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Comment by na85 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

> 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.

> [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.

>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.

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

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