Hacker News Reader

Comment by dpedu | Hacker News Reader

Am I the only person that doesn't want IRCv3? I don't find the new features important or compelling (telling others when I am typing is creepy!) and I see v3's rise as only leading to some sort of schism.

View on HN

You're not alone - IRC is precious as one of the last places where one can still avoid exactly these kind of features! It looks/fits/feels more or less the same today as it was when I started using it in 1996, and I have never felt it needs improvement.

"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.

My _opinion_ is that whatever really replaces / evolves existing commonly used communications protocols already has an uphill battle. Further, as Gchat / XMPP based chats showed (opinion observations): federation without a sufficiently rich baseline to ensure a basic user experience leads to fragmentation, silo-ing, and eventual death.

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.

I'm already benefiting from IRCv3's server time extension [1], since I use ZNC and get the actual timestamps for each message that I get from its buffer that way. You have capability negotiation [2] at the core of it all, anyway. So even if you end up not liking some of the new features, your client should ideally allow you to just turn them off.

[1] https://ircv3.net/specs/extensions/server-time [2] https://ircv3.net/specs/extensions/capability-negotiation

Don't worry, at the speed at which IRCv3 is being implemented we won't see the effects on real-world servers for another 20 years anyway :P

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.

You might like Ergo, which has a built-in bouncer that supports playback and channel relays out of the box: https://github.com/ergochat/ergo

Thanks but I'm really happy with Quassel (and QuasselDroid on mobile) already which also has this. But I'll check out ergo of course!

This. There's really too much configuration overhead for new people to get started with IRC: registering a nick. Setting up your scripts. Setting up a bouncer. Etc.

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.

The beauty of irc is exactly that it is cumbersome. You don’t need a bouncer, just use /away in irssi running in tmux.

This is true, you can totally do that.

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.

Will using `/away` on irssi in tmux prevent join/quit cycling when the laptop goes to sleep? I got banned from a popular channel recently for that. I had irssi open and I myself fell asleep without quitting.

There are some good ideas and some bad ones. Part of our work is to argue against the bad ones. I don't think that the contentious ones are likely to get much traction, but some of the more obvious ones, like account-registration, are making their way into the ecosystem.

Yeah before even looking at the article I had the sinking feeling I always get when some corporation wants to "improve" anything that already works perfectly well.

One beauty of IRC is you can easily opt out or in to the typing spec

Clearly a lot of people do like the features, hence some of the popularity of discord. But at its heart it seems like discord has one over general users by having a generally easier interface - from a non technical users point of view.

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.

Both have their merits - though I see a winnowing. My connections in IRC are generally deeper, more durable, and more often result in some creation or production.

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

I feel like the IRC thing might be a product of how long it's been used - there are plenty of people I know from IRC that I still know today, but there are many many more that I "knew" but no longer do, and even more that appeared and disappeared.

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. :-/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com