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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

What makes IRC special isn't the protocol but the community, and that community has been steadily shrinking month after month, year after year. The average age of regulars continues to go up. Unless its popularity sees some kind of resurgence and the current trends reverse, IRC will most definitely die.

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Funny, I think the exact opposite. All social spaces are about the people/community, which mostly adapts itself around whatever space they happen to be around, be it a park, shopping map, IRC, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.

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.

The biggest weirdness on IRC compared to all other platforms is that you NEED to be online 24/7 with your client or you'll miss stuff. There is no "backlog" except for the one you see yourself.

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.

In addition to the bots others mentioned, there are web front-ends to provide scrollback. Convos [1a], TheLounge [2a], KiwiIRC+KiwiBNC [3]

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

[3] - https://github.com/kiwiirc/kiwiirc

screen, or `nohup` (at least in bash) ^)

There used to be whole websites dedicated to archiving IRC channels. Last time I tried to find one, I couldn't. It's a shame, really. It used to work as a forum you could go back to and find answers.

Yea all major channels used to run logger bots for themselves at least.

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.

These had always been public channels. Saying it's a breach of trust that an unofficial archive exists feels a bit heavy-handed. It's like complaining about the web archive.

I'm not talking about a massive channel like #c++ or something, more like a ~40-50 person channel, where someone just joins and appears to lurk.

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.

If I can suggest a different perspective: that lack of scrollback is what makes IRC special. When you join a channel, instead of just scrolling back to whatever topic you care about and joining the subthread, you get caught up on what you missed by engaging with the channel instead. It drives community this way.

I love irc, but irc is probably more problematic to manage for users and admins/moderators than discord.

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.

IRC is also very low bandwidth so you can't throttle it. IRC will live forever and is one of the longest lasting technologies of the internet.

I think your statements about average age and number of users is probably correct.

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...

This makes me wonder if there will ever be a day in the distance future where the final Bitcoin node will be turned off forever vanquishing the cryptocurrency to the digital graveyard.

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