you don't wish to administer it yourself.

>you have to keep it secure; IRC servers get targeted by (D)DoS attacks all the time - it's a hobby for some arseholes;

Yeah, not really much debate here. (Although if I have to be pedantic figuring I've been rambling on anyways there's a good amount of vps/server providers that provide decent DDoS protection these days)

Spammers are still a minor issue on Discord though.

>people new to industry don't know what IRC is and are simply going to find it confusing;

And that's a darn shame, but it's not an impossible barrier. People can be taught what it is an how to use it if there's any demand for it.

> most of the teenage population on the planet is using Discord already (and as a primary communication channel).

Yep, it's convenient and popular and has a large user-base.

>IRC is dead. Get over it.

IRC will almost certainly outlive Discord and Slack, but it's past its prime for sure.

I still believe there's plenty of value in protocols rather than being tied to companies like Slack or Discord and perhaps Matrix (or something else) will be a proper "modern" successor to IRC and enjoy the freedom in communication that not being tied to a particular organization's terms of service/code of conduct.

Ultimately though a lot of that will depend on if the internet gets entirely centralized (as has been the direction many things have been going), or fracture back into more decentralized structures. Time will tell.

At last, a constructive response to something on Hacker News. Thank you.

I might consider a back up to Discord, but in my game the best back up available is a mailing list. That's my goal for the commercial side of my community engagements (the Discord isn't commercialised, of course.)

I certainly stand corrected on a few of your points though.

Thanks a bunch. Stay awesome.

> If Discord were to disappear tomorrow, you'd would be well served to have a backup of some sort to avoid losing contact with everyone, IRC has the advantage of being relatively easy to setup independently with extremely low hardware requirements.

I don't see why you wouldn't need some sort of alternate contact info on IRC. There's no real identity system with IRC, so you'd need to validate people are who they say they are when they register their names with your new NickServ.

Using IRC isn't nearly as complicated as you make it out to be. Kids in the 90s/2000s would frequently have it open in internet cafes along with Star Craft or whatever else they were playing. The move to Discord says more about features (which I won't deny are nice) and marketing than it does about usability. And most of the world's teenage population isn't on Discord.

Even nearly computer illiterate people over 30 used IRC back in the day at internet cafes.

>It's not your server. I hope you have everything backed up

but who cares?

who's going to read thru those 10s of thousands of messages where majority of them is just random talk?

also Discord offers better privacy/security for end users than self-hosted alternatives

I run a network still, it’s a social club but the majority of people are devops.

ircs://irc.darkscience.net:6697/darkscience

What's that channel about?

Well, I disagree. ##slackware, #slackbuilds and so on are still a good site to learn and share knowledge.

Discord and Slack are a disgrace.

Discord is great.

For now. I have been bitten so many times, by startups, offering exciting new features and of course great API's.

People flock in, create great interactions, sometimes even better clients, etc.

But thein it always comes, either buyout or IPO (or they just get big enough), and of course the inevitable post about how things wont change because they passionately believe in their vision and community. And then they change everything. Monetization, ads and of course removal of API's.

I do use discord, in fact my biggest problem that between my "work" discords (programming, devops, various user groups) my hobbies, and occasional gaming group I have over 30+ servers, and it's hard to manage at that size.

But I do not trust it, I try to not relay too much on it, because sooner or later it will go downhill.

Currently watching slow rolling tragedy that is Reddit

I remember fall 1995 rather well. A friend I've since long lost track of snuck me into his university's 24x7 student computer rooms at night. Introduced me to the internet. Quite fittingly, a slightly naughty irc chat session with someone ("a woman"? really?) in Canada was my first memory of the mighty internet. Good times.

Thank you Raf!

Still a happy irc user.

It's crazy, I've been using IRC for practically 30 years. I was using IRC for months before I even checked out The Web because there was nothing on it back then.

literally my first foray into the "internet", was telnetting from a dialup BBS to an IRC port, and issuing the raw IRC commands (someone had given me enough info to join a channel and basically say hi.. ).

I met most of my friends via IRC in the 90s...

I miss the excitement of reconnecting to the bouncer and reading chat log. Something you just don't get from slackbot.

How many of those friends are still friends now? That’s cool. I began going on irc and forums in the early 00s when I was a teenager. My anxiety was too bad to connect with people directly. 15+ years later, I’ve formed a lot of friends who originated online (which coincides with the coworking community I manage, linked in my bio).

I wish I would have been able to shed my issues earlier considering how much time I’ve spent on the internet since Napster was around.

Edit: Regarding HN. The (vast?) majority of HNers are anonymous enough. There’s no DMing. Unlike IRC or the forums of yore like phpbb and vbulletin, it isn’t possible for me to connect with people on HN.

I updated irssi. Then i had to update a plug-in i haven’t touched since 2011.

that’s about it

I use catgirl for outgoing IRC servers and sic for bitlbee.

Catgirl is much simpler than IRSSI but it doesn't support TLS'less connections.

On the "Slack has superseded IRC" wrong supposition... IRC was already declining from the AIM/MSN days and then Whatsapp/Telegram nearly killed it.

But, as Usenet, it's still widely used on geeky niches. it's the de facto medium for technical questions for programming or computer/networking stuff.

https://netsplit.de/networks/top10.php?year=2006

Interesting to see how IRC peaked around 2005. The current most popular network, Libera, has a fraction of the users that Quakenet did 17 years ago.

I also don't need 15 bots on different IRC servers linked together to prevent someone riding a netsplit to takeover my channel.

Obviously IRC use has declined, but I also think the ratio of connections that belong to humans has increased.

Colloquy link is dead (again), https://github.com/colloquy/colloquy/releases is probably the most relevant link at this point. A couple of guys keep it limping along when there are breaking OS changes, but it's pretty much in a coma. A pity, since imho it's still the best-looking UI IRC client on any platform.

Yeah, should have swapped the link, did it now.

IRC users around, what are the servers you're joining? Looking to give it another try after all these years.

I have been using IRC since 2006 and I still use it. Initially, I used to hang out on a variety of networks including Freenode, DALNet, EFNet, OFTC, etc. but as years went by I found myself joining only Freenode. The most active discussions around open source projects, mathematics, programming languages, etc. occurred on Freenode.

After the original Freenode staff stepped down[1] and moved to Libera[2] in May 2021, I moved to Libera too.

There are still tight-knit communities on Libera IRC. For example #commonlisp, #emacs, ##math, #python, etc. have great communities with friendly attitude. I have been an operator of the #algorithms channel[3] for over 14 years now. I run a mathematics and computation book club[4] at #offbeat. Contrary to the popular opinion on this forum that IRC is dead, I think IRC is still thriving. It is definitely not as popular as web-based forums like Twitter, Stack Overflow, etc., not even close, but it is there, it is active, and I think it is here to stay for at least another decade or two and possibly even longer.

[1] https://gist.github.com/joepie91/df80d8d36cd9d1bde46ba018af4...

[2] https://web.libera.chat/

[3] https://susam.net/maze/algorithms-channel-migrates-to-libera...

[4] https://offbeat.cc/

Isn’t the comparison for IRC, Slack and Discord? It’s not dead. Neither is ICQ. However we can probably agree ICQ is pretty close to dead and IRC is holding its own with a small number of people and no growth to look forward to.

Discord right now is capturing almost all potential users.

Unfortunate Discord has gotten so big and continuing to grow (they just raised hundreds of millions at a $15B valuation in Sept) without better options to be able to back/export things or have a web archive of channels. I’m assuming a web archive of channels is possible with the API, but I haven’t checked enough. If it is available. It is surprising I have never seen a Discord or Slack web archive of communities you’d think would want this sort of thing like troubleshooting communities like programming ones.

I'm connected to OFTC, Libera, and Hackint right now, plus a semi-private one run by some friends.

In addition to the sibling comments, Rizon, for some specialized usages. Yes, some stuff there I won't endorse, but it's also home to my favorite and most tight-knit group of online friends.

Libera and also sometimes pissnet because it's funny.

Not much news at all, really. More of a roundup of popular clients and utilities.

I suppose that's a reflection of the state of the IRC ecosystem, which is stagnant and slowly dying. The ircv3 project, while well-intentioned, will never result in the revitalization of IRC.

I really like IRC but the ux story is pretty bad by modern standards. Users expect seamless multi device sync, for one. You can achieve a poor facsimile of this with a bnc and a shell account but it's not a great experience.

It's little wonder to me that discord and slack have eaten IRC's lunch, sadly.

> I suppose that's a reflection of the state of the IRC ecosystem, which is stagnant and slowly dying.

I see it as mature rather than stagnant. I like my client to remain mostly the same over years so it doesn't disrupt me every time a developer changes something.

> Users expect seamless multi device sync, for one. You can achieve a poor facsimile of this with a bnc and a shell account but it's not a great experience.

Ergo (an IRC server) has it built-in: https://github.com/ergochat/ergo/blob/master/docs/USERGUIDE....

Awesome. Are any networks running ergo in production?

My experience has been that most IRCops are very much of the change-averse nature.

There is the flagship ergo.chat network, and a bunch of small networks. A total of 118 networks according to https://www.ircstats.org/servers (based on scanning the IPv4 address space on ports 6667 and 6697. Note that, despite being a census of servers, Ergo can't federated, so 1 server = 1 network for Ergo)

> My experience has been that most IRCops are very much of the change-averse nature.

True. Ergo in particular changes the IRC paradigm, so some old-timers don't like it very much. As far as I know, Ergo deployments are all brand-new networks

> Ergo can't federated, so 1 server = 1 network for Ergo)

I guess I qualify as an old timer even though I’m not that old then. If you can’t federate servers I don’t think it should be called IRC. It might be using the same protocol, but it’s something else.

Why? It doesn't make any difference for users.

These days, IRC federation is only used to scale horizontally, and sadly, IRC networks doesn't need to scale over 100k concurrent users anymore.

Part of what made irc, irc is that it was decentralized. A single server breaks the entire premise of IRC. EFNet literally could not exist if it weren’t decentralized.

> I suppose that's a reflection of the state of the IRC ecosystem, which is stagnant and slowly dying.

It's stable, yes. Some of us like a slow-paced ecosystem.

> I really like IRC but the ux story is pretty bad by modern standards. Users expect seamless multi device sync, for one. You can achieve a poor facsimile of this with a bnc and a shell account but it's not a great experience.

Any bouncer will work, and there are even web clients that serve that role as well. Although, yes, it's higher friction than some alternatives.

> It's little wonder to me that discord and slack have eaten IRC's lunch, sadly.

Yes, the ease of use and feature differences do often favor alternatives; I'm hoping Matrix becomes the preferred replacement.

>Any bouncer will work

Any bouncer is one step too many.

>stagnant and slowly dying

As Progval noted, this is more maturity than stagnation/death... Not all software needs to have more things continuously added to remain useful.

> Users expect seamless multi device sync, for one. You can achieve a poor facsimile of this with a bnc and a shell account but it's not a great experience.

I'd highly recommend TheLounge since it does this extremely well. For a given login (which can be connected to any number of IRC networks/channels), it'll have the same state across all sessions/devices (including private messages), without needing a special client for the device.

Being a webapp, it can also be used on any work PC/device with a browser & internet connectivity.

> It's little wonder to me that discord and slack have eaten IRC's lunch, sadly.

Frankly, I've found Discord to be largely full of children and trolls.

>TheLounge

That's the problem. Your best recommendation is to sign up for a third party service just to use IRC. That's awful UX.

IRC is a protocol, not a service. The alternative discussed is slack/discord, where you sign up to use their service. You can pretend that TheLounge is IRC and then it's just the same as slack/discord from a user's perspective. I don't see why that's horrible UX.

I keep an irssi session running inside a screen session on my server and SSH into it to use IRC. Since IRC is a protocol, not a service tied to a specific client, I have that option. I can't do that (easily) with slack/discord. I consider slack/discord to have shit ux because I'm forced to use their bloated clients that waste tons of screen real estate.

TheLounge is not a third party service, it's software you can run on your own machine. Works pretty well and the UX is slick.

> [IRC's] ux story is pretty bad by modern standards

UX is entirely dependent on the client. And there are issues with modern UX standards that result in browser tabs using an entire core of CPU resources and/or allocating enough memory that the device becomes unresponsive.

The other issue is the inconsistent UI. Automatic updates result in users having to learn a different way to accomplish what they need to do without prior warning or a way to opt out of the change. Slack did this a few years ago where markup no longer worked the way it had before[1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21589647

> UX is entirely dependent on the client.

Not entirely. Some features cannot be implemented without help from the protocol, like this extension to fetch history: https://ircv3.net/specs/extensions/chathistory

IRC just operates differently than discord or slack do.

In the olden days, people just had large log files for their IRC clients stored locally, understanding that disconnected time = time you weren't logging.

A lot of existing IRC users would probably view the ability to fetch complete channel chat history as an anti-feature.

Typically this was something that was handled locally by the client by logging messages sent to channels you were in. The concept of having all messages on a central server to pull down actually makes certain actions more difficult.

For instance, pressing PgUp several times or just scrolling up to see what was said some time ago in Slack takes quite a bit of time because it has to pull down data from the server rather than relying on local storage. Same thing with using something like ctrl-f to find a certain phrase you saw in the channel some time ago. Slack, for example, requires you to go through several dialogs to formulate your search terms, and by default, returns results in channels you never were in, and won't filter them out until you select just the channels you want.

Yes of course. I meant this protocol extension is needed to get the history while disconnected from the network.

And it can be fast enough to work smoothly with scroll/PgUp, I successfully did this with Gamja + https://github.com/progval/matrix2051 + Synapse, it almost felt like the history was stored locally.

> It's little wonder to me that discord and slack have eaten IRC's lunch, sadly.

Discord and Slack have the great advantage of being freemium proprietary software that don't have to inter-operate with any software not written by their own companies. They're paid more to hit a much easier target.

I'll never be surprised when well-funded projects outperform volunteer-run projects. Even the Linux kernel is funded by different entities.

How do you feel about Matrix and some of the other new-age FOSS chat systems?

> Discord and Slack have the great advantage of being freemium proprietary software that don't have to inter-operate with any software not written by their own companies.

While that indeed is an advantage, it's not why they're dominant, and I'm not sure it's simply a question of funding either.

Let's be honest, compared to IRC, Discord and Slack are very easy to use. All it takes to join a server is clicking a link. IRC protocol is just as old as me, and I, to this day, remember the struggle as a kid of joining empty channels before finally understanding the concept of networks. Back in the day, you'd need a special friend with ZNC to be the cool kid. Since then, audience has changed dramatically and most people don't even know what "protocol" means.

IRC just doesn't offer what it takes to get everyone on board.

You don't need everyone unless you're trying to IPO. For instance, it's not hard to slap mature GUI clients on company laptops to access a company IRCd. You can even use emoji!

A huge improvement over how Microsoft Comic Chat emotions appeared on other IRC clients.

> For instance, it's not hard to slap mature GUI clients on company laptops to access a company IRCd

And which mature client would that be?

And which clients would work for Linux laptops, and MacOS laptops, and Windows laptops? And also company-issued Android phones and iPhones?

And who would be maintaining the servers for IRC with all the necessary things to make it meet expectations in the modern world?

Quassel? Mature and works on everything except iOS if you use the split client/bouncer mode.

iOS is only not properly supported because the devtools and hardware are far too expensive for me to finance.

If you wanna deploy an ircd, there's some modern ones like ergo. Deploying ergo and the quasselcore bouncer can be easily done with a helm chart on your k8s cluster, you can even get Prometheus metrics out.

>You don't need everyone unless you're trying to IPO

But if you are looking for people to talk to, but they don't use IRC (read: almost everyone) there is no reason to use IRC. If I wanted to talk about speedrunning a game I will go to Discord because that's where the community is, not on some IRC server.

Slack doesn't get money from casuals, so if your company says "hey we use IRC," you're going to plop a client on your laptop and be done with it (and there are web clients besides). It's not a learning curve you'd have to worry about.

IRC's main barrier remains easy access to history, IMO.

There are a few easy 'just click a link' web clients I've used (via doing exactly that from a GitHub readme or similar) - but you connect and then you have no history, no idea (without waiting a bit) if there's an ongoing discussion, no idea what it's about if there is. Then you go afk and if you get disconnected only to reconnect later, you have no idea if someone answered your question during the time you were offline.

(I like & 'support' & want to use Matrix, but haven't yet.)

History is possible with current IRC tech & spec, but I think the cost (GDPR compliance etc.) will be a challenge for networks run by volunteers. Even before the spec work, IRCCloud has been an option for a long time. Now there is a chat service for paid users of Sourcehut: https://sourcehut.org/blog/2021-11-29-announcing-the-chat.sr...

Ticket for ratifying CHATHISTORY, tracking implementations: https://github.com/ircv3/ircv3-specifications/issues/437

>How do you feel about Matrix and some of the other new-age FOSS chat systems?

Well I have a perpetual notification on my phone from element (the matrix client) because a server I was part of has shut down, but I can't sign out because the client can't connect to the server that no longer exists. Yeah.

That pretty much sums up my opinion of matrix.

Wow. I haven't used Matrix, as it brings no value to me over XMPP. Can't you delete the server/account from the client?

> How do you feel about Matrix and some of the other new-age FOSS chat systems?

Like with Mastodon. I really like the idea but I do not know where to start. Which server should I use for my account. With IRC I just opened my client connected to any server and saw what was there, without any account. Then I got to know people and got ssh account on some server.

In an industry where Wordpress plugins and JavaScript frameworks buy people their houses, the ideas of stability and stationary targets become negative attributes.

Gamja (감자) is the Korean word for potato. Curious thing to call an IRC client.

Indeed! Maintainer here. I just lived in Korea for a while and remembered a Korean dish while trying to find a project name.

tl;dr no particular reason. :)

No mention of freenode going rogue, and Libera Chat?

That did not happen in H2 2021. I did refer to it briefly in my first article, but enough was written about the event elsewhere: https://www.ilmarilauhakangas.fi/irc_technology_news_from_th...

Not only did it happen in another part of the year, this article is also titled "IRC technology news" so one could assume network drama does not really belong there.

oh, I missed the "second half".

Turns out that my mind is still stuck in 2019. The year is also wrong (2020).

Reminds of my young teens in middle school…joining the gamesurge.net server on IRC to find a Counter-Strike 5v5 scrim

Remember everyone moved from IRC to Silc in my bubble. I wonder if those people are still there.

Where is Igloo for iOS?

Due to certain concerns, Igloo is banned on several large networks, so no one is going to recommend it. It's no surprise that the author of Igloo was part of the new team that took over freenode.

Igloo is not banned on any networks. Please don't spread misinformation.

Objectively Igloo is the best client ever made for iOS, you all need to stop thinking about the politics and personal life, decisions and behaviors of developers and care about the tech aspect of tech things. There is absolutely zero reason to not list Igloo on this list and even on the IRCv3 website.

Also, regarding the bans, I never had a single issue connecting to any network, I remember it was banned on freenode before the takeover but only briefly and that was cause by their childish attitude towards personal issues between few people.

This "cancel culture" is the reason we can't have good things anymore.

Personally, I know what's good or not, if a website is not listing something that I KNOW works well then I can't take it seriously, or any other work or project of that person, because I know that he's driven by emotions based on false claims.

What's wrong with irssi? Why's it not listed here?

EDIT: disregard, this is a list of updates, and irssi had no updates

It's lacking a maintainer, so didn't have any changes to talk about. I pointed to an active fork called Neırssi instead: https://www.ilmarilauhakangas.fi/irc_technology_news_from_th...

EDIT: disregard, I see this is a list of updates to clients, not a list of clients.

What are you on about? Look at the git repo. There were literally no changes to talk about.

No source, just an observation.

> Neırssi is not yet working

I think that is just a case of a non-native English speaker making a mistake. The full context is:

"If you are stuck at any point, feel free to come to the IRC channel #irssi on the Libera Chat network and ask for assistance. While Neırssi is not yet working, you can use the Libera Chat Webchat."

I read the last sentence as "If you can't get Neırssi to work for you whether due to a critical crasher or something else, join via web chat and ask for help".

Yeah; it’s also missing the venerable Microsoft Chat:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Comic_Chat

Though I’m guessing it’ll never be updated again. Would love it if they decided to open source it though!

There's a proxy script in Python that'll get Comic Chat working with Freenode at the least, I'm not sure whether it'd work on Libera as posted.

https://gist.github.com/richardg867/bb19ca2b03545f71ae15

and Comic Chat itself: http://www.mermeliz.com/cchat.htm

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