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Comment by Apocryphon | Hacker News Reader

IRC will never die

Being self-hostable it can never die completely but lets face it, in most communities it's a hollowed out husk of what it used to be since Discord took off.

My reading (and maybe I'm wrong because the comment was terse) is that IRC will never die, because it is not a commercial interest that can be shuttered. It's an open protocol and anyone can spin up a server.

Any community you build inside a walled garden can be taken from you. I do think that is important to keep in mind.

It can't die because of that, but the reason we use things like reddit and discord and slack is because those are not open protocols -- they have monied interests behind getting people to use them

The idealism of the internet in the 80s and 90s never could survive past the growth phase.

I don't use reddit, discord and slack because they are not open protocols. I use them because of the network effect and only reluctantly. Look at the relatively recent success of software like bittorrent and know that idealism and commercialism both live and die by the network effect. We aren't doomed to live in walled gardens forever.

I think you can credit a win to IRC recently, too, when someone tried to buy control of Freenode and it seems (as least as an onlooker) that everyone successfully coordinated upping stakes and moving to a new network. I don't use IRC, but I find that impressive.

I think everything you said was true, but I would point out that I think of this as a practical rather than ideological position. I'm not saying it never makes sense to build inside of a walled garden, I'm saying there is a costly tradeoff. I would speculate that it might be more important going forward, but time will tell.

Matrix too

DOS Game Club on AfterNET is still really active, for those who have an interest in checking it out.

And yet, it’ll still be around after Discord shuts down.

But would IRC be what a post-Discord exodus actually goes back to? Lacking basic modern amenities like seamless scrollback and push notifications is going to be a hard sell for the generation that grew up with Discord. As a sibling mentioned, Matrix is closer to the mark.

Doesn't matter. IRC serves a niche that there's always a community for that no matter how small it'd become. I'd place a bet that it won't die as long as there's computer and internet. Long live IRC.

v3 has a lot of features folks don’t talk about. But XMPP MUCs are still kicking too.

There is also Zulip, that I think is opensource.

Can vouch for Zulip. Threaded messaging is the best.-

> seamless scrollback and push notifications

Both are doable with modern servers and clients thanks to v3 chathistory. Ergo (server) and Goguma (mobile client) in particular make this work very nicely.

Discord's main "ease of use" features: Centralized user management, centralized server discovery, server hosting

What it does technically could be replicated by current technologies.

Emojis, video streaming, screen streaming.

Discoverability by the masses is a tough problem to solve because there is really no way to monetize it. Does Discord just rely on Nitro subscriptions?

> Discoverability by the masses is a tough problem to solve because there is really no way to monetize it. Does Discord just rely on Nitro subscriptions?

It's a gold mine of data for things like market research, ad targeting/fingerprinting, and more recently AI training.

A few weeks ago I shut down my self hosted znc bouncer that I still logged in every few weeks to download logs, see if I got pinged somewhere and catch up with some low traffic channels.

I then switched over to https://www.irccloud.com and it's such a improvement as I can use it on my phone, now I'm pretty active again and I kinda missed it.

Are there any self-hosted alternatives?

For IRC bouncers there's many, but I'm not aware of anything that has a web interface, phone app, push notifications and all kept in sync. The market is pretty small.

Alternatively there's many bridges these days so you can use Matrix with one of the many apps supported.

> I'm not aware of anything that has a web interface, phone app, push notifications and all kept in sync.

IRCCloud does. Or if you want an open source stack: Soju as bouncer, Gamja as web interface, and Goguma as Android app. If you have a paid Sourcehut account you get Soju+Gamja hosted for you at https://chat.sr.ht/ .

I'm not sure The Lounge and Quassel support push notifications, but they otherwise fit your requirements.

> IRCCloud does.

You replied to my post where I said I switched to IRCCloud and the person asked for self hosted alternatives to it :P

Haha, yes, my initial message didn't mention it; then I re-read it and thought "huh I forgot to mention IRCCloud" before adding it.

I haven't used it, but Quassel looks like a similar idea.

Alternatively using a Soju[1] with Goguma[2] for phone and Gamja[3] for web could work; FWIW, I use Soju, but not the other two.

1: https://sr.ht/~emersion/soju/

2: https://sr.ht/~emersion/goguma/

3: https://sr.ht/~emersion/gamja/

I'm surprised nobody mentioned TheLounge: https://github.com/thelounge/thelounge

Yes, but in the same way that WordStar still has some loyal users.

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