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Comment by ReactiveJelly | Hacker News Reader

> 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?

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> 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.

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