I really hate Slack but the killer feature nobody in irc world is solving is mobile connectivity. If get logged out every time I lock my phone then I have to keep dealing with Slack.
But that being said, the mobile phone essentially killing all open tcp connections is not really that great of a thing. IRC is not the only protocol that suffers here, but also IMAP IDLE push notifications suffer here.
It uses IRCv3 chathistory + a proposed extension for push notifications.
EDIT: ah, of course it's Android only.
EDIT2: They absolutely are Apple problems. Unfortunately Apple has convinced their users that they are IRC problems and the practical reality is that Apple users will not use IRC unless they're fixed which for me means setting up eg MMS bridges with cheogram which is a major pain. Thankfully we're getting web push on iOS next year and that will (hopefully) make all these problems effectively go away.
It's really convenient, I don't even have to pull out my phone because notifications come straight to my Apple Watch.
I would really like MutterIRC to come back or some alternative to this application.
When I was at work I got a push notification and could quickly write back on IRC chat. That's how it should work. Unfortunately, MutterIRC is not working since 2019.
Just checked discord - electron app consumes half the memory firefox does with only discord open.
You need to have a client or a proxy client running somewhere 24/7. You can self-host it (bouncer) or you can pay someone else to do it (IRCCloud).
But it's still a protocol level issue. IRCv3 might be doing something about it, but I'm not holding my breath.
So you'd have to use a server that's connected to the IRC server 24/7 and connect from your phone to that server.
Or https://ircv3.net/specs/extensions/chathistory# this might change it.
I see some IRCs even keep a mailing-list-like record of all messages posted on a channel... so I don't see how it's not possible.
At one point I extended an IRC server where you could send a list of regex filters. When messages where sent to channels you had joined that matched the filters it would send you push notifications. I think that combined with logging is really all people want on mobile.
Unfortunately someone has to actually run the push server and that
1) Requires more work than volunteers are willing to do
2) Can only be done by people holding the certificates used to publish the app.
I've personally just given up on popular mobile OSes. They're a disaster in nearly every way.
It's just a bot that runs on IRC just like the bots I made when I was using it.
Props to them for giving it a go but I feel it'd take something massive for people to switch back to IRC at this point
There's no reason not to allow this for open source apps (commercial ones would obviously abuse it and you would have battery life issues.) Unfortunately it doesn't matter what makes sense on mobile, you're not allowed to tinker with the OS in any way.
EDIT: That's great! I did not know about it. You could probably get around the issue of teaching clients to use it by modifying the BSD socket library to open sockets that way after checking an environment variable. I might mess around with that later.
The problem is that:
a) ... this requires teaching ModemManager about this API since MM is the only thing that talks to the modem.
b) ... this requires teaching clients to talk to MM for a TCP connection, likely using some new dbus-based API to match MM's existing API, instead of just socket() + connect() + read() + write(). So existing TCP-socket using programs will not work without modification. (LD_PRELOAD trickery can work, though ideally only sockets used for push notifications would be routed through MM and the rest use socket(), which can be hard for an LD_PRELOAD'd library to do.)
c) ... one should really be running the OSS firmware instead of Quectel's, and the OSS firmware does not implement those commands.
This was discussed a few months ago in #pinephone. AFAIK no one is working on it.
Run Thelounge somewhere and it provides a great interface for your phone with chat history storage and other conveniences.
EDIT: I can't reply to your other message but having to deal with people editing their messages is awful in any real time chat. Once you send a message it's sent and if you want to make changes send a new message. I once had someone gaslight me using message editing in Slack and never ever want to deal with that again.
1) To converse in an easy, familiar manner; talk lightly and casually.
2) To participate in a synchronous exchange of remarks with one or more people over a computer network.
No, reactions are not essential part of chat apps.
Talking to a person also has none of those features, yet it's still as popular today as it was 300 years ago. And I view IRC just as the text-version of talking in person. So my expectations are that it has more or less the same feature set.
And even with only partial support the delete function (if it's not limited to the user itself) gives way too much power to the ops/moderator (power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.).
Reactions and images aren't essential for the strict interpretation of the word, but as everyone is used to them now you're not getting very far without them.
Nobody wants to play multiplayer notepad in 2022.
The fact IRC is still widely used disproves this quite clearly.
I think the real issue is people who like Discord trying to convince people who like IRC that the Discord method is better, and vice versa.
It's two pretty different demographics for the most part.
Relatively that's not widely used. Back when I used IRC you'd see that many people disconnect from the network during a netsplit if you were a network admin. Honestly if 45k people for the top network is widely used it's just... kinda sad really.
With modern resources you could probably get the the entire top 100 public networks running off a single machine. Look at Undernet, EFNet, DALNet! Those places used to have 100k users each on a slow day, they're barely reaching 10k now.
User counts have halved since I last looked, and have been decimated (literal usage of the word, nice) since the days I actively used IRC. I'll accept that maybe today is a bad day for stats or something, but it doesn't look like there's many good days left.
For clarity's sake I am still in the IRC demographic[2], but that's no use if no bugger else is using it. I'd love to get back into it if there's anywhere not-a-dead-software-support-channel to hang out but every time this comes up the usage stats just get smaller and smaller.
For what it's worth I rarely use Discord and dislike that back-and-forth knowledge for software communities is now locked away behind some rando company's sign-up form. If I ever set up a new community it'll have to be forum based I think.
[1] https://netsplit.de/networks/top100.php
[2] Literally my entire career was born in IRC. Wanted to make an IRC bot, figured that out, some other stuff happened, was seen as a tech type, asked to help admin a network I frequented, learned how to admin a Linux box, time passes, got a job doing sysadmin work.
I do miss IRC, made a whole bunch of internet friends on it and it took me down a career path I only sometimes regret.
30 people leaving a reaction to an announcement is way easier than 30 lines of chat coming in at varying times.
Same goes for things like +1 -1 feedback