Why I Live in IRC (2015)
aaronparecki.com
aaronparecki.com
TOO many bots log entire channels out to public html sites. This is prevalent in everything like discord etc but the degree to it in IRC is just ridiculous god knows what any of those 1500 bots in a channel are doing.
NO features. I'm just over the IRC client and protocol and whatever else. It won't preview gifs, you probably still have to do some xdcc crap to send a file. After using discord and twitch and anything remotely modern it just doesn't allow the same type of conversations, socializing, interactions, but a lot of people do love that about it. I don't include weird irc clients like AcidMAX or whatever would be hip nowadays that probably came from a russian warez group that now has your credit card numbers.
No syncing without running an eggdrop or some tty somewhere running it 24/7. No multi-device support, have to join the server and log in again etc. if it ever restarts or you're somewhere without a shell running it.
Everyone is just bluntly anonymous and you have no privacy outside of priv chans where you know literally everyone.
And being an op the amount of absolutely depraved and creepy stalkery stuff that went on was insane. So many of the few women who identified themselves as women would be harassed and stalked all over irc and sometimes IRL. Lots of glining of creeps.
This was very much an efnet problem with some of the communities it developed. Freenode etc I'm sure iddn't suffer that drama much if any.
A lot of ops were people who synced (peered) their stable and moderated servers on good connections with efnet. Like, OC1-3 connections. My friends and I were pretty much apprentice network engineers to a family member who ran a NOC so we had.. servers..
edit: LOL I just looked up oc1-3 speeds. That used to be so fast.
OC1 - 52 Mb OC3 - 156 Mb
And my parents really weren't very helpful with me growing it into a career. I was always "playing on the computer."
HPB (high ping bitch in counterstrike 1.6) :(
I still use IRC (For nearly 30 years now!) and am in a channel that is still highly active with regulars, but I certainly don't fault anybody for not wanting to use it. I run a bouncer not just so I don't lose messages (I leave my computer on 24/7 with mIRC running, so it's not like I'd miss anything), but so I can hide my IP address.
It's actually kind of appalling from a security perspective to expose users' IP addresses. I'm genuinely surprised that the major IRC networks still don't hide them. Sure, it'd break things like DCC, but would prevent DDoS attacks against fellow users.
(also don’t forget umode +x and vhosts/cloaks exist on most competent networks to hide your IP/hostname)
It's my favorite feature. I want to chat with friends, not have a second job I need to catch up with.
> It's actually kind of appalling from a security perspective to expose users' IP addresses. I'm genuinely surprised that the major IRC networks still don't hide them. Sure, it'd break things like DCC, but would prevent DDoS attacks against fellow users.
Hostname cloaking is a pretty standard feature these days, you just generally have to ask for it to be turned on which is a bit odd. Doesn't break DCC either because DCC negotiates what your IP is directly with your client afaik. NAT is generally the thing that breaks DCC.
These sorts of bots are quite rare on Discord, you usually have to make an account to be able to see anything. There have been attempts at standardizing this (like https://www.answeroverflow.com/) but they haven't taken off. Public logs are much more common on IRC than on Discord.
> Freenode etc I'm sure iddn't suffer that drama much if any.
It seems all of the drama hit all at once, due to Andrew Lee's cocaine fueled episode in 2021 which caused hundreds of open source projects to leave the network within the span of a few weeks - https://gist.github.com/joepie91/df80d8d36cd9d1bde46ba018af4...
> TOO many bots log entire channels out to public html sites.
Fair enough. This would be a likely problem with any non-private chat system.
> It won't preview gifs
Why would I want my client to preload arbitrary third-party supplied fourth-party content? No thank you.
> No syncing without running an eggdrop or some tty somewhere running it 24/7
Screen and tmux have been table stakes for decades. If you can not sustain a 400h idle, you're doing it wrong.
> Everyone is just bluntly anonymous and you have no privacy outside of priv chans where you know literally everyone.
Which one do you want? Anonymity or privacy? I don't see how this is in any way different than our current-day antisocial networks.
-- -- -- -- --
But this, now this is a real problem in all modern communications:
> depraved and creepy stalkery stuff that went on was insane
This has always been a problem. In the 90's, IRC was a relatively low-friction method of getting online and talk to people. At least these days the creeps have largely concentrated on their selected forums, but back in the day having just one in any ISC channel was a real menace.
Disclosure: in IRC since 1992.
I would describe it as a funny picture that moves
No, because most non-private chat systems don't oblige anyone who wants to participate seriously to run a log bot. Of course any chat could be being logged, but most people don't bother if you don't give them a reason to.
> Why would I want my client to preload arbitrary third-party supplied fourth-party content?
The whole point of being in a public chat is exposing yourself to arbitrary third-party content. Why would you want to read a message from someone you don't trust enough to load a gif from?
> Screen and tmux have been table stakes for decades. If you can not sustain a 400h idle, you're doing it wrong.
"It was hard for me, so it should be hard for you too." And IRC fans wonder why the younger generation don't want to use it.
> Which one do you want? Anonymity or privacy? I don't see how this is in any way different than our current-day antisocial networks.
People generally want persistent pseudononymity with some kind of reputation/integrity. When you DM someone on Twitter/Instagram/Reddit (or indeed on a phpBB-style forum), you don't have to show them your driving license, but you're reasonably confident they're the same person you were DMing yesterday. For most people that's a better tradeoff than IRC's "they could be anyone who's chosen to call themselves that, lol, good luck". Heck, HN accounts are the same kind of thing (whereas IRC is more akin to 4chan).
Also, impersonating a user is against Discord TOS. It's only if the user is actively portraying themselves as that user to others and not just a nickname switch and being goofy, IIRC.
Personally I think you should get nuked for a day minimum for doing it at all but whatever. Someone did it as me last year and was actually having conversationg an entire day or two before I saw them doing it and it confused the HELL out of me until I realized it.
I used to have a 2 or 3 character nick on Efnet + Freenode, prob others. I'm sure thats long taken by someone else now unless the nickserv never expires them.
To this day, image and video codecs remain full of awful bugs. If you are on the receiving end a piece of data whose mime-type starts with "image/" or "video/", there's no telling what kind of malice you are up against. At best you are up against bile and propaganda.
Incidentally, I find it funny that disappearing messages á la Snapchat or whatever copycat the major tech companies have come up with is considered hip. But IRC with its "you were not online, so you missed it" concept is somehow undesirable.
Freenode had all the drama and discovered how to kill off 99% of its use in just three easy steps: (see https://netsplit.de/networks/top10.php?year=2021 for the dramatic abruptness of its fall)
1. There was some drama over the new "owner" of freenode which resulted in most of the moderation staff leaving, planning to set up a new network (libera chat).
2. Most of the communities saw this drama and basically said "uh, we're still evaluating what the hell we're doing," with many opting in the interim to do something along the lines of have presence in both freenode and libera. Freenode responding by de-op'ing and kickbanning people from channels that mentioned libera in the topic. This resulted in pretty much every community still on the fence going "thank you for making the decision, we're now on libera, goodbye freenode."
3. A few months later, the network cleared its chanserv and nickserv lists and basically completely rebooted itself from scratch, to avoid the problems of legacy people.
Don't expect privacy in public.
> NO features.
Thank god.
> No syncing
Conversation should be ephemeral. If you want an audit trail use email.
I also use ircs/ircx on plan 9 where the server portion, ircs, runs on my cpu server and I can connect from anywhere and open the ircx chat clients which are just rc scripts in windows.
These sites exist? Examples?
If you want a crazy trip look up irc logs on 9/11, and keep in mind most of the people on irc on 9/11 were middled aged in the 2000s and.. extremely unpleasant. Incredible amounts of anti-muslim, jew stuff, every single channel was ranting about muslims and turning iraq into glass.
These are just examples, you have the full text logs so I'm sure people are running them through AI and everything else now.
https://ircstats.net/ https://ircstats.net/LA/
9/11 example https://www.smogon.com/forums/threads/9-11-irc-10-years-late...
At least you don't have to re-learn how to do it when the UI changes, when the commercial sponsorship changes, when the advertising changes, or when they announce they've been hacked and your data is on the "darkweb" (probably another IRC network).
!xdcc list
A new user doesn't know to type xdcc help, etc. They have to google how to send IRC files, blahblah. And everyone will be on a different client so maybe yours has an XDCC context menu button but theirs doesn't, etc.
I have the sneaking suspicion that I know your handle but I won't share lol. Feel free to email me or something.
While some people might use XDCC, it seems more common to post a filehost link, similar to sharing pictures. You can also exchange magic wormhole codes, link a torrent file, give ipfs info, share a server where you can use sftp, etc. I personally don't like XDCC and never touch it. I think it's used more for grabbing files from bots than between real people, and for that sort of thing I much prefer torrents.
>syncing... multi-device support
I run irssi (tui client) inside of tmux on a remote server (in the house of someone I know, within 20 minutes driving distance). I ssh in and attach to the tmux session from my main PC and my phone, getting the same full client and experience from both, allowing me to do powerful things like use irssi aliases, shell commands, and tmux shortcuts even from my phone. Much more powerful than a dedicated mobile client. Plus I can run mail and torrent clients in another tab, quickly look at IRC log files going back years in another pane, etc.
I'm also on XMPP and Matrix, but nothing feels as powerful, controllable, reliable, and as fun as IRC. I've never seen Rizon or Libera go entirely down for a day or even an hour, but it's practically normal for XMPP and Matrix homeservers to go down, lag super hard, have issues sending or receiving media, have issues with encryption (which you can't even turn back off when it breaks on Matrix, but you can on XMPP). Other proprietary chats need not be mentioned of course. Honorable mention to Mumble for voice, but it's not that often I want to voice chat.
I've made a lot of friends on IRC and I still chat on it every single day.
What you're saying is that IRC file sharing is so bad that people use anything other than IRC file sharing.
> I run irssi (tui client) inside of tmux on a remote server (in the house of someone I know, within 20 minutes driving distance).
A unix shell account on a managed server would cost at least $5/month at commercial rates. Most people aren't willing to pay that much just for online chat. You don't like IRC, you like the massive favour this person is doing you.
> I ssh in and attach to the tmux session from my main PC and my phone, getting the same full client and experience from both, allowing me to do powerful things like use irssi aliases, shell commands, and tmux shortcuts even from my phone. Much more powerful than a dedicated mobile client.
It's not though. A native, customizable chat program will let you do everything you could do over ssh, but also do things that take advantage of your device's unique capabilities like touch gestures on phone.
> Plus I can run mail and torrent clients in another tab, quickly look at IRC log files going back years in another pane, etc.
Again this is an example of the best thing about IRC being not IRC.
"No syncing without running an eggdrop or some tty somewhere running it 24/7."
That's one of the things I miss most about IRC. There was something very temporal about it -- you were logged in, or you weren't. You were present, or you weren't. More modern tools of communication like Slack or Discord basically don't have this; it's more like a long private "feed" than a "chat" as I think of it, anyway.
I miss that temporality. I miss logging in and asking the chat, "Hey, is so and so online?" "yeah, he was here about half an hour ago, went afk but should be back." It gives me the same warm rosy feeling the thought of having to use a pay phone does.
Obviously, you're right, in the commercial sense, this is unacceptable. But I personally kind of miss the days when chat / email / forum were separate things. Now we have these mutants in Slack and Discord that mish mash both. Maybe I'm old but I find it sort of difficult conceptually.
It is simple, reliable, and well established. I initially used to hang out on multiple networks like DALnet, EFnet, etc. but I quickly settled on becoming a regular at Freenode and OFTC because those are where most of the free and open source software communities were active.
The biggest recent event in IRC that happened recently from my perspective (user perspective) was the controversial change in ownership of Freenode. I switched to Libera like everyone else. The migration took only about 30 minutes or so: point my ZNC to the new server, register my nick, register my channels, and done!
The freenode debacle impacted a handful of my favorite channels. #tcl is noticably quieter and a couple others are still trying to decide whether they're an official channel or not (this affects #channel vs ##channel naming). I'd bet that the number of active users has dropped but I don't have any emperical evidence.
If anyone is considering ZNC, here are a couple suggestions to change to the default config:
1. AllowWeb = false (only enable the web interface if you need it)
2. For each channel, add Buffer = 10000 so that you can have history for more than a day or two (the default is quite small)
3. Add these two lines:
LoadModule = chansaver LoadModule = clearbufferonmsg
to get better history tracking and avoid duplicate messages.
$ wc -l tcl2023* | awk '{s+=$1} END {print s/NR}' 116.333
$ wc -l tcl2020* | awk '{s+=$1} END {print s/NR}' 314.556
Less than half the activity before/after according to this non-scientific analysis (my client wasn't always connected and it looks like the logfiles contain topic/names and other output).
I ended up getting back "in" with irc.home .com (@Home Cable), on their re-linking efforts. Around these times, we still had big names on IRC, universities, America Online even.
I would go on to be linked to HybNet (Hey, Dianora, Hardy, everyone I'm forgetting) testing ircd-hybrid, the IRC server software that powered much of EFnet at the time. Since EFnet had no services, the server's software and its ircops were extremely important to the network. I would later mess with TCM and other auto-regulators, leading into my interest of bot making. Everyone's hailing ChatGPT when we'd write our own SmarterChild, and it could connect to AIM -AND- IRC -AND- Web.
20....25... nearing 30 years later, I'm still on EFnet. My channel is still active, and yes I have quite a few bots. I also still talk to a few friends, some who are still IRC only for privacy or other reasons. We've lost over 100,000+ users, but I still enjoy randomly typing /list thinking I'm going to crash myself with the upcoming flood of activity. Not quite, but it feels good.
Also, DALnet services banned me for hacking them and I think I'm still banned.
Thanks for listening to my IRC Talk.
I wish there were more people using these alternative, somewhat decentralized services that weren't just tech people. Whenever I see some cool new fediverse technology or alternative protocl (e.g gemini), 99% of the conversation is just people talking about the technology itself. I originally joined facebook because I had friends on there, not so we could talk about the tech behind facebook
Idling is very much a key aspect of the irc culture.
- #darkscience on the darkscience server
- #linux and #indieweb on libera.chat
- #talk on snoonet
I don't think FreeBSD was _ever_ discussed on efnet's #freebsd lol
If you go real deep I went to the same highschool as JKH so sometimes we'd talk about that too...
Were you on at the same time as Asym, Axthrower, Lefty, that black dude who was into photography (lol sorry), the girl who kept talking about her sbux investment performance... nitedog (?)
I had op there for a while, I can't remember my username tho
I had ops courtesy of that alternative bot Austin (?) ran - I remember there were like two competing bot systems and he liked me for some reason
yeah some interesting conversations were had
It was hard work keeping the trolls at bay and the Lunix spammers/users in check.
Oh it still is hahaha
Do I want my community to be completely owned by a corporation, so that all the work we put into the network effect belongs to a company and they can impose/change rules at any moment? Have we learned nothing?
Matrix is the modern IRC alternative, not discord. And in some cases, you can run a bridge between the two, so I use a matrix client as my daily IRC interface -- best of both worlds.
But simultaneously Matrix is not a good enough Discord alternative.
Too much friction, too many issues, and still difficult for non-technical users.
The reason Discord won out is you can just send a link to somebody and they're already on-boarded.
Once that's all out of the way they should be able to just click on the app and chat hassle free.
I did all that. It wasn't enough. They kept getting another family member to send them a new invite and then manage to somehow create a new account in the web UI each time. I guess that workflow worked for them so they didn't want to change it.
Discord is IMO quite a mess. I am definitely a technical user (also lived in IRC for years, that's why I'm on this thread) and as someone who just uses Discord from time to time, I regularly get confused by it and find a nontrivial amount of friction to get things done there. No wonder your parents struggle with it.
The company itself seems to be riddled with problems so honestly I wouldn't be surprised if it was dead in the next 48 months.
Yes, after you give Discord Inc. your phone number.
Utter lunatics.
We use IRC at work for this purpose. Prometheus alerts flow into channels that anyone is free to join or leave depending on what they're working on at the given moment.
Why I Live in IRC (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12267254 - Aug 2016 (83 comments)
I ended up getting back "in" with irc.home .com (@Home Cable), on their re-linking efforts. Around these times, we still had big names on IRC, universities, America Online even.
I would go on to be linked to HybNet (Hey, Dianora, Hardy, everyone I'm forgetting) testing ircd-hybrid, the IRC server software that powered much of EFnet at the time, like a crash test EFnet admin. I had a blast! Since EFnet had no services, the server's software and its ircops were extremely important to the network. I would later mess with TCM and other automated connection regulators, leading into my interest of bot making. Everyone's hailing ChatGPT when we'd write our own SmarterChild, and it could connect to AIM -AND- IRC -AND- Web.
20....25... nearing 30 years later, I'm still on EFnet. My channel is still active, and yes I have quite a few bots. I also still talk to a few friends, some who are still IRC only for privacy or other reasons. We've lost over 100,000+ users, but I still enjoy randomly typing /list thinking I'm going to crash myself with the upcoming flood of activity.
Not quite, but it feels good.
Also, DALnet services banned me for supposedly hacking them and I think I'm still banned from NickServ.
Thanks for listening to my IRC Talk.
You had +v, +h and +o which was all you needed.
Meanwhile unreal started introducing +a and +q for those power hungry folk.
I've been using Discord every since and while I'd still prefer to use IRC, I don't mind it nearly as much as I originally expected to.
I would reconsider if there was a half-decent TUI client that doesn't have 250ms latency to send a bloody plaintext message on a top-shelf Linux workstation. Is it that hard to make it run as smooth as mIRC did on my old Pentium II?
The clients, the server, the org that manages it.
Half of these seem more appropriate for email, and email is already set up to handle them with zero configuration (like GitHub).
Twitter, who cares, that’s a time waster.
Home surveillance stuff is also a waste of time. It is basically entirely ineffective, every petty criminal knows to wear a mask and clearance rates are below 15%.
And putting your sleep logs on your website publicly…really!? Seems like this is just data collection as a hobby with no end goal.
This is very context-dependent.
If I lived in a large city somewhere and was often not at home, sure - but I live in a small town and am almost always home. "Home surveillance stuff" notifies me when something unexpected is happening on my property and lets me respond to it personally. The clearance rate for reported crimes is immaterial when you're able to prevent the harm from occurring in the first place.
I’ve had plenty of projects change scope once someone has told me “why don’t you just do X?”
It's a bit slow. It's not an entirely beautiful place. But it's a fun idea, at its core.
Zoom is just fancy telegraphy
No one should call IRC "mirc", email "outlook", or the web "chrome", come on bro.
Mastodon is like the Internet Explorer of Activitypub software. It's what a lot of people think is fediverse. But developers and power users prefer Firefox and have many valid reasons to dislike Internet Explorer.
Those kinds of people are pretty much just a different interface into a knowledge base. Once you get past the off-putting nature of their responses, I've found that IRC has a higher proportion of correct answers to complex problems.
People who sit in the same channel all day watching moderators and regulars abuse and mock people that ask questions, just makes me not want to be there.
Unfortunately every large channel on libera operates this way and they get REALLY pissed off if it's ever brought up.