Making IRC better
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It has to fulfill the need of a common space for public discourse.
The specification must be open and free for all to use. There should be no artificial restrictions on who is able to develop tools including servers, clients, intermediary or subsystems, or provide a service to host any of them. Federation also introduces a higher risk of spam and bad actors; it's part of the price of freedom so the protocol should have an intended use pattern that addresses that type of issue; ideally without forcing the association of a 'real identity' to all use of the system. That won't solve all of the problems, and it adds a bunch of other problems. However a system of the commons may see users such as government organizations or heavily regulated industries where endpoints agree to use such an identity in some way.
"Weechat in a terminal on my other monitor" feels like home to me. I'm hoping we can opt-out, but in my opinion it will be a dark and dogless day when we cannot.
I know I exaggerate but I'm sure that traditional IRC clients will be supported for a long time to come as a fallback.
Personally I'd like some mod cons, like the server keeping state and not needing a bouncer. Server side scrollback would be another one.
However I'm not sure if these are in the standard. Not a fan of the typing indicator either.
I wish they would concentrate on sane defaults so that more new users could easily be onboarded. Otherwise those people are just going to use Slack or Discord, which is a shame.
I like my Quassel bouncer because it gives me a multi-network synced experience between multiple computers and mobiles. I don't really like the way irssi does multi-server support.
However I do really miss a text client for quassel. There is an irssi plugin for it, but unfortunately it's unmaintained, and it was never that great.
At some point I stopped using IRC or similar style communication (group iMessage worked), and then suddenly work stuff was all Slack, which is obviously a better service for businesses I guess?
I find a bunch of the discord and slack things more annoying than not, but I can understand their appeal to the wider market.
I have random friends in IRC with whom I've been chatting casually for 26 years now. Perhaps newer tools will also endure!
Does IRC appeal more to people like me who experience aphantasia and related issues? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia
But that's over a time frame that is still longer than discord has really been around, or at least around in my life - so much so that I certainly would take the longevity of knowing people on discord as a measure of long term result.
The other obvious factor is that discord is more popular for many more people, which means you get many more people coming and going. It's much like when starcraft2 P2P became free to play, there were vastly more players (at least initially) but I found it intolerable due to the huge increase in assholes - presumably account creation being free meant there were no longer any consequences for such - and just stopped playing. Maybe it's changed since, but I don't know as I have no desire to play anymore. :-/
[1] https://ircv3.net/specs/extensions/server-time [2] https://ircv3.net/specs/extensions/capability-negotiation
An irc bouncer is a middleman between you and an irc network. It connects to a network like a normal client and instead of connecting directly to an irc network you connect to it. Usually you would set it up to log for you and show you some or all of the messages it received while you were disconnected. In this way your nick is always present in your channels and you can see what was talked about while you were away.
source: https://www.reddit.com/r/irc/comments/35vcth/comment/cr86hcs...
On the other hand, the mobile/cellular world has been largely responsible for killing off IRC.
UnrealIRCd (a popular IRC server implementation) have actively refused to add features in to the code-base that allow IRC operators to snoop on private messages or covertly on channels, for example.
Slack, Facebook, Reddit, and whoever else we all use these days, keep every private message ever sent logged for all time and this is just accepted.
That's really moot because operators can certainly and easily snoop the traffic on the wire. Therefore I agree with the statement above that one should take IRC for what it is: lightweight, convenient, but don't assume any privacy - and it can be perfectly fine.
Someone should have told Angrywolf. This module was on every "we used to be on BigNet but we split off because reasons" UnrealIRCd network for a while, haha
(disclaimer: don't use it for moral reasons, but also because I've not vetted the code in any way beyond checking it looks a bit like code)
But I think it is more complicated, because it also makes clear that IRC is not an ideal medium for many forms of messaging. It works great for free for all chat, where the discussion happens right now. But it is not great for group chats with friends or when information needs to be disseminated across a community, but I have both of these seen used often.
It just not asynchronous, while at the same time, because of the constant open connection, also not great to use on the go.
It's somehow nice to have a medium for "right here and now", but it sucks to not be able to answer a question or miss important conversation because you didn't look for 10 minutes.
Of course, multi-tier conversation options have helped traditionally, but I think that's also why i never bothered with IRC much, because it was always 3 dozen people idling who always seemed to burst in conversation once you got disconnected.
I wrote a little bit about this facet of IRC culture in this article:
https://drewdevault.com/2021/11/24/A-philosophy-for-instant-...
Back in the day where people used to differentiate between IRC and IMs (more importantly, chat vs messaging), I don't really think this is correct. In today's era of Discord/Slack/SMS though, it certainly would seem like a detriment. I do agree with those other people, though. What was nice about IRC (to me) was how imperative it was. You could post a cool thing, question or discussion topic in a channel and have responses coming through within the minute. When you're done, you just close the window and it's like it was never there. I remember feeling like I was using a secret spy communicator when I had IRC downloaded in middle school, the whole ephemeral nature of it was the coolest to me back then.
If someone is looking for an ephemeral side-project to work on, it'd be interesting to have something like twitter that works in a similar way: you only see tweets posted when you're online on the page.
A bouncer holds that TCP connection for you and you connect to it instead of directly to the server. It will store messages received while you were away, automatically log conversations to disk, and allow you to connect to the same user with multiple devices, among other features.
For starters, it would mean logging every message in every channel. IRC servers are (traditionally) relatively stateless and adding a database for logs is a very nontrivial ask.
Server-side logs are a non-starter for many server ops due to exposure to the legal system (dealing with warrants, subpoenas, DMCA, "right to be forgotten", etc). Way easier to say, sorry, we don't have any logs.
It doesn't take a whole lot of active channels to start eating up serious disk space. And of course for every user connection, you incur a complex db query, the results of which need to get sent back to the client, meaning every new connection is expensive in all of disk, cpu, sand network at a minimum. Most IRC servers are run by volunteers who aren't looking to beef up their server specs by an order of magnitude for one convenient feature. This is more doable now than a decade or two ago but it's still a big ask.
You would need to convince all client authors to support server-side logging. Some will, some won't.
Last I knew, most IRC servers didn't support authentication directly. If you wanted to "own" your nick, you had to register with a bot-like service. This means you can't get your logs until after you've authenticated to NameServ or whatever.
Channels are ephemeral. Unless registered with services, a channel does not exist until a user joins it. Once the last user leaves, the channel doesn't exist anymore. Logging would mean channels are no longer ephemeral.
Traditionally, the IRC networks and server authors have responded to these kind of feature requests by saying they should be done by the client, not the server. And I think I have to agree. There's nothing that Slack does (for instance) that can't be done with a sufficiently advanced IRC client.
Keep the server as a relatively dumb message broker and put all the smarts in the client. If the features are useful enough, other clients will implement them too.
That's not quite true anymore. While many IRC servers don't directly talk with the user database, but indirectly to the services daemon (which provides the mentioned NickServ, etc.), most support SASL authentication these days (one of the more widely adopted IRCv3 extensions on the client and server side). So you can directly authenticate yourself right at the start of the connection without having to talk to any special services.
Most good IRC networks allow you to list loaded modules as a method of good faith transparency.
Having me@why.the.fuck.you.whois.me was a classic.
(Yeah people would usually buy a bouncer, or perhaps several ones)
For a ZNC bouncer, an e2 micro instance is the right option.
https://cloud.google.com/free/docs/gcp-free-tier/#compute
1 non-preemptible e2-micro VM instance per month in one of the following US regions...
30 GB-months standard persistent disk
5 GB-month snapshot storage in the following regions...
1 GB network egress from North America to all region destinations (excluding China and Australia) per month
The reason IRC can't have a bouncer capability is that you're then unbounded in terms of storage and memory requirements. IRC, as implemented, is an insanely light server to implement. I ran a college IRC network with a few dozen users on a pair of Mac SE/30s back in the 2002-2004 era - 12MB and 16MB RAM.
If you want something persistent, run your own bouncer, or use Matrix or something.
Message comes in, message goes out. You don't need much of any actual storage, it's mostly in the network buffers, and IRC tends pretty aggressive about killing off clients that aren't taking traffic.
I assume the CC requirement is mostly anti-fraud. Easy(ish) to create thousands of Google accounts and abuse the free tier, harder when you can start correlating credit card numbers.
What I'd love to see is an open source version of discord take off. Especially if there's a discovery mechanism built in.
On Discord, all communities are created equal, and are discoverable. When you go to the discovery mechanism you can search for many similarly purposed communities.
But not sure I buy that the communities are that different. I would rather view them as different networks in IRC terms. You'll have a completely different set of people from one to the next, so how is it any different to joining a different network on IRC?
Yeah, sometimes, other times there's overlap. That is kind of my point, they're encouraging chasing people off to new places because their channel operators could be worse.
Discord's default of "notify me on every message" is its worst anti-feature, IMO.
Other than that, I like Discord.
It seems to me that most UX choices these days are designed to increase engagement.
Isn't this basically the matrix protocol? It already has millions of users (mostly in the french and german governments, I think) and they're pretty serious about UX and security.
Anyone can run a server, and there's no issue with messaging someone who uses a different server than you use. Messages and private channels are e2e encrypted, so even the server operator can't see them, and it supports modern features like editing/deleting messages, file sharing, messaging from more than one device, seeing messages that were sent when you were offline, and things like that.
To your specific complaint with IRC, matrix also has a pretty innovative feature that I like called "spaces", which are groupings of channels (with a many-to-many relation between spaces and channels). So I can make a "best functional programming channels" space that can have many channels with different moderation teams, etc.
I imagine IRC people will just call all of these distractions. They are in a shrinking minority of people.
> I like being able to paste code into chat and have it syntax highlighted.
Regardless of there being a better tool for syntax highlighting and holding small linkable snippets of code (so that logic doesn't need to be more to download when opening your chat) it also keeps it _out_ of the chat so it's not polluted. People not being able to instantly insert 20 lines of text is a _good_ thing. So, link to the resource don't embed it.
> I like being able to ping people so that they get a notification on their phone, and likewise, I like people to be able to ping me
> Occasionally, I like to send a GIF
That's not a solution, that's a bad and inconvenient workaround. Having to use an external service just to share a couple lines of code is horrible for usability. Funnily enough, its also exactly the thing that IRC users complain about when the matrix bridge converts multi-line messages to links.
I assume you're trying to say this is hypocritical, but it isn't.
The problem with multi-line messages becoming links is that the message is the context of the question. You have to reach for a browser just to read what the other person wanted to say.
Things like images and pastebins are ancillary to the message. You read the text part, decide whether you want to engage with it further, and then if you do you reach for a browser to see the image or pastebin.
Compare:
<h> hey guys im trying to install blub on ubuntu but it keeps complaining that my splines aren't reticulated. full error here: https://paste.rs/id123
<h[m]> hey guys... (full message at https://matrix.org/_matrix/media/r0/download/matrix.org/id123)
There's nothing to file a bug about. The bridge does not (and can not without some AI or heuristics which are both fallible) know where the relevant part of the message ends and the log spew begins, so a message with a one-line description and fifty lines of logs is treated the same as a message with fifty-one lines.
I wonder what else is missing besides paste and chat there.
Edit: but the manual does: https://man.sr.ht/
Element (Matrix) and Slack will render something like this as 3-5 lines with the expansion option to see all of it. I'm sure discord will eventually do the same too.
This is clearly preferable to using a different application entirely to view the snippet.
It's only IRC where some naive clients expand this out into 20 something messages where this is a problem. And since it's not part of the protocol, you're at the whims of the sender's client for how it's handled, so it's not like you can install a sufficiently smart client to render it how you like in all cases.
I'd also suggest your perspective of how much a problem even that 20 lines of text is is distorted by being in fast moving public chatrooms, like your typical Linux distro channel. In my small team or friends chat, it's perfectly fine
The same also applies to the gif. If this one bothers you, most clients even have the options to disable inline images, so the sender gets to choose. Also it means you just get the image file, and not whatever cruft the popular image host of this 5 year period is doing to monetise.
Image hosts and pastebins also seem more fragile than chat services. I've occasionally gone through old messages that link to pastie or similar and the context is gone.
I'm no stranger to the IRC protocol (in fact one of my first submissions to this site 12 years ago in 2010 was an introduction to the protocol written as part of building an Android client that was my side project at the time), but I have no interest in putting in the time to make an IRC client with the experience I'd like in 2022, which is clearly a much lower bar on matrix when Element, nheko, Cinny, FluffyChat and Fractal have all managed it.
(Not affiliated, just a happy user.)
Sadly true. While I don't use IRC much, looking at older posts from fora without on-forum file storage and I just see photos roughly like this Imgur example (https://imgur.com/NOnf.jpg). Heck, even older HN posts suffer from the same problem.
I can of course see the appeal of all those features, but at least for me it translates into a much worse UX in the end.
Discord does this already.
The users then use other services which have these features and the irc users claim some grand conspiracy to kill open protocols.
did you feel that you were offering solutions or something?
IRC has been around a lot longer than most of the projects which have sprung up in the same space, and IRC views their features with skepticism rather than being the eternal trend-follower. If IRC had followed every trendy chat feature for the past 34 years then it would be a hulking monstrosity by now.
There is wisdom in moderation. A communication method can be effective without facilitating every style of communication -- often moreso. I'll note that you're unable to embed a GIF or highlight code or send an emoji reaction on your Hacker News comments, but we seem to be having this conversation in relative ease despite that.
Different people value different things. Matrix is there if you want a more "modern" option.
Not even using comical exaggeration either, I'd say the user counts are pretty dead on 10x less now, give or take a few thou. Back then EFNet, Undernet, DALNet had like 100k users each. Barely getting over the 10k hump these days.
> You might like pinging people so they get a notification on their phone, but they might not like being on the other end of your ping :)
Notification settings aren't stuck in 1988 too, if you don't want to be pinged in 2022 that's on you :P
What does it matter? If you go on IRC now every channel is idle, no chat, just joins quits and parts, boring, dead.
> If the hundred or ten people you want to talk to are there,
They're not, and haven't been in 10 years. I'd love to get back into IRC but there's no IRC to go back to.
Not my experience at all. The channels I'm in have had a fairly stable number of users for at least the last decade. These are channels with hundreds or even thousands of users. There is lots of discussion in these channels every day. Sometimes so much I can't keep up with it if I'm there participating. I'm in mostly tech related channels, though.
This is a false dichotomy between "you have to receive annoying pings" and "there's no notification system in your chat system".
What actually happens in real life is that chat systems, even proprietary ones, give you control over what notifications you receive (and when you receive them). Discord, in particular, gives you significantly more fine-grained control than any FLOSS tool that I've ever seen.
The world is not moving on, IRC is very much here to stay. It works way too well for this sort of thing and people like being able to have their client set up exactly right. It's just heavy iPhone users that left and once Apple allows web push iPhone users will be back on IRC again.
I run ZNC+Palaver and get push notifications on my iPhone; but I also run ZNC on my own machine somewhere, which is a cost and a setup most people don't usually have to bother with.
One solution for casuals is probably IRCCloud; since IRCCloud will give you the same experience as mine for free, but will disconnect you if you're inactive (unless you're paying).
Irccloud also precludes all of the nice features you might get if you're running your own clients... so, YMMV.
I don't doubt that IRC is here to stay, but I've noticed more and more people moving from IRC to Matrix. Nix, the wgpu-rs guys, I believe the blender devs, and I believe the GHC devs are all on Matrix now.
(No affiliation, I just like the service)
Because IRC works. It's open, battle tested and has huge support by an endless amount of tools and documentation. There is not much reason to not use if all you wanna do is chat.
> I like being able to paste code into chat and have it syntax highlighted
> I like being able to ping people so that they get a notification on their phone
> Occasionally, I like to send a GIF.
That's the job of your client, not the communication-protocol.
How about encryption?
for everything else there are plugins in your client for OMEMO (what signal is based on) and OTR (which is purely session based).
Handling this as a third-party implementation for E2EE is probably the only true way to gain trust anyway. If your provider provides the infrastructure and the client then how can you really trust it?
I believe it is hard to get right, and only worthwhile on 1:1 communication, it doesn't work well at all on large chat rooms, which is what IRC is.
Regardless, if you don't want E2EE to be handled by a plugin- it is possible to make a client with it baked in.
There is no company that will stop you creating a third-party client unlike slack/discord which are extremely hostile to those endeavors by comparison.
EDIT: If you downvote without replying I'm just going to assume you're ideologically opposed to open standards, because I'm not sure what else I can take from it.
You can't downvote direct replies.
---
Speaking about standards; have you looked at IRCv3? Is there anything specific that you feel is not being addressed?
Encryption (to my mind) is better handled outside of the spec itself, just like HTTP vs TLS wrapped HTTP (HTTPS) where the "TLS" has no bearing at all on how HTTP is implemented.
IRCv3 is attempting to address the persistence issues, though many people like the lack of persistence in general.
I don't want to guess at what your concerns are, but more generally; have you looked at the spec?
My network forces TLS: https://darkscience.net
Forcing people to "do what you want" is against the spirit of open standards.
It's fucking slow.
Then you use private messages as a way to talk to someone without disturbing, or away from the noise, of the channel - still not for really private conversations ; for this you don't need encryption, you need end-to-end encryption, but at this point you'd rather use a messaging platform rather than a chat platform.
I even learned today that irssi has an OTR module by default! On Debian systems you have to install irssi-plugin-otr but once you have that and irssi you can just `/load otr` and `/otr init` in a query and that's it, you have E2EE.
This is handled client side though, so I suppose if your clients cannot agree on a protocol you'll be left with nothing. I'm not sure that's really the responsibility of the server though, since we're talking E2E after all.
That's not what I want. I want modern features like text formatting, links, images, file sharing (don't mention DCC), threads, linking to messages, persistent history, and even emoji reactions.
And when I say "modern" I mean "modern relative 1995 which is where IRC proponents are still stuck".
It allows you to disable threads in your UI but that's useless since then you can't reply to people by posting after them since for them it goes to main chat instead of the thread (instead of, y'know, just being the next message).
Also IRC definitely supports links, haha.
Why though?
> Also IRC definitely supports links, haha.
Oh how do you set the text of a link? Do IRC clients support markdown syntax these days?
I don't love Discord or Slack and there are a lot of things I miss about IRC, but the amount of sandpaper around getting people who are less than extremely forgiving of Computer Stuff to use it adroitly is one. Two chat platforms is already one too many for me, and IRC doesn't really make the cut for a third anymore because I too am becoming less forgiving of Computer Stuff as I get older, too.
People have different needs and expectations, so why shouldn't different clients for different people exist?
I'm not saying somebody who only accepts text-based email is wrong, mind--do as thou wilt and all. I am saying that the more barriers you present to being communicated with, the less reasonable it is to expect people to communicate with you. IRC makes it too difficult to communicate in modes I've come to expect as normal, so I'm just not gonna do that these days.
One doesn't need to keep anything in mind if one just has two different clients for the two user groups. And there are IRC clients, such as thelounge or irccloud (ok.. more than just a client), that offer things like inline images/audio, link preview, etc. (and wouldn't be hard to add missing things there). On the protocol level they just send urls in the irc messages, which falls back nicely for the other user group. I send images, pastes, etc. all the time on IRC it's just I don't want my client to render any of them inline - I want to decide if I look at something or not, while you want a client that does render everything inline for the most part.
PS: My spam filter judges html emails rather harshly :P
Because the point of a conversation is to communicate. Your client is changing the meaning of what I am sending to you, and I have to know that to effectively communicate with you. I value clarity, and IRC doesn't offer me this without knowing what the other client is doing. I do not trust a normal, representative user to click on every relevant link and internalize it from there, because my experience is that people don't. On the other hand, being able to post a snippet makes it part of the conversation and not a reference, and in my experience means people are more likely to actually read the thing. The assumption that I should just throw URLs at you and you will parse them, either through a computer or mentally, and do the right thing with them increases the lossiness of communication, and adds to my mental stack. My mental stack is tall enough already for me.
In my experience from platform to platform it's a difference of kind, and frankly? It's also not one I really want to be dealing with myself on the sending end more generally. I don't like the bouncer paradigm and I'm not paying irccloud to host one for me when I can do so myself but doing so myself is annoying and work that other platforms do not demand of me. And I'm not going to a pastebin website when I can literally drag a code file in and click "post as snippet". It's slower and it's unpleasant. A sufficiently smart client could solve these things, sure--but Slack and Discord already do them, and the 99% case are there and not on IRC.
I am not, to be totally clear, saying you're wrong to like what you like. I've run IRC servers many times and I used them steadily for about fifteen years. But I have learned, personally and for me, that the things users seem to value on IRC makes those folks harder for me to communicate with as we've normed (for lack of a better term) rich experiences in group conversations. And if you're cool with that, that's totally fine. It's a tradeoff, not a moral thing. It does also means that (not that you're doing it, but some IRC defenders in this thread have definitely logged on) incredulity that Nobody Wants To Use IRC just isn't reasonable. It's not a friendly platform unless your values are its values. Mine aren't anymore, so I don't use it.
But I think you are overthinking it by a lot. If you were to use IRC, you should just use a modern "magical" IRC clients and not worry about what happens in the background (and btw it's not just "could" but "does".. there are clients that do all that already - where you can just drag and drop stuff in and it will magically do the right thing). And I am willing to bet that in other instances you already do operate that way. Unless your mail client is very broken it will send a plain text version of your email along with the html email. Do you worry there too that I am actually just looking at the plain text version of your email and not with the intended html formatting? Or do you worry that the person you are talking to on slack might just be connected via matterircd via IRC (or directly via IRC back before slack did the bait 'n switch) and not see any of your snippets, images, etc.? Which btw. I am totally doing despite how much it butchers everything - I just cannot stand that UI (and neither can my rather old laptop).
It totally does, though. If I write an emoji thumbsup, and the recipient only sees a tofu box, they won't know if I'm agreeing, disagreeing, or saying something else.
If I'm participating in a heterogeneous environment, I need to refrain from including any mission-critical information in a form that can't be read by all of the participants. And since writing the same information twice is usually too much work, the extended functionality winds up completely unused, or at least only gets used for low-value spam.
> Or do you worry that the person you are talking to on slack might just be connected via matterircd via IRC
Yes, I do worry about that. If I find out that one of my coworkers is using a Slack client that doesn't implement all the functionality in the reference client, and can't just talk them out of it, then I'll have to make sure not to use anything that they can't see.
I might even start doing an IRC bridge myself, in fact, since at that point there's really no actual purpose in running a chat client with a bunch of functionality that I cannot use.
A major part of Slack's value is that this is very rare. Almost everyone just uses the reference implementation.
That's a fundamental disagreement. I know some people like tightly walled gardens where there can only be one client and you're stuck with its limitations. Personally, I despise those systems and will do everything to avoid them.
> Consistency is valuable
Consistency is not valuable in this context, it is a straightjacket. I want a client which works exactly the way I want, which is likely different from what you want. So we need probably different clients, or at least an extremely configurable one.
This is why email is so wonderful and I use it above all else. I can have my client which I love and others can have their clients which they love and I find unusable but we can all be happy.
The idea that IRC might be better was why I clicked on this thread in the first place, before I really parsed the srht part of it, 'cause my values absolutely do not overlap with theirs. (Which is fine. Like what you like!)
Another way to say that is IRC helps filter out the worst of Eternal Eternal September. (Meaning nothing against you personally! No disrespect intended.)
(FWIW, it's a slowly growing minority.)
Say what you want about these services being privacy infringing and proprietary (trust me, I don't like them either) but let's not be deluded. Their predecessors will die.
I am :) . I've found that the discussions I've had on IRC or read on mailing lists are typically higher quality, and more interesting than anywhere else.
They think PRs and pull requests are a distraction and all should happen in mailing list.
If you host on sourcehut, you want these things
Personally all the people I want to talk to still use IRC, so I'll use it to.
> Occasionally, I like to send a GIF.
Some people don't like large blocks of text or images pushing other messages completely off screen.
Don't try to solve social problems by removing useful technical features from tools.
So options for people that have different usage patterns do exist.
The Lounge can do that also.
Thankfully, nobody is. We're simply using existing tooling without said "features".
There are absolutely others doing good work here too but Simon and Drew are the most visible (to me).
With (good) forums non-existent now I spend almost all of my tech/programming/misc talking on IRC and have since 2011. I'm 27, this isn't technology for "boomers" or "die hard oldies" which is the general tone against "just use Discord or Slack" I see in response to any kind of IRC discussion online.
'In public conversations, there's no expectation that everyone will be present and no expectation that those "not there" should view the things they missed.' -Not even with the same eye. P-:
Freedom!?
It certainly gets around some of the privacy concerns. (-:
regards,
In the late 90s I've purchased a "shell account" from a guy who was working for a local uni. Had some trouble understanding how the hell `screen` makes programs like ircII stay alive when I'm logging out.
Good times.
you close it, and you are not there :) its amazing you connect and the history is empty, like every day is fresh
slack/discord/whatsapp/etc are just invasive, everybody somehow expects immediate answer to their request.
IRC replicating slack. The irony. old-person grumble
But bouncers and bots have been around since the 1990s. There's nothing particularly ad hoc, informally specified, or bug-ridden about them. They are open source and they've been around for longer than some of their users. Slack, by contrast, is proprietary software used for corporate communication, which comes with its upsides and downsides. IRC is just a different tool to solve a different problem.
The protocol for actually controlling the bouncer or bot is always ad-hoc. Whether client X will have support for bouncer Y or bot Z is a crapshoot, and whether such integration will keep working is even more so (of course you can generally fall back to doing it manually, but that's a serious downgrade in usability). As for bug-ridden, well, all I can say is that that's been my experience.
>blub has connected
>blub has changed nickname to glub
>Hello anyone here?
(* 10 hours later no replies, 10 hours of random connect/disconnect spam *)
Irc is basically a ghost town apart from random noise compared to other popular communication channels.
For what it's worth, I've been active on three channels in the past few months — #openwrt on OFTC, #vim and #neovim on Libera. I've always got responses fairly quickly on #openwrt and #vim.
The default non-TLS with whatever that standard is to say “always use TLS in future” is boneheaded. Not supporting TLS at this point is inexcusable for any client or server. I couldn’t work out whether they’d actually made DMs private yet or whether it was still plain text.
Those are things I’d consider baseline expectations for a specification 10 years ago, let alone today.