IRC is still my favorite chat system even if my close friends have moved on to fancier systems like discord and Zulip and slack.
If I could set technical direction in a company we’d use only IRC and email. Maybe mumble.
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.