IRC Will Never Die (2021)
hackaday.com
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What's special about IRC is that it's really easy to set up. If all of the social platforms collapsed, you could set up and use IRC with your group of friends until the next social platform blows up and "everyone" moves to it.
If a partial/regional apocalypse happened, you could set up and run IRC.
On the other hand it's a good thing, people can't just join and scroll down 10 years of chat history.
But you'll also be completely unfindable unless your client is online.
Then there were a few "unofficial" ones that just came in and lurked without telling anyone they were logging everything and publishing it on the internet. A bit of a breach of trust IMO.
Unknown to everyone they're logging content, grabbing URLs and posting it all online.
It's like archive.org logging in to a private forum with an account and scraping the content for public sharing.
I prefer to instead run irssi+otr in a GNU screen session from a random VM/VPS provider. Most others prefer tmux. I'm just stuck in the past I suppose for using GNU screen.
[1a] - https://github.com/convos-chat/convos/
[1b] - https://convos.chat/
[2a] - https://github.com/thelounge
[2b] - Demo: https://demo.thelounge.chat/#/connect
I don't like the discord server model, but it allows the platform to prevent spam more easily and to put the responsibility on server owners.
Searching chat history is also a big plus.
IRC sets a high bar for users to choose a client, create an auth account etc. So obviously many of them are power users, and those users are qualitative.
Discord is just much easier for everybody, and it makes money.
I would say this is another indication of how people who grew up with the internet, and who generally base their "community" and "friends" in corporate digital products, are incapable of pushing back on corporate overreach.
Are you finding it difficult as a young professional to buy a house, keep up with subscriptions, save for retirement? Don't worry, you'll be screwed 10x worse by the time your of retirement age.
The "i've got nothing to hide from constant survielance", "just use chrome" crowd is digging their own financial grave.
Think it's bad now, just wait...
However it was reborn as Libera which is once again doing great. If you don't know the story, Google it. I don't want to drag up the past, it's better forgotten.
I don't think IRC will really die, it will become a more fringey thing though. Probably more than it already is.
And that it worked so well is the point of the article!
IRC is highly resilient because it's simple to set up, the clients and servers are free software and can be endlessly and independently configured to talk to each other, and it's light on resources - both server, client, and bandwidth.
I'm on terrible, legacy satellite internet (ie, not starlink, with 700ms-1.2s round trip times), and IRC is the only chat system that works fine.
I went to Monash University in Australia, starting in 1994. We had an EFnet server (biggest, or one of the biggest). I was just a student so I don't know the specifics, but it was only allowed to run from 6pm to 6am because otherwise it used most of the University's bandwidth, if not the entire country:
At the time, Australia's internet capacity overseas was a SINGLE 1.5Mbit link. Telstra did buy a 45Mbit link in late 1995, and then another in early 1996.
Still, that's insane, the country had less than 100Mbps.
I remember working for a web design company in the mid-late 90s and we had servers at a datacenter in Melbourne. I remember downloading Netscape Navigator (1.1n!) and being blown away by how fast it downloaded, and then realizing for the duration of the download I was using something in the order of 5% of the country's international bandwidth.
Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_Australia
It's easy to take for granted just how much Fucking God Damn Technology we have mundane access to today.
That 14700K or 7800X3D CPU? That's more powerful than entire national supercomputers back in the day.
A 64 gigabyte stick of DDR5 RAM? Bill Gates once said 640 kilobytes is enough for everyone. And you probably needed multiple sticks.
A 20TB hard drive? With helium? Do you understand the bandwidth of a station wagon full of hard drives barreling down the freeway in the 1980s?! Wait, nobody probably even knows what a station wagon is anymore...
1gbit/s internet? 10gbit/s ethernet? We sung the melody of dial up modems conducting international diplomacy better than any politicians.
360Hz liquid crystal display monitor with billions of colors and millions of pixels? We used to completely evacuate air out of glass or ceramic tubes and fire fucking lasers with them to show monotone pictures in neon orange or green.
Modern, minimalist user interfaces? To hell with them, Windows 95 was the pinnacle of human engineered interface design.
...Wait, did we actually devolve? Maybe it was a mistake to make sand think after all.
Gates has always denied saying this, and no one has ever produced the original quote. It’s more like something IBM would have said about the PC, they’re the ones that created that limit.
It's not 'insane'. Bandwidth goes a long way when you aren't downloading 100Mb JS frameworks and watching cat videos all day.
But yeah it worked out really well with Libera.
I don’t believe any gamers use it today but fringe-tech communities still use it, I think that’s what the parent is referring to.
Ah, Xircon, Quakenet and Counter-Strike. Those were the days.
Still, MIRC (as a client) was a common thing for all computer geeks until 2005-2010 or so in my circles. After that people started moving to whatsapp and the like. This includes people in the hacker/maker and game/lanparty community so very techy and niche but there it was still big back then.
The internet was much better when it was limited to very techy people too. And so is hacker news for that matter.
We have a saying in the Netherlands: "When you lower the barrier the shit flows over it". It's kinda true.
1. Is there still a benefit to having more than one server? My understanding is that IRC networks had multiple servers partially because because having >50k open network sockets was difficult on 1995-era UNIX-like operating systems. That's not really a problem anymore. I guess multiple servers is a way to achieve load-balancing and fault-tolerance for servers going down, though. But then again, the services database still has to exist somewhere, right? That's probably still a single point of failure?
2. From a user perspective, an IRC replacement ought to compete with Discord. That means support for posting images and videos, audio/video chat, offline history, easy switching between desktop and phone, deep and granular admin controls, etc. I'd love for there to be an open source & open protocol option here, but I'm terrified to even imagine an RFC that implements all of this in a way that works in practice.
Ugh no.The reason I love IRC is precisely because it's not Discord. IRC with Quassel (and QuasselDroid on mobile) adds most of the mod cons already without being overly bloated.
Besides, if you want something like that you already have Matrix which is just what you're looking for and fully open and federated.
It's also not clear for us! We're considering using a regular replicated database backend with multiple service nodes accessing it. Making the service nodes replicate directly through the network is also an option.
> Is there still a benefit to having more than one server?
Good question. I'm not a staffer at Libera so I don't know, but they believe they need multiple servers. If nothing else, it keeps latency low between clients and servers no matter the client's continent.
> That means support for posting images and videos, audio/video chat, offline history, easy switching between desktop and phone, deep and granular admin controls, etc. I'd love for there to be an open source & open protocol option here, but I'm terrified to even imagine an RFC that implements all of this in a way that works in practice.
There are already specs for most of this stuff. Images and videos are through sharing URLs freely and there's https://github.com/progval/ircv3-specifications/blob/filehos... to tell client where they can upload media (I wrote it as a joke, but there are a couple implementations now???). Video/audio chat won't happen, because it's just too hard. https://ircv3.net/specs/extensions/chathistory for offline history already has a decent number of implementation. And easy switching is going to be tough but there has been work on it from https://soju.im/ (read markers, synchronizing PMs) that we can reuse.
"deep and granular admin controls" is probably going to be through non-standardized commands as is tradition, so servers can freely innovate and there isn't much to gain through standardization. https://github.com/ircv3/ircv3-specifications/pull/484 would help build GUIs for new custom flags, though.
Like Gopher? Still out there and bein' used. Very "fringe" now though.
The whole Gopher idea (fixed links) actually made a bit of a return on old Nokia mobile phones with "WAP" but it never really took off because it sucked so badly. I made some WAP sites at the time but it was pretty terrible. 1-bit black/white images, a very strict layout and protocol. Bleh.
When the WWW came out gopher was pretty much instantly forgotten. And don't forget the whole internet was "fringe" back then.
There seems a genuine loss of mojo amongst those purporting to support freedom of expression across the spectrum.
One does not wish to feel as though there were some "Dark Age" pending, but here we are.
If I could set technical direction in a company we’d use only IRC and email. Maybe mumble.
That said, these days a Matrix Synapse instance would be an easier choice.
What money would it require? Any leftover PC from the last 15 years can run the server.
Also, at red hat, we’d complain to the whole company about paper towels vs air dryers in the bathrooms, so naturally the complaints about losing IRC would be expected! It’s refreshing to be at a place where I can make a decision without getting second guessed and derailed by someone totally unrelated to what I’m doing.
1) IRC doesn't support any form of message threading. There's some user conventions like "username:" or "@username" to direct a message to a specific person, but there's no way to make a clear distinction between multiple conversations in a channel. (You can make a new channel for the conversation, I guess, but that's even more hostile than usual to other users trying to follow along.)
2) IRC doesn't support messages longer than ~400-500 bytes. There's an internal hard limit of 512 bytes per line in the IRC protocol, and part of that gets silently consumed by fields like the server hostname and channel name. If you try to send a longer message, it's silently truncated. (Your client will probably echo it back as if it all went through, but other users will see it truncated.) Trying to discuss anything longer than a single line of text typically requires users to post it to an online "pastebin" - adding another external tool you need to make IRC work.
3) There's no reliable, standard way to transfer non-text content on IRC. DCC is unreliable, slow, requires one or both users to set up their firewall to allow incoming connections (!), and only transfers files to one user at a time. All of this combines to make IRC incredibly awkward for discussing audiovisual content, like graphical designs or audio/video. Sure, you can upload screenshots or videos to another web site and post links to IRC - but that's yet another external tool you have to bring in.
4) User authentication and authorization in IRC is incredibly crude. The protocol is built around the understanding that users can change their username at any time (!!), with systems like NickServ bolted on after the fact to "protect" names. User permissions are tied to a user's presence in a channel; private channels are implemented with a single shared password. All of this is "good enough" for a lot of social IRC networks, but completely unsuitable for a business setting which demands a higher level of assurance.
A previous rant of mine on IRC's missing features: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40813743
The other 3 are UX matters, 2nd point cracks me up because hexchat could split a message in batches of privmsg's eleven years ago, spam control is totally local (so being banned for spamming isn't a given), servers can nowadays buffer a lot of text and throttle messages, albeit bandwidth is mostly free.
Being them UX matters, they aren't worth much, thus IRC will remain broken because there are like two thousands IM competing software that dealt marvellously with those problems.
Without a doubt, the modern era is worse than the experience I had in the 2000s. But, it's true that threaded conversations make it easier to collaborate. Email and voice calls used to work fine for that, though.
Meanwhile, I discovered https://thelounge.chat/, and since I have to open too many browser tabs already, what's one more? I'm pretty happy with it. It fills in the missing features of IRC like sending files and images, and being a bouncer.
Real time communication should be used for real time communication. Send me an email if it's async, or call me if it's urgent and I'm not available via normal RTC channels. People want Slack etc to be an everything client, which is why we have the gross bloat we have.
That said, I think the lack of threading is a huge downside.
I have only been able to load a discord "page" or whatever maybe once or twice so I don't know if discord style chat is better or not. IRC I can run on a potato lol
To respond to the sibling comment: we had text files on a share that we could actually grep. Far better than the inexact, incomplete search functionality that seems to have become normal these days.
I've never set up IRC before though, so I have no idea if this is actually feasible.
For me, IRC stopped being attractive when Freenode changed owner. They broke it in two months and with no way to migrate nicks between servers, many lost their registered nicks on the channels that moved to other servers, and I had no want to stay on Freenode for the channels that stayed.
Identity is a major problem with IRC. Losing mine cut a core tether for me, it wasn't my space any more.
Currently, I still run my own IRC server for friends, I have syslog channel where bots are idling and msg importand/criticial messages from my infra (semi-centrliazed logging). I see no reason to move away from it.
I think I do lament the abscence of a more aggressive "why not just update IRC to be like Discord?"
WAY easier said than done, and I think Matrix is trying, but I suppose the most frustrating thing is trying to tell the young'ns, hey this has a strong chance of enshittifying
Because one is a protocol and another is a platform. To quote from [0]:
After 30+ years, email is still unencrypted; meanwhile WhatsApp went from unencrypted to full e2ee in a year. People are still trying to standardize sharing a video reliably over IRC; meanwhile, Slack lets you create custom reaction emoji based on your face.
This isn’t a funding issue. If something is truly decentralized, it becomes very difficult to change, and often remains stuck in time. That is a problem for technology, because the rest of the ecosystem is moving very quickly, and if you don’t keep up you will fail. There are entire parallel industries focused on defining and improving methodologies like Agile to try to figure out how to organize enormous groups of people so that they can *move as quickly as possible* because it is so critical.
When the technology itself is more conducive to stasis than movement, that’s a problem. A sure recipe for success has been to take a 90’s protocol that was stuck in time, centralize it, and iterate quickly.
I got into IRC multiple times, but I really have no desire to go back to it. The fact that I have to set up a ZNC bouncer if I want messages to show up on multiple devices kind of feels like, well, something from the 90's.
I feel like Matrix is considerably less annoying, while being federated and relatively easy to set up.
I'm happy enough with IRC dying.
Modern software tries to do too much and as a result often fails to perform its main function.
IRC is pretty much the simplest solution that works. It wont be going anywhere.
I cant remember the last time I saw a reference to an active channel. Or seen it installed on any system.