IRC is the only viable chat protocol (2022)
koshka.love
koshka.love
The article brushes over this, but IMO the lack of built-in backlog support is the main reason why IRC is essentially doomed. Logging isn't a "fancy" feature and telling people to just run an always-on logging service on top doesn't cut it.
Especially when there are open, federated chat protocols that don't have this problem.
Absolutely fantastic that it was finally added but IRC is 34 years old, and this has been an essential feature of chat services for at least 20 of those years.
I'd love to see it's introduction now save IRC but given the seeming resistance to adding it, one wonders how long any other improvements will take.
Slack is just a modern irc interpretation. It literally started running on top of IRC.
Discord got popular because it was one of the only chats that kids could access and install in school. It wasn’t a serious tool.
This is the point isn't it. If IRC were fit for purpose, we wouldn't need "modern interpretations".
IRC was an instant/synchronous chat protocol. We had newsgroup/web forums for unsynychronous chat/dicussions.
The likes of slack, and later discord, had the idea of merging sync and unsync discussion to provide both.
In the end slack/discord/teams ended up being jack of all trades/master of none.
Yes the backlog is saved automatically but for most of them the search is slow and borderline unusable and it ends up being much more difficult to search for information than using google with the site:yourwebforum.example.org option.
as for your snide, obviously wrong comment at the end, it's not worth a substantial response
Matrix seems more than executing.
What if an interpretation veers wildly of course?
Slack is fine for many things but if I were to look during the pandemic, Teams our executed to meet people where and how they worked.
Slack is also often seen with and without context. Most people have someone pay for their slack for them to keep that precious searchable history. Non profit or free uses uses lost so much value from slack deleting their histories every 90 days unnecessarily.
Irc had bots to help.
Irc if you all me has inspired alternate experiences be it hashtags based, or a central feed like Twitter.
This is the point and the problem. It could but it hasn't. People have been waiting for it to modernize for 20 or 30 years. It took almost 30 years to add a feature people were demanding 20 years ago.
Slack etc. are poor replacements, it's true. No-one is denying that. But for all their flaws it's not hard for them to be better in aggregate when IRC is as stagnant as it is. If IRC refuses to modernise (which it has, generally) these replacements will come, whether they're good or not. I'd really like if we had something good, however we get there. But waiting for IRC to get there has not been fruitful.
It's not trivial to setup a bouncer for the new guy who's just worked out how to connect to IRC.
As I recall, newbies often figured out how to do this pretty quickly, even before the recent trend of IaaS and free tiers. Shell accounts with bouncers were a quite common offering back in the day.
I learned a lot about how far matrix has come along and seems to have solved many of the swipes and gripes against irc.
Chat being real-time is certainly "approaching real life" much moreso than fully asynchronous email, but most people don't want either to be real life: chat still needs an element of asynchronicity to distinguish it as a technologically useful medium improving over actually walking into a real room.
To put it another way: if I'm in a real life room where being present for the full conversation is necessary, it's easy to excuse being late or going to the bathroom as unfortunate parts of life when people are repeating themselves. When there's simple technological solutions that can easily prevent me from missing anything important, and someone's telling me they don't want it because they like the inconvenience, that's harder to justify.
If I need more context about those messages when I return, I can just ask those users (or a bot).
When I join an IRC chat there's a lot less baggage.. it's just a label / topic, it's very freeing.
logging, message fixing, embedded replies .. all great but not important in the end. These things are blending professional complexity with normal human moments. Not the right optimization (if optimizations are required at all)
Still maybe there could be a way to summarize those chats with some kind of a transforming generative text system that I hope exists one day.
You need the irc services to keep specified information (like ownership of channels and nicknames) and they probably could also collect logs, with some limitations in case of netsplits of course.
Additionally, it's richer in features
Discord's search function is so bad it's essentially unusable so having the backlog is often useless, however the ability to "pin" a useful message or discussion by getting a link is very relevant.
Baseline IRC doesn't have message addressing, regardless of backlogging.
You need the "message-tags" extension (https://ircv3.net/specs/extensions/message-tags) and message-ids support (https://ircv3.net/specs/extensions/message-ids.html) for that to even be entertained, plus probably echo-message (https://ircv3.net/specs/extensions/echo-message). I've no idea how well those are supported in servers, to say nothing of clients (which would need a way to surface message ids, and possibly permalinks).
At that point, you probably also want the WIP chathistory extension (https://ircv3.net/specs/extensions/chathistory) which provides backlog support.
Oh wait they’re probably using nosql
Their main consideration is latency, not search.
But also, it's chat, so I don't really care if on the once-per-month I use the search I have to think about it for a second, because all the other stuff is there and it's good.
While that's not technically unusable it's far beyond the level where I'll even try to find something in Discord unless it's very important.
Discord's search function is 1,000x better than what's built into Windows 10 and 11. I've found pictures I posted from years ago in discord, Windows 10 can't even find half the files I downloaded and transferred to another drive the other day.
That sounds like indexing settings, on your end, are not sufficient for your use cases. I suggest decreasing the interval between indexing on your machine.
If indexing is correctly setup in windows any/all files will be immediately searchable and indexed.
FWIW I have DisableBackOff = 1 set so indexing happens faster than default.
How do companies tolerate such obviously awful search experiences?
Chat is not just for business. Its use-case existed even before notion of business came to be.
Discord's logging is shitty because:
1 - The logs aren't yours, they're Discord's. If you get banned from the server, your server shuts down, or Discord bans you altogether your access to those logs is gone forever.
2 - Unlike the logs of some IRC channels, Discord's logs aren't available on the web anywhere, so they can't be indexed or searched outside of Discord.
3 - Paging through hours or days of Discord logs is so incredibly painful, because every few screenfuls or so Discord has to load the previous/next logs and that is super slow compared to paging through text logs offline. If you have a lot of logs to page through, this experience is absolutely atrocious.
4 - There's no easy way to export the logs to be processed with standard/powerful text manipulation tools, like text editors, sed, etc..
Discord's search is painful because:
1 - There's no regex search.
2 - No ability to search via web search engines, because the logs aren't available on any website (see above).
3 - No way to search through the logs of multiple servers at once.
I have IRC logs going back decades, from servers I haven't been on in decades, but they're all instantly searchable, and the text in them is easily manipulable.
My Discord logs are trapped in Discord and I'm forced to use Discord's pretty but otherwise horrible UI to search them.
No, the reason Discord is popular has nothing to do with logging, but everything to do with how easy it is to sign up, join, and get a server running. Inline images and not having to learn obscure IRC commands or figure out obtuse IRC clients are also huge plusses for your average user. Discord's client is also visually pleasing -- something that most IRC client developers still haven't figured out. Aesthetics matter to users, as Apple has proved.
But Discord is an information black hole where data goes to die.
Also you forgot to say that Discord had a high quality voice chat back when such a thing was nonexistent in the web and the various desktop clients like Skype were a crapshot or were obscure and required you to host your own server like Mumble.
But the people who use logs won't use IRC, and the people who often miss out on important conversations because they are only casual users will not have logs. Casual users outnumber dedicated users - the lack of good logging is a real problem for them.
But, yeah, I understand this is beyond the capabilities of your typical user, and not something most users even know exists.
This is really a UI/UX deficiency of IRC, not a functional deficiency.
I have a hard time imagining irc heads don’t have a solution dockerized
Therefore I don't understand your sarcasm. What's the alternative? If you find Discord's search feature good, you could implement it on top of the text logs.
Camfrog video chat has been around since the beginning '00s. You could put as many video feeds as you could fit on your screen, with 20-30FPS streams, and good sound quality. Granted, resolution was 352x288, but for seeing and talking, you don't really NEED much else.
Discord, meanwhile, can't keep a reliable WebRTC stream going.
Once every 5-10 years, I look through the logs I have that aren't on textfiles because the statute of limitations hasn't run out and relive a little of the history of how certain things came to be.
Those chats are an ethnography waiting to happen. You'll wish you had yours one day.
And some communities had it setup for you so it is not something that each user had to do.
Or use one of the public ones.
Sure, you can write your own logs, but does your business want you creating even more information to have to submit as evidence if you’re sued? What a nightmare.
He somehow managed to know enough technical information to get past a phone screen, and in the in-person interview claimed to be the second coming of Christ. When he didn't get hired, he sued for religious discrimination.
Fortunately, all communications with and about him were entirely professional and didn't include a reference to his claim, so (iirc) the case was tossed in short order.
That being said, you don't need to do anything to get sued- you just need to have something worth suing for.
A number of places use email as their effective information store. Good luck finding content once everyone in the relevant chains have departed.
Yes this is a real thing.
Free slacks lose their history in 90 days
I'm really saddened and angry that projects end up using Discord as their main forum interface.
Not everything is worth keeping around forever, but Discord is as closed a closed garden as can be.
That's great for private servers between friends, but it's contrary to the ethos of Open Source, as nothing is really in the open.
History is basically unsearchable and everyone lives in a perpetual present where topics need to be discussed over and over again instead of being easily available to newcomers. Once they disappear from the current page, they become really hard to reach.
And discord will happily close your account or prevent you from logging if your activity is deemed suspicious, i.e. if you're travelling and using VPNs, getting in can be a nightmare. The feeling of also being constantly watched, a step away from having your account blocked, is jarring.
I wish there was a good open source alternative that would also allow data to be easily made public and allowed users to just join and participate with whatever existing accounts they have (google, GitHub, any Fediverse account, etc).
Servers could be self-hosted or hosted for free or a minimal fee based on the server size, with some paying additional features (like flair, large audio rooms, automated backups, branding, more customization, etc).
But is discord too big to be taken on by an Open Source project?
One project I’m working on uses it instead of Slack and the Element client specifically is pretty good and constantly adding new features
Using chat as a forum is... Just not a great idea. It seems most remember a strong sense of community on forums. We talked about actual interests and learned things and it was great, and stuff didn't get buried or too disorganized , nor did it feel like any kind of time pressure thing where you had to be on at the right time... Why not just... Do that? It was amazing.
Discord gives you a chance at searching old history with zero additional setup if the permissions allow.
For both IRC and Discord you’d need to run a bot to have truly open logs online.
You're totally right that you need a bot to have open logs online, I'm just trying to point out that a huge number of open source projects (CPython, FreeBSD, Haiku, Quotebrowser, random NASA weather balloons, thousands of others) already use a common bot so it's not that hard of a problem. The bigger problem is political, in that most IRC network discourage logging, and many communities are outright hostile to it.
Notifico discards PRIVMSG's immediately and the rest of its logs after a couple of hours normally, but in its last decade of operating it's seen more than 2 billion messages to give you an idea of how much has to get indexed.
Also, writing your own bot for IRC is trivial, and has no TOS, complicated APIs, OAuth flows, or other barriers to entry. Can absolutely do the same for Discord but they've already been making changes to make it more difficult to log or export your data.
As far as logs hosting though, this only works for as long as you're willing to host though. It seems unlikely that Discord will disappear overnight -- or if this was a risk, I'd assume they'd be acquired with a large userbase.
I've written IRC and Discord bots and don't think Discord bots aren't much more difficult. One of the best strengths of writing a Discord bot is that if your bot goes down, you can query and fetch lost history fairly easily. This isn't doable in IRC unless you put a bouncer in front of your bot or the server is set up to feed clients with history.
Ultimately, it uses an irrelevant % of resources on a dedicated box used for other projects, so it's not a financial or even operational burden. One of my favorite things about IRC is that if all you want to do is a JOIN a channel and PRIVMSG some people, the same code I wrote a decade ago works fine today. The project went almost 6 years without requiring a single code change from me, other than accepting 3rd party feature PRs.
I may have missed something last time I looked at it, but Discord was making it harder to react to all messages and wanted to force you to only use slash commands. The whole discord.py saga - https://gist.github.com/Rapptz/4a2f62751b9600a31a0d3c7810028....
https://github.com/Tyrrrz/DiscordChatExporter
But beware -- it can result in account termination!
https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/115002192352-A...
I can not possibly understand why anyone considers discord to be anything but a company with absolute control of a product.
For 99.9% of users, they don't need to worry about Discord terminating their account or their friends' account. If Discord somehow fumbles this by randomly suspending peoples' accounts for no reason whatsoever, and on such a wide scale that everyone will know a friend affected by this, they'll quickly lose marketshare.
Actually I find it ugly, but thats firmly in personal preference territory. A decenct client would be skinnable or css-able to meet users diverse aesthetics.
people in the west have a lot of freedom in this and don't really need to care at the moment, but imagine living in the CCP or Thailand and bad mouthing the supreme leader?
I’m beyond sick of the helplessness performative shtick around Discord. This is an ancient problem with obvious solutions. Do better.
(To their credit, IRCCloud tries. They are the best swing at it I've seen. They aren't Slack-good, let alone Discord-good. The search continues.)
The second part of your response isn't helping you move towards the end state you want. If anything, it's going the other way. Product empathy isn't optional--ask yourself: why would I write or fund an IRC client when I have things that work for me already? Like, this is the Linux-on-the-desktop advocacy all over again. "Your thing doesn't work for me because of X [usually literally X on Linux, but you get the idea], but Y does." "Well, expend time or money to fix X!" Why? You're the one who likes X. You're advocating for it. Why would I fix the thing you like when the thing I use already works?
Take the sibling response to yours--I learned something new in seeing https://thelounge.chat, and while I don't want to run software to deal with chat, that was a cool thing to see. I learned something! I'll remember it later!
Contrast that to "do it yourself".
The spirit of what's argued is right in line with the spirit of free protocols, open source software, and venture capital funding for new challenges.
Your implication that lots of open source communities have historically not done that is absolutely true. But also it's why people don't want to talk to them much, too.
It's also very bad at URLs.
And sometimes it just breaks and loses results. If I remember right I even hit a situation where searching one word found a chat line, and another word found that same line, but both words didn't find it.
It's shitty, but if you just have to beat "non existant" that will often work.
Everything is painful. Clients tend to be terrible and I cannot search at all in IRC, or I get weird integrations between znc and and the chat client.
All in all, i'd rather use discord than IRC, even with the downsides. I do prefer forums or the "was" reddit for information.
As far as I'm concerned it is not a technology that should exist aside from realtime viewing of feeds, and things meant from random idle chatter.
People are using Discord like as if it's a forum and a wiki in one. Which isn't the worst thing, because it's better than nothing, but I think it would be better with an integrated real forum that auto-posts new topics in the chat.
If you have something you think is worthy of preserving, say it in a paginated forum where people can find it, if you have an ephemeral shitpost, say it in the chat. If you want to scroll through history of ephemeral shitposts and see what's happening, even that should have a calendar based pagination UI.
Old forums used to have shoutboxes. Proboards and phpbb and the like were basically already perfect.
If I was going to do a community platform, I'd just build a forum. The only thing I think I'd change is I'd make it so you could download archives, and I'd consider having a wikipedia style policy of everything being Creative Commons.
For one it stops you from being lazy and not maintaining FAQs and documentation.
It also forces you to stop treating the chat as something you need to keep up to date with. At work I see people commonly scrolling back for pages and pages to find the last read marker and continue reading from there. This seems unhealthy to me.
I use a bouncer but I very rarely use the logs. For all the purposes for which I would use logs, there are normally bots in the channel which can compensate.
Regardless, what is your point? I never claimed that conversions can't happen when you are not online, just that you should design your conversations such that it doesn't matter if someone isn't online.
The problem you just described was caused not by IRC and its lack of backlog but by you and your team and your misuse of a backlog-less chat system.
Important announcements shouldn't be done on IRC. For that matter, neither should they be done on Teams, Slack, Discord, Matrix, XMPP, or Skype. Important announcements belong on a web page and a mailing list (both simultaneously) or alternatively on some other purpose built system which tracks who has seen an annoucement so that if important announcement is missed by a key player, someone is alerted and can reach out using an alternative method of communication.
But even if you insist on misusing a chat protocol like IRC for this, ask someone who was there for their logs? I don't understand how nobody on your global team was able to even just summarize what you missed.
It seems someone chose the wrong thing, then you needed a history feature to bridge the gap.
Using chat as a source of truth is not a good idea
Over time it becomes more and more ridiculous to use it as your knowledge base.
The inability for partisans of particular technologies to understand that affordances matter more than the technologist's spherical-cow notion of "better" continues apace. And I have some empathy for that viewpoint, too, but I grew out of it as a teenager and I always find it odd that others stuck to it.
If you can't meet people where they want to be, your solution might be simple but your solution isn't good for them and fulminating about it just isn't great.
(ripgrep is a very nice log searching tool, only top tier users will be told about it!)
That existing IRC implementations may be antiquated mammoth shit shouldn’t prevent anyone from building something new.
I understand that a part of this whining is a desire to market one’s own proprietary silo which purports to solve these problems.
Not to mention some IRC channels are really high latency, you leave a message and someone else replies ten hours later. If you miss the reply because you were offline, you couldn't expect anyone to be around to repeat missed conversations back to you.
Due to this I've never really liked IRC, its not good for mobile devices or people who live with DSL or dial-up. Sure you can "just get an account on a bouncer" but that's pretty esoteric knowledge that I never encountered until after university.
Server Up 1375 days, 10:05:01
*.XXX.net[xx.x.x.xx] 0 9696 10570 56550590
Its server to server link, online 56M secs. Now do the math, how much days this link is up (no netsplit).
And for that matter, for "pretty much everything?"
Seems to me the simplicity of the bot is the biggest feature?
(Now if it’s an extra-special piece of software just to use your extra-special chat, then they’ll tell you to take a hike, true. They’ve got to actually want to get to the dancing bunnies[1] first.)
[1] https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-dancing-bunnies-problem/
Anyways it feels silly to require always-on service when history could just be part of the protocol.
I just think that the general argument that users are only capable of running server software with as much uptime as they care for (in the “easy” < 90% range) is unfair to users. They’re not dumb, it’s us the programmers who have made them behave as though they are and gave them little choice in it.
All that aside, a say 95- to 99-percent-online machine is pretty handy to have when you can code, you should try it if you don’t have one. The best such machine is one you don’t use interactively—an old desktop in a closet, an RPi with a USB HDD, hell, that old Eee PC you have laying around gathering dust works pretty well and even comes with builtin battery backup. You don’t—and shouldn’t—need to have one, but it’s liberating to be able to go “oh I’ll just throw that into urlwatch and have it poke me on Telegram” without a second thought. Now excuse me while I pacman -Syu && reboot my webserver :)
Federation and federation type ideas should be enough; let's get (back?) to a place like cars mostly used to be. You should theoretically be able to know a friend who can fix your car if you don't want to be a mechanic, and the same for "computer stuff."
If you're storing data, someone somewhere has to pay for housing it. One of the reasons IRC is lightweight is because a network and its constituent servers only facilitates exchanging data between users.
Consider how Discord is begging you and everyone to sign up for Nitro because they're housing and serving all of their data. Most IRC networks on the other hand operate perfectly fine off of donated volunteer time and hardware for tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of users.
No data to store means cheaper and easier logistics. IRC is just a simple bridge, whereas Discord is a Costco.
As of around a year ago Discord claimed to be passing around 4 billion messages a day.
I don't know how their average message size compares to Slack, but I just took a look at an export of messages from my company's Slack server and our busiest day in six years was just over 1MB in uncompressed JSON format, around 1.4KB per message. Compressed it was around 104 bytes per message. If we assume that the average message size is similar and similar amounts of metadata are stored per message, that means we're talking about somewhere between 400GB and 5.6TB per day for the entirety of Discord.
That's a lot of space on an individual basis, but nothing for a global-scale service. Obviously that's just for text and not any uploaded files, inline previews, thumbnails, etc. but still the point remains. Archiving text is not really a hard problem to solve. It's tiny by modern standards.
I don't really understand why people would need to log chat, it doesn't really make sense to me. Chat is meant to be ephemeral, short lived, and not leave trace. Chat is spontaneous.
If users want to leave a trace, they use a database or email.
Discord added threads and forums, and those should be logged, but not channels.
I think when I was a teenager, I did a lot of chatting online in the sense you are talking about, and I didn't really care about the backlog. But nowadays, there's no room for "chat without log" because it's way too involved. I don't do synchronous chatting anymore at all, basically. After reading your comment, it seems like "chat" in general is just not for me anymore. Asynchronous messaging, however, still has a big part in my life.
I don't know what expense you're imagining, but my IRC logs took almost zero CPU to acquire and they add up to well under a gigabyte per year before I apply transparent 4x compression.
If you want a full conversation history then use something like email/listservs. IRC is for real-time chat. We already have a plethora of async options.
chat history is critical even for realtime chat.
This provides a really reliable chat framework in a totally open-standards compliant way.
Of course, most people don't care. This is why the corps business model of profit via surveilance is so successful. So, to jump straight to Godwin's Law: this is the same lack of concern, and passive cooperation, that led to the rise of hitler...
I understand if what you mean is it’s an extra step the technically challenged don’t want to do but the ability to do so has existed forever.
Of course, this was over 20+ years ago now.
I had an IRCCloud account for the same exact reason until freenode "blew up"
It's almost like how math educators sometimes don't understand that we mostly don't have checkbooks to balance. Math is important, but that doesn't mean I have ever sat down with paper and made a budget by hand.
Everyone always talks about flexibility and modularity and control, but what people want is stuff you just install and it works and has all the features already there.
Maintaining even trivial software can be hard, and people are very good at using what they have even if it's not explicitly meant to do the use case, like the story where the old lady was annoyed at her family for not telling her about the knitting program, which was Excel, that she found and figured out herself.
Until Discord appeared we had
Ventrilo, Mumble, TeamSpeak, Skype, etc, etc
I've been using those for like 10 years almost everyday
They had voice chat, some had viable text chat, etc, etc.
And then Discord appeared which had:
Voice Chat,
Good text chat (images, code snippets, emojis, reactions, etc)
Streaming Video (!!)
File share
Robust bot integration
Lack of security problem unlike the self-hosted alternatives have.
This one is important in gaming communities in e.g MMORPG games cuz there's nothing better than being DDoSd cuz you left team or because you talked to somebody on wrong TeamSpeak server 5 months ago :)
Push2Talk - this is also important, I dont understand how e.g Teams dont have this shit.
Imagine you're working on remote with kids in the background - having an ability to push button and talk is really useful! So you don't have constantly mute/unmute yourself! Gamers have been doing it for over 2 decades but with the parents in the background instead of kids
One account between all servers with ability to customize your identity
All of that in one solution. That won its market.
Provide something as innovative and robust as Discord and people may consider switching.
__________________
I know that IRC's simplicity may be beautiful for hacker's mind, but it doesn't solve my problems nor make my life easier, so I'm not going to use it over Discord.
And one censoring authority.
Nope, not a good idea.
Go ahead and create 1 account per 1 server, nothing prevents you.
I've actually been doing it for some time - school (1 server) & private discord account (like 10 servers).
>And one censoring authority.
Sure, that's valid concern, I respect it.
For me it's a trade off.
You think? I still have to use the official client to log on to all of them so they can just ban all if their AI thinks I'm a communist pedophile terrorist.
>I still have to use the official client to log on to all of them so they can just ban all if their AI thinks I'm a communist pedophile terrorist.
so... what? Your country can cause you a lot of harm too if they think you're pedophile terrorist.
That's edge case, not something that happens to 99.99% of the users.
Doesn't having to give up a phone number for each account (and you can't use the same number on different accounts) make it difficult? (unless you haven't had to, maybe my browser is suspicious, but it's just regular old Chromium). Would like to do this so that I can separate IRL/weak pseudonym (from random people in servers, obviously you can't be truly anonymous on Discord)
Which happened to me because I apparently had an old account I had forgotten about. So now I need a new phone number if I want to use Discord.
You left out that it just bans you on any servers that you're already banned on.
It doesn't deactivate/suspend your entire discord account for trying to reuse a phone number for servers that require verification.
Yeah there is a way to register accounts without phone number verification. I did it four times. The trick is that they block you if you do anything suspicious and any account created under this 'suspicious' state demands phone verification. I don't know how they identify you, but you must succeed with your first try. So your best bet is to find an email provider that is trusted by discord that does not need a phone number.
https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/4409388345495-...
[ https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/muting-and-unmuti... ]
same way Wayland broke push to talk for ages in Linux desktops (incl. in Discord).
This is a major issue. Back in the day TeamSpeak was the primary mode of communication for game servers of a certain kind. Every game server had an associated TS for offering support and many/most of the teams had their own. This was a disaster with people's IP addresses being leaked all over the place, if you joined a server and associated yourself with your in game name there was a high chance that you'd get DDoS'd offline at an important moment. Switching to discord makes this much less likely.
Looks to me that Discord went after those and not after IRC.
I don’t get its appeal at all.
as a student, I'm in discord servers for friend groups, school clubs, unofficial classroom servers, game communities, fanbases, etc - anything that can benefit from conversations organized into different channels is usually turned into a discord server.
when I think "how can I take this group of people interested in the same thing to gather together online?", the alternatives that come up are:
- facebook (too linked to real life identity, also not really great for separating conversations into specific channels to my understanding) - reddit/forums (which can compliment a discord server in being more searchable/async, but in no way rival Discord's real time text/voice chat) - mumble/teamspeak/skype/matrix (largely just has a subset of discord features) - slack/microsoft teams (pretty much solely designated for work and not at all marketed as a general purpose communication solution)
Maybe it’s me getting old, but while I remember quite vividly that IRC regulars liked to flood with emoticons just as much, in five minutes I’d know what the conversation was about. In discord… not so much. And there’s the whole voice layer I didn’t even touch. It’s too chaotic and demanding full immersion, so I just noped out of there.
(And there’s the whole aspect of Discord actually owning it all, and banning you discord-wide if you blow your nose funny.)
The idea of using discord as a medium for conversations you mean to log and refer to later seems like bollocks in the light of above. Also the idea of having work discussions there seems to be bollocks too and indistinguishable from Slack in 99% aspects imaginable.
> Ventrilo, Mumble, TeamSpeak, Skype, etc, etc
And now we have Discord, Ventrilo, Mumble, TeamSpeak, Skype, Slack, Teams, etc etc
Then it was the voice chat for any video game play.
Being a Swiss Army knife of chat can be handy to get users together from different chat platforms
How am I doing
Integrating a Jitsi bot into the channel solves this.
> Good text chat (images, code snippets, emojis, reactions, etc)
All possible with good old web linking. Link to an image host, a pastebin, or a file host of your choice. Many IRC clients support inline display of image/media URLs.
All major IRC clients and servers support UTF-8 as well, so emoji away.
> Streaming Video (!!)
Jitsi (with a bot) or web linking.
> File share
Web linking.
> Robust bot integration
Quite possibly one of the strongest arguments for IRC. The protocol is well-documented, and it's very easy to write an IRC bot.
> Lack of security problem unlike the self-hosted alternatives have.
Also lack of transparency. The self-hosted open alternatives are auditable and can be inspected. Nobody knows what Discord does with user data or what security issues exist.
> Push2Talk - this is also important, I dont understand how e.g Teams dont have this shit.
Your (possibly self-hosted) Jitsi instance already has this.
> One account between all servers with ability to customize your identity
Until you get banned/blocked for some arbitrary reason, at which point you might as well start over, since everything is gone.
tl;dr: Web linking + some bot integration and client affordances solve all these. This is how the web is supposed to work.
This doesnt solve (or doesnt even tries to solve) my issue AT ALL.
I'd rather have Discord have some user data that I'm consciously putting there instead of my enemies from the game DDoSing/Stalking me
I've played hardcore MMORPGs and this is serious concern.
>tl;dr: Web linking + some bot integration and client affordances solve all these. This is how the web is supposed to work.
sounds like: go put effort and decrease your UX.
Security by obscurity is not a real solution. If you have a public IP connected to the internet, you will be subjected to attacks and port scans either way.
Configure your network and firewall correctly and ensure no ports are open instead of trusting the false sense of security given by some proprietary vendor who has your data.
> sounds like: go put effort and decrease your UX.
"UX" is subjective. For me, Discord has horrible UX, with its flashy, slow, obnoxious UI and its incessant cacophony of tips, "new feature" notifications, and advertisements for "Discord Nitro".
Putting in the one-time effort to configure an IRC client (and making it "fancy") seems worth it to me instead of having to continually put up with Discord's whims. At least there is no threat of enshittification with this approach. "IRC Nitro" will never be a real thing. With Discord, you can never be sure. Elon might just decide to buy it on a whim and rename it something like "XDickswords" if he feels like it.
This obsession with having a single centralized identity where some vendor is trusted to painstakingly guard the linked PIID is misguided, unsafe, and harmful. Discord will fall prey to a data exfiltration attack eventually, and affected people will only then realize that this trust was misplaced. The fact that people are comfortable giving Discord their phone numbers while being worried about their client IP being exposed on IRC is baffling.
It's not a real practical problem – and I'm not sure why we're pretending that it is one. Let's clearly state what the problem is: OP wants to play MMOs & online games against potential threat actors who may DDoS and/or doxx them. Which is why they simultaneously also want to shield their identity from them. An analogy would be somebody who wants to play games with the neighbourhood meth gang while not wanting to get stabbed.
This is not safe or reasonable behaviour. Even if these people lack a client IP, a motivated attacker can piece your identity together from what you say and/or post eventually. Discord just makes that a bit more difficult at the cost of you handing over PIID of greater importance.
Most MMOs & online games offer an in-game chat client that does appropriate cloaking & is also moderated (so an offender risks a ban if they engage in harassment). Nobody is forcing OP to invite these people onto his VoIP server.
Yes, and somehow it magically happened this way that during decades of having access to internet we were being DDoSed only when targeted by ppl from the game that had access to our IPs from TeamSpeak/Ventrilo, right?
Because what incentives attacker would have to DDoS random IPs?
>Configure your network and firewall correctly and ensure no ports are open instead of trusting the false sense of security given by some proprietary vendor who has your data.
Again, put effort, time to manage firewalls and security solutions.
I'm not even sure if this would work this way.
They purchase $5 (or who knows how much nowadays) stressers and DDoS your IP, so even your ISP feels it and you lose internet access.
My friend's village had no internet access for X hours.
And all of that for actually what? solving issue which could be easily avoided?
(Seriously, this response and others like it demonstrate that IRC will continue to remain a niche. I won't fault you if this kind of setup works for you but suggesting this kind of thing is acceptable for the average user is really, truly, genuinely out of touch. I'm among the demographic who can and has done this kind of thing, and I don't want to do it!)
Can you even write multi-line messages with IRC now?
MS Teams does support this feature, though you have to activate it first: see
> https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msteams/forum/all/teams-... (concise answer)
> https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/muting-and-unmuti... (documentation)
Isn't that solveable on the OS level? I have a global mic mute toggle hotkey, this could be done on keydown/keyup too.
I just wished it used an open protocol, and allowed its content to be indexed. I dislike proprietary as a principal, and I get that discord isn't going to open it's secret sauce, but at least allow the discord moderators to click a box that will index text channels for search engines and future people trying to solve the problem that's pinned on you faq I. your discord channel without having to join your discord channel. (mostly for when that discord channel goes away in the future, lal that knowledge isn't completely lost"
It's so popular in so many places that I assume I'm missing something obvious. I've always just hit a key to toggle mute though.
Which is why I find it puzzling that it's so frequently a make-or-break feature, when everything I've used since early teamspeak days has had a keypress to toggle mute. (I have not used Teams)
Push to talk also frees up your brain cycles from having to keep track of which mode you're in.
If it's global though I can absolutely see why that's useful.
As to why? It depends on the game, but Eve Online can get the most complicated. The most complex set up I can recall offhand, was when we were in cross coalition operations, where I had 2 mumbles and a teamspeak up where the teamspeak had 3 separate server tabs. It was my alliance mumble, my coalition mumble, other coalition teamspeak, my corp teamspeak, and half way through the operation we had to change the other coalition teamspeak servers to a backup because of what looked like a ddos. (In eve you have players who join a corporation, who join an alliance, who form a coalition. Coalitions are not internal to the game mechanics and often incorporate multiple timezone and language groups.)
As a side note, the open source mumble is popular because the corp/coalition/alliance IT services can easily configure it to work with external authorization systems, like the SSO provided in the Eve API or in [1]. For small orgs where security is less of a concern, you are probably better off with a discord server.
You're playing video game / sharing your IDE / whatever
with discord/ventrilo/whatever being in the background
you push e.g MOUSE3 (scroll) button - talk, and stop holding it.
And you were unmuted just for the moment of holding scroll button.
The article was excellent, however, it made no mention of Matrix.
Matrix, like IRC, is decentralised.
You can run your own homeserver - just like running an ircd.
Connecting to a Matrix homeserver with a suitable client - I use Element - you get all the equivalent benefits of IRC (chat) but with the additional Discord-like benefits of being able to post images in-chat, text formatting.
Another benefit is chat history (if configured for a room). Also, fully encrypted rooms. You can have voice and video rooms too.
What I'm trying to say, I suppose, is that I'm a full convert now to Matrix. It's better than Discord in that Discord is a walled garden, whereas Matrix - like IRC - is completely decentralised, and I highly recommend using Matrix over IRC these days.
This is not the problem. I’d say that XMPP is just as alive as Matrix, except it’s not so hip anymore. It definitely feels faster with more mature clients.
Some rooms have so many user and so much chat history, that my own puny homeserver struggles to join them. I've tried all sorts of tweaks - from tweaking the PostgreSQL service, to using things like noatime etc. on the ext4 filesystem. This has helped immensely, but some rooms, like the Python room on matrix.org, brings my homeserver to its knees :)
Perhaps in the future the Synapse devs will improve the code so that mammoth rooms don't bring more resource-starved homeservers down. Alternatively I could throw more resources at the homeserver, but for my use-case, the 6GB ram and 6 cores I assign to the VM running the Synapse instance and the PostgreSQL service - and the IRC bridge heheh - is the bare-minimum I can get away with.
On saying all that, I like Matrix more than I like IRC, nowadays, and more folks should IMO get on Matrix.
(p.s. custom emoji's would be lovely on Matrix ;) )
If I'm joining a huge channel with thousands of people I _really_ don't care whether astroboy8756 has read my message or not. I don't want that traffic to enter my client at all.
Which is why I use self-hosted Gitlab ;)
A second-gen (?) alternative written in Go called Dendrite is much lighter weight, but is lacking in some features last I looked.
A couple of years ago, I found Conduit (https://conduit.rs/) an ultra lightweight homeserver implementation written in Rust with an engaged and responsive community. I've been running this for 18-24 months now and use it for family communications, as well as small business and my group at my $DAYJOB. I highly recommend anyone who hasn't already to check out Conduit :)
Look forward to trying out conduit.
>an ultra lightweight
370 crates in Cargo.lock
176 crates downloaded by cargo-tree
Maybe the author could write something based in fact, rather than their dogmatic authoritarian fan fiction?
IRC isn't viable for the pretty simple and obvious reason - it lacks features users expect. It's telling that things like Signal and Telegram have built IRC-like services (large chat rooms) not on top of IRC.
0: https://discord.com/developers/docs/interactions/application...
1: https://support-dev.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/4404772028...
Consider that a Ring employee was doing exactly that, with customer security cameras, and the only reason they were caught is another employee reported them (and Ring has no idea how many other employees were doing the same thing). [1]
But if the analog for a "private" Discord server is a private IRC server then in one you're trusting all the employees and in the other you're trusting yourself (or whatever admin).
And there do exist IRC client plugins that allow for E2EE chat (but I've never met anyone who used them).
IRC certainly has plenty of problems and Discord is very convenient but I think assuming privacy is assured on Discord is a bad bet.
Voice chat before cell phones with unlimited meant calling your friends
Anyone making this argument doesn't understand why people use Discord. These articles about why Discord is bad crop up over time and they ALL miss the boat. If your argument is that "Discord isn't private" then you've already lost because no one who uses Discord cares about that and you've shown that you don't actually understand Discord.
Do you have any evidence that him using a centralized platform like Discord played a role in him getting caught?
But that's not really my point, just picking a random famous example of someone who would want Discord to be private.
I used IRC for a brief period even after we began to have multiple devices. It was always through some kind of proxy, or basically an ssh connection through GNU screen, just so that basic functionality like asynchronous messaging worked, and so that my setup would carry over. The whole protocol you would have to build around IRC to achieve client agnosticity would arguably be more complex than IRC itself. To a point where any of the big players could introduce IRC-style channels as a fun retro feature. I'd bet more money on that feature becoming popular than on an IRC resurgence.
Also, tangentially related to your first point; I am personally exploring more ways to disconnect. Even if it’s just briefly, like not bringing my phone to the bathroom as you describe. I realize now that I hate being always connected. Vanilla irc sounds like a dream compared to the nightmare of constant connection.
Can't speak for the others, but Teams is really hit-or-miss. Missed notifications, missed messages, out of order messages. Then it appears to be fixed for three months only to happen again. It mostly seems to happen on Android.
In general, you're right, multi-device appeared to have been solved for IM - at least MSN messenger and Skype had it - right around the time when the smart phone came around, but then, because somehow those messengers couldn't successfully move to phones, we had the same problem again in the mobile world: WhatsApp and the likes was bound to one device again. They added web access later, but that was more of a hack than true multi-device support.
The big problem the phone messaging apps solved was that their protocols didn't require a persistent connection. Theoretically, all the other protocols, MSN, ICQ, Skype, IRC could have been extended to support this too, but it's always faster to just build something new and be first to market.
If you want to use IRC today and have that modern multi-device experience, IMO the most decent solution is Quassel[1] (and Quasseldroid for Android). It's like a bouncer, but uses a custom protocol between the bouncer (quassel-core) and the GUI (quassel-client), so that it can perfectly sync state across all devices, and work with flaky connections on mobile. It obviously requires you to run the core on some server so it's accessible from everywhere, so nothing for "normies" as TFA calls them, but to me it's what makes IRC usable in the modern world. I wouldn't want to use irssi in a screen via ssh in termux on my phone.
The next best thing, if you're a Web 2.0 aficionado is probably The Lounge[2].
First? Slack takes ages to sync lately (sometimes you have to explicitly refresh) and has a ... random ... idea of how to move unread counts around.
Discord never notifies me of direct messages from my daughter but always notifies me of announcements in a gaming discord i've explicitly muted to hell and back.
You don't have to build a new protocol. The Ergo IRCd supports multiple clients connecting to the same account (and using the same nick) at the same time using the regular IRC protocol: https://github.com/ergochat/ergo/blob/master/docs/USERGUIDE....
On IRC, I leave my desktop (quasselclient), go to the bathroom, get out my phone and go on typing (quassel app) (*)
All functioning because I'm actually connected to Quassel.
(*) actually I would never do this.
This remark, topped with the author's piece on "normiefication", is the kind of intellectual elitism that reliably keeps me away from IRC whenever I think of coming back to it.
I find that I can use it both for IRL friend groups á la whatsapp, and for online "rooms" á la IRC/discord/slack (but with history, which IRC is lacking).
Reliability as in uptime?
I personally use the nheko client since it is a native client and less bloat (in other words, no Electron stuff).
I don't have any problems with message delivery.
If you don't trust then there a few alternative mobile clients and plenty of options on desktop. I use iamb which is modal TUI like vim.
Element is so bloated and slow, it's impossible not to feel Matrix is bloated and slow as well.
IRC was always a pretty big part of my life, it's where I got into organized quake/cs1.6/Dota matches. I'm not as involved in hardcore gaming now, but I suspect that's all been replaced by discord and automated match-making in games.
I was also a great resource for learning about technical topics. Nowadays most open source communities point to discord/slack/gitter or something like that.
I really wish IRC would make a comeback. All these new networks force you to use their client to connect, and I hate the modern design trends. mIRC (on windows) and irssi(on Linux) got the UX/UI pretty much perfect in my book. Everything since then just adds more whitespace and distractions from the actual important content (the chat).
I always felt that UX people are self-loathing, and thus, view their best work as... nothingness!
The more of nothing they add, the more space, the more emptiness, the more comfortable they are with their work!
The less of them, the better they did!
"Hi, I took this perfect thing, and added ... nothingness, and got paid for it!"
Perhaps, a little voice in my head whispers, the nothingness matches their soul!
I dream of having my company use IRC for chat, and I used to fake it by using Slack through the awesome Emacs modes, but now that we're on Teams all hope is dead.
Edit, Homer was great.
Chatting "accelerates" conversations which considerably reduce their quality, which is cancelled by discord adding the "slow" mode. Online forums are slow which encourage people to make a better effort to write posts and answers.
The UX is not that simple. I have to say discord "forums" are a bit better, but it adds more complexity and there already are threads. It's a lot of noise. Should I write in chat or start a forum post? Discords makes several things at once which will often confuse the user. Discord is mixing chat and forums in a single confusing thing.
On top of this, discord is not federated, because communities are often redundant. For example if I just want to join a community to play a certain game, it's all spread across so many communities that those communities are just awful. Quantity over quality. You have some many battlefield or overwatch servers, it's pointless. Quakenet has one channel per game, and it worked well.
The single thing that IRC needs is a good frontend interface.
I just like minimal software. Discord bloated, and their carbon footprint must be quite high. Not to mention so few people use it for voice or visioconference.
It was both hellish and amazing. Hellish in that I had absolutely no idea how to use anything. Channels and rooms and stuff. All very complicated and weird. I just wanted a single, default place to hang out!
It was also amazing because it all worked beautifully all the way from text chit chat up to in channel video calls. Snappy and fast and reliable. Bliss. LDAP integration out of the box (or near enough out of the box) too. Lovely.
If it was just a little bit more seamless it would probably take over the world.
I try it every now and then and within a couple minutes, I manage to break something, that my Matrix-using friends just shrug off. As an example, just a few days ago I used the web client again and had a chat with a friend. Just for fun, he added a bazillion emoji reactions to one of my messages, and after that the client would always claim our conversation has unread messages, even after right-clicking and selecting "mark as read".
But my favorite is how they broke the IRC bridge about 3 months ago: It randomly drops messages from IRC -> Matrix. There's an issue[1] for this with pretty much no reaction from the devs. Like, nobody cares. So on one hand, the Matrix folks always stress how it's the best chat protocol on the planet because of all the bridges that connect it to everything, but then in reality those brides are unreliable and apparently only there to tick a box, working as well as Microsoft's POSIX layer for Windows NT in the 90s.
And apart from the complete lack of interest in getting this fixed, it also just boggles the mind how you can even break it in this way. IRC has a persistent connection and streams messages separated by CRLF. How do you end up parsing the protocol properly and then randomly ignore a received message?
In its current form, the bridge does more harm than good, as you can't always keep in mind during a conversation that the bridge might just have dropped a message again, leading to frustrating misunderstandings every now and then.
Again, I find the communication from matrix' side absolutely pathetic. Yes I know, it's an open source project, I don't pay them, they don't owe me anything, but come on, wtf. I really wonder how many people have had weird miscommunication because of this and never became aware of it.
the root cause is lack of bandwidth: the bridge is both written and run by one guy, alongside a tonne of other stuff which often takes priority given it revolves around trying to generate $ to fund matrix dev.
Around the beginning of the year, we had some nasty problems on the bridge (from memory, some delayed traffic, and a security bug). Libera started threatening to deportal us, so we rushed out a major feature (persistent IRC connections, so Matrix users don’t reconnect when the bridge restarts) to try to address the longest running series of issues and avoid Libera killing portals (ie stopping users bouncing via Matrix). Unfortunately, while this seemingly worked, it introduced the nightmare subtle traffic loss bug which the parent is complaining about, which we haven’t been able to repro outside of production. Meanwhile, rather than averting deportalling, the new problem reinforced the case, combined with false concerns about archive.matrix.org (https://matrix.org/blog/2023/07/what-happened-with-the-archi...).
This has caused a particularly unpleasant vicious negative feedback loop where we’ve had to split time fixing the reliability bug with: fixing plumbing, preparing deportalling, handling tonnes of community reqs about deportaling and the awkward UX of plumbing, dealing with the libera team, and dealing with a new brace of security issues which showed up thanks to newfound attention on the bridge.
Meanwhile it’s fair to say that we have badly failed to communicate about this with the wider IRC community, focusing on trying to fix bugs while talking to the libera team instead. This is clearly a huge screwup, and, again, I apologise for it (and for the bad job I’ve done on resourcing keeping the bridge running).
At this point, the our best hope is that we’ve fixed the root message loss bug, and that the bridge will go back to being lower maintenance again, and plumbing will prove usable in practice. However, we’re also in a catch 22 when the main use of the bridge (portalling, ie acting as a bouncer) is now gone, meaning fewer people will be able to use it and it’ll be even harder to justify spend time on it going forwards. If libera hoped that by turning off portals they would somehow make it easier for us to improve the bridge, they were wrong.
Our fallback position, if plumbing doesn’t work out, is to try to find a set of people who libera trust to run/maintain the bridge and hand it over to them - or alternatively give up and encourage the community to run their own personal bridges via matrix-appservice-irc or heisenbridge or even matterbridge, if empirically running a huge bridge to libera’s satisfaction is impossible.
If anyone has any other bright ideas, please let me know.
Finally: the reason we have run the bridge for the last 8 years is, perversely, to try to support IRC and let xkcd.com/1810 style users still participate in communities which have otherwise migrated to discord/slack/matrix and avoid community fragmentation. Right now the Libera Matrix bridge has around 10K IRC connections - around 25% of Libera’s total users. By knifing portaling, I’d guess this will drop 10x. So the whole thing ends up being an utterly depressing spiral of fail.
That said, I think privacy is a weak argument against Discord (or, rather, a weak argument for IRC). I have used IRC for many years and I never assumed that anything I put on there was private. Everything you post can be seen and trivially recorded by other users as well as the server operator.
To me it's more about not having your access to social media entirely at the whim of a corporation whose incentives are not aligned with yours and who, sooner or later, is going to come under significant pressure to monetise you. So I guess, in a word, control is the main advantage. This includes control over whether you can access the service, how you access it, what you can access and on what terms you can access it. IRC's simplicity is a definite plus in that regard.
And then you have the "average user", who ruthlessly selects for ease of use and cost and doesn't care about any of this stuff. I think that is a short-sighted position, but ultimately people will make their choice and the average user's preference for walled gardens built by VC-backed corporations is so strong I think it unlikely to be reversed by any amount of blogs or HN comments. I think these services (or their successors) will always continue to exist and will probably always be far more popular than the open alternatives, but it is still worth maintaining and promoting those alternatives, which can provide a sustainable platform for those of us who care about such things.
I'm excited by projects like Element, which is Matrix protocol-powered Discord but open source, but, aside from network performance and feature parity, network effects rule social tech. You're doomed to use Discord if nobody uses Element.
The rest are just proprietary, centralized, corporate-owned.
Here's a short list of those: Teams, Zoom, Discord, Whatsapp, Telegram, Skype, Ring.
- Doesn't expose your IP address by default
- No need to fiddle with automating responses to NickServ to log in
- No need to register with that specific chat server, can simply use your XMPP account for any server
- No annoying netsplits
- Supports multiline text messages
- Has avatar, away status, profile info support
- Can show about 20 last messages when you join a chat so you have some context of the conversation
- Nicknames can have spaces and Unicode
- Can transparently join from multiple devices under a single nickname, no need to kill a "ghost" from time to time after a lost connection
- Configurable with GUI instead of cryptic modes designated by a single character symbol that varies from server to server
* https://github.com/ergochat/ergo/blob/master/docs/USERGUIDE....
Twitch has been providing a non-TLS and public IRC bridge.
Moreover, IRC chat can be extremely well extented, namely with bells and whistle features if the client supports them, and if not can be ignored and and then displays harmless garbage (you can encode A LOT in a short text string, and now with utf-8... you can encode MASSIVE load of things within a short text string).
From a noscript/basic (x)html, just need a irc:// URL and were good. We can even have pre-authencitated irc connection using a transient TCP port opening with IP[46] locking (ok... you will need a pool of IP[46]s for significantly sized services).
Ofc, the bad thing: most of the time the noscript/basic (x)html browser will fire up an irc client, then you get 2 windows. Or we could have an IRC client integrated into a noscript/basic (x)html browser which will open a "frame"/new tab, well... modularity, and this would still be cosmically less costly from a technical point of view than any Big Tech web engine.
It is like some _LEAN_ p2p protocols (streaming, live or not) directly integrated into noscript/basic (x)html browsers with good and honest default (that's the hard part, it will be abused, and if it is too much, won't actually work). Well, a "private" tracker would do the "trick". Still, it could fire up an external p2p-enabled media player (via <video> with the p2p URL with the private tracker and video hash, or the private tracker infos could be part of a dash file).
Ofc, you have to expect the worst from Big Tech: adamant lobbying against that, sabotage up to shadow-hire hacker teams, etc...
First off, I love IRC and always will. But boy, the author sure must have a stable internet connection. In my experience one blip means a lost message with no indication that it's been lost. That is not my definition of reliable.
I don't know what to tell you other than "that doesn't mesh up with the reality of my experience" shrug. Even if they did tell me about a connection issue (which they often didn't), those messages are still gone with no indication that I missed anything ("hey your connection blipped" != "here are the messages you missed while you were gone").
My comment was ironic, solution like that are not practicable for common users.
The rise of alternative chat platforms (discord, matrix, slack) really demonstrates IRC was too limited.
I will remember it foundly but the era where IRC was the dominent open channel chat platform is at its end.
I just hope Discord will not be it's long term replacement.
I wouldn't go as far as saying it's the only viable chat protocol, if you follow the link below you'll guess what I have in mind saying that. (it starts with an X and ends with two Ps)
So Matrix, with a bitlbee plugin or a text client, would be amazing imho.
I'm just so used to seeing many lines of text, and getting a good quick overview of what is going on that way. Sometimes I use /last in irssi, and very rarely I've searched through a channel's web archive. But mostly I just see whatever it is I need directl in the client. If it's a slow chat I see it the next day. It's not going anywhere.
It applies heavy pressure and behind that is the motive to monetise attention. Snapchat is the worst for this; it notifies your recipient once you start typing.
I loved the days where I'd be in a couple IRC rooms and a couple slack rooms all in the same IRC client. Slack killing IRC support still bums me out.
A simple "everything is a json schema" protocol but over TCP/UDP would be cool.
IRC as a protocol is extremely simple and that has value, and I feel that Discord's UI, search, built-in history, and finer-grained permissions (finer than anything IRC can do, anyway) are all plusses that IRC advocates should not discount.
other great features that Discord has which are discounted by IRC afficionados: replies. inline image and short video support. reactions. very high quality video streaming and voice chat (though IRC can be forgiven here given the time period in which it arose.)
these things almost all matter to modern day users. saying that no one needs them because you don't need them or want them is gatekeeping and is myopic and short-sighted.
At work, it has only ever been Slack. Some older employees recall using Skype for Business.
IRC is very much a first-generation distributed comm protocol, but by the time it was mature it had most of the capabilities of current systems, mostly provided by external services. As Jamie Zawinski once observed about email, team chat has a common set of functions that people will always want and any system used for that eventually implements all of them or is replaced; and if a system implements these functions better, it also replaces its predecessors. I mean, I'm old enough to have regularly used 'talk' at work, evolution is a good thing.
Note that you can make IRC server which makes logs of channels and could provide a link to access the file in the MOTD or HELP file, if desired. It can also be done by clients and link in the TOPIC message, which is more common.
IRC is good for fast communication with short messages, but for slow communication with long form messages is also sometimes more useful and for that, NNTP would be better, I think.
This is more against the migration of these “knowledge base” services to Discord chat than a knock against Discord itself.
On mobile the links in your header are fiddly because the links clickable area overlap.
IRC is #1 in my book. I always come back to it. I like its simplicity and its community. It has been immensely valuable to me, to get guidance and answers to questions, from software engineers with tons of experience.
Libera server all day!
Working at Microsoft surely must have been a lot more fun back then.
I assume there are many such cases
As a preface, I'm not telling you not to use IRC. If it works for you, if you like to use it and deal with its quirks and anachronisms, more power to you. There are loads of great communities out there on various servers.
Having said that...
I couldn't in good conscience recommend IRC to a hypothetical someone who's never used a chat program, under almost any circumstance. The feature set is truly beyond meagre by modern standard, with some, though not all of these shortcomings being resolved by standing up, and administering, a bouncer, and (if you're using something like irssi) a stew of Perl incantations. Which, again — I'm not bashing, necessarily, but Perl just isn't a language most people are learning these days, for a number of reasons.
Following up, though:
- Admining a bouncer, while not a full-time job in the long run, is something you need to keep on top of, from keeping the host up (both in terms of potentially paying bills if you're using commercial hosting and in terms of making sure resource usage is fine, nothing's crashing, and security updates). It's also nontrivial in the strict sense: I couldn't teach my parents to do this.
- `tmux` or `screen` are _easier_ options, but man, it always feels dodgy to use them like this. I ran Python servers like this when I was an intern because I hadn't figured out how to create an init script and before Docker was the staple that it is now.
- Other commenters have pointed out that Discord, Slack, etc., have occasional sync issues between devices -- but *at least they support multiple devices.*
- Search is functionally non-existent without a bouncer
- Once again: this is a feature that's not prefect on other platforms, but at least it's *there.*
I'm not making the argument that Discord/Slack/whatever are universally better than IRC in every way. I'm trying to argue that their usability is top-tier compared to IRC, for most people. I also won't say that Discord "killed" IRC. IRC is an older-generation chat protocol/UX, and by that logic it's gonna keep getting killed with every new generation of chat client. First, it got killed by Teamspeak, then Slack, and now Discord, each using their feature sets and UXes to chip away at what's left of the IRC user base.
This isn't even touching on the other features offered by these chat platforms that IRC just doesn't really touch -- mainly, reasonably reliable audio/video calls and screen sharing. And I gotta say, dealing with self-hosted live video streaming is surprisingly hard to get right for calls of more than 2-3 people, generally speaking.
There's some argument to be made about data ownership, but honestly, the more time goes on the less I believe most people care about that very much for casual chats. If you're worried about the government or (much more likely,) advertisers coming after your private chats, IRC is absolutely not an inherent solution to this, and is by default probably about as bad as any centralized platform in this regard.
Use whatever you want and what works for you. I genuinely don't care. But don't deal in absolutes like this; you'd have to be really full of yourself, or totally out of touch with reality and how users interact with software to make a claim like this article's title. Discord and Slack aren't perfect, and certainly, IRC power users who've been on that platform for years or decades may find it falls short in some ways, but for the average person, they're both likely better alternatives.
It's also kinda weird to fanboy over this kind of thing, which is the impression I always get from these posts. "I use X because the communities/friend groups/features/tools I like or am part of are there" is an extremely valid subjective argument for preferring a platform. "I dislike Y because it has A, B, and C issues which break the user experience for me" is just as valid and more objective. "Everything that's not Z is bad because of $PERSONAL_MORAL_FRAMEWORK reasons, and if you wanna put the work into it, Z can be usable actually."
Discord is IRC's next evolution. Next generation chat. Good voice, excellent interactivity.
It has problems (bugs & weak beta phases) but after nearly 20 years of irc, i stopped my bnc (currently znc) instance last week. ~20 years of irc, countless bots, tons of good memories.
it is time to say goodbye for now.
If Discord went away no one can just spin up a discord server.
It shat the bed, just like Twitter and Reddit did recently.
The huge difference is that with IRC we were able to painlessly hop over to libera.chat pretty much the same day while a lot of people are still struggling to leave the other two behind. I have learned my lesson, it's open services for anything important.
IRC is prehistoric ancient history. It's time to evolve and leave that protocol in the dust and go with modern alternatives like Matrix.
A couple of years ago you'd have told me the exact same thing but with s/Discord/Slack/
IRC has "lost" many times before and yet it's still around while the previous "winners" are all gone or irrelevant. Even if Discord is tolerable today how long before it becomes terminally enshittified?
IRC is no more relevant than the fossils that are still underneath the ground.
> while the previous "winners" are all gone or irrelevant.
So Matrix is gone and irrelevant?
> Even if Discord is tolerable today how long before it becomes terminally enshittified?
Even if that happens I can guarantee you that they won't be going back to IRC.