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Comment by LorenDB | Hacker News Reader

There's no point in overhauling IRC when Matrix is a much more modern alternative that includes E2EE and such things out of the box, no custom extensions required.

Also IRC doesn't store message history, which is kinda a really important thing.

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Shell sessions and bouncers sort of alleviate the history issue if that is what you really need. I always thought that not having history was part of the magic of IRC.

That said, all your private messages as well as any messages in public channels can be logged and will persist on your PC until you delete them.

You can't just tell Julie in HR to get a persistent shell session and set up her bouncer.

For Matrix, you can say "go to chat.company.com" and click log in with Google.

You absolutely can tell Julie in HR to log into the company instance of The Lounge or whatever friendly frontend IT set up. Users should no more need to run their own bouncer than their own homeserver.

I'm sure Julie from HR also isn't present for every physical chat at the watercooler, and isn't any worse for wear.

In fact it'll be great for everyone if HR is not present at every watercooler conversation. At most companies we got work done despite company leadership and policy, not because :)

This assumes that there is actually a friendly frontend meeting the equivalent feature and UI/UX experiences of things like Slack and ignoring the cost of maintaining that service by IT.

Yes, I assume that https://thelounge.chat/ exists. As to cost/maintenance... there are no free lunches. You can pay with your money and your data, or your money and your time. I happen to find the ladder preferable and frankly cheaper than people think.

> For Matrix, you can say "go to chat.company.com" and click log in with Google.

And half of them logs in with their private Google account.

Usually not as bad as allowing personal GitHub accounts to be added company teams.

Eventually somebody starts wondering who spikeycactusplant4589 is.

Trust me. It’s bad. Real bad. ‘Cause when it’s a startup, there are minimal restrictions. You can share what you want.

This has all the energy of the infamous response to Dropbox back in the day [0]. "Just set up a client, and a bouncer, and adjust your retention policy in this text file buried three levels deep and make sure you have enough disk space, and...", when at the end Julie in HR just wants to keep an eye on what happened in the #watercooler channel when she's away on vacay.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

> Shell sessions and bouncers sort of alleviate the history issue

And that's why people don't use IRC

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