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Comment by Shish2k | Hacker News Reader

> if we had interoperability we would have had competition and after 30 years we’d see 30 years of progress

Counterpoint: IRC

i dont see the counterpoint here, which company has poured even a fraction of a percent into IRC as Google has with its myriad of messengers or Whatsapp/Telegram ec?

One google engineer on his personal time introduced entirely new systems into IRC (RobustIRC) https://robustirc.net/ which is the most commercial support that exists.

The IRCv3 initiative is a very small number of people, none of them supported commercially.

Companies apparently do not see incentive to pour that kind of money into software for open protocols. We can talk about whether they are rational or irrational, but from a perspective of maximizing profit I think they are probably rational.

I agree what it gets the consumer is crap.

The claim was if we had interoperability we would see progress. IRC exists and we didn't. Now your claim is if we had interoperability and there was a benevolent giant willing to pour billions in investment we would see progress.

Ah, well, I still disagree IRC was that.

XMPP was that, and it saw widespread adoption up until Facebook and Google walled off their XMPP federation- slack even disabled its XMPP bridge (that wasnt federated).

Companies definitely killed that open protocol, though there could be arguments against XMPP: functionally they could have been worked around, there is just a significant financial incentive to not want to.

why counter?

still alive and well, survived takeover attempts, see freenode -> libera.chat and got a shiny new protocol spec with modern features

> still alive and well

Last time I checked user numbers were both steadily in decline, and small in absolute terms (top 10 IRC networks combined have ~500k users - compare to eg discord with 150 million users. There are individual discord servers with larger user numbers than the entire world of IRC)

> survived takeover attempts

Didn’t the takeover succeed, and then all the users migrated to a different server? I guess if you’re saying “IRC as an abstract concept survived the takeover of an individual network” then sure that happened.

> got a shiny new protocol spec with modern features

Perhaps I’m reading this chart wrong, but checking the IRCv3 feature support page, features that I would consider “modern by 80’s standards, table stakes by 90’s standards” (eg account registration, chat history) are still in the “draft” stage and not supported by libera.chat. Features from the 2000’s (eg mobile notifications) aren’t even being drafted?

If interoperable protocols really drove progress, Discord wouldn’t have attracted more users in 6 months than IRC did in 30 years :P

your last sentence seems to imply that progress/superiority drives adoption, i can agree with the rest.

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