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Comment by Ferret7446 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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) ^)

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.

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