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Comment by CJefferson | Hacker News Reader

For me, the single issue with IRC is that it doesn't fit well in a world where I communicate with multiple devices, each of which is only attached to the internet occasionally.

If there was (is there now?) a standard way of clients requesting all messages since they were last connected, that would solve my biggest problem.

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This is one of my bigger use cases for Matrix. Having a consistent UI with complete history for IRC is pretty great.

Although it also helps that Matrix being relatively close to Discord in terms of basic feature set made it possible for me to convince friends to use it as a Discord backup and for more private conversations. With IRC they would've probably shrugged it off as another "Linux nerd" thing.

Yeah, that is exactly how I first came into contact with Matrix, it works great as an IRC client which is always active and keeps full history.

AFAIK many people use a bouncer (e.g. ZNC) for connecting to IRC. ZNC at least supports individual backlog for multiple devices. So I think that is a fairly standard solution.

Multi-device with history is not built-in to the spec which makes it a non-starter for big rollout. IRC has had many years to adapt but it didn't so here we are.

Well, IRC 3 has been in development hell longer than Duke Nukem Forever was.

As someone who was essentially constantly on IRC back in the 90s to early 2000s, IRC is just significantly less usable "out of the box" than Discord or Matrix; either is significantly easier to teach someone to use, especially multiple-device.

The ship has sailed and I don't think IRC3 will ever get traction even if it ends up actually being good.

Just check the channel log. There's no reason to make this so complicated. We're not even talking about "normal users" these are people involved in the Gnome project. I'm sure they can figure out how to click a link in the channel topic.

There is a common way to solve this kind of setup, just run IRC client on a server within screen, and then log from these devices to the server and re-attach screen.

A lot of people don't want to be a sysadmin just to use a chat application.

Lol, I mean. I get it but you could just be running a raspberry pi in your local network and connecting to that, screen just keeps the process running even if you detach from it etc..

Sysadmin's do lot more stuff y'know

IMHO, Irccloud is a very convenient solution for this. Not open source though.

I consider that a feature. If you are on IRC I know that you are in front of your "main" computer and can dedicate your attention to me, instead of being on the tube and typing with a shitty phone keyboard trying to pay attention so you don't miss your station.

How do you know they're not on termux via an IRC bouncer?

Not true nowadays, everyone uses a bouncer. You're lucky if it automatically marks them as "away" when they aren't connected to it.

Automatic "away" notifications are the work of the devil.

Yeah, it's terrible what smart phones have done to computing. They're such incapable, weak computers with such bad networking and user interface that all software is being dumbed down and gimped to act as a crutch for their users.

Random round trip time combined with the energy storage limitations of the radio modem mean tcp back-off and inability to actually hold open a port (if they even have a routable ipv4!). But somehow that's everyone else's problem, not the smart phone's.

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