IRC Driven – modern IRC indexing site and search engine

Writing an IRC client is really a fun and rewarding exercise.

I also more or less started my career as a software engineer by maintaining a mildly popular Linux one, at the time.

Some things I learned ...

- A lot about shipping to real users and their pain points, since the devs are naturally accessible by IRC and you get to meet directly

- A whole lot about what makes a successful technology

- Equally much about tech warts, as IRC suffers from a fair number misguided early decisions and many years without functioning governance

- How incredibly rewarding it is to work on products that users directly "live their lives" in and that can help facilitate anything they do - it taught me to look out for jobs that have similar substrate-like qualities

Good luck with your project, I'm glad to see the cycle of renewal continue.

That's why providers.xmpp.net gives a good overview on where to sign up. The clients I know of also allow you to create an XMPP address directly from the app. The whole ordeal is to choose an username and a password then.

> involved in some nation state espionage activities

This is really more of a TLS thing than an XMPP thing, since the attacker was able to intercept traffic with a valid TLS certificate. Of course the second line of defense is E2EE here, but arguably, since the XMPP community was directly affected, they learned (monitoring certificate logs, channel binding , DANE, https://certwatch.xmpp.net/ ) a lot about defending even against this level of attacker from this incident.

> still current best but unmaintained [client]

I wonder which one you are talking about. My recommendations are Conversations, Gajim and Monal. They're all modern clients, actively maintained and have been around for a while now.

Which would, of course, be solved by having those conversations indexed and searchable on the web.

By those that have an account and that know on which "servers" to find the content they're looking for.

> What annoys me more is the fact that discord these days is also used as a substitute for forums and such. There is so much information just hidden on discord you will only find when you know to join specific servers because there is no way to search for that information from the outside.

And that's exactly the problem. Discord is a great Teamspeak successor (I suppose; I've never used that). It's a horrible substitute for a bug tracker, development roadmap, forum, release announcement feed etc.

In my opinion, most of the differences between IRC and Slack/Matrix/Discord/etc stem from trying to keep users in a group chat while they're not actually online, since this requires servers to store message history, and then you're legally required to have a way to moderate the message history, and you might as well send back-history to clients who just joined, and so on. Additionally, since each message is stored authoritatively on the server, it can be updated with things like text edits and emoji reactions.

Some of the differences, like being able to send pictures, do not stem from that.

I read and responded to a similar comment recently here on HN about email security. The gist of the question is "why don't we create something like email but secure?" and the gist of my reply is "if we created a whole new system, we'd add all the things we can now have that we couldn't have when email was invented, like instant notifications, and then it would be a reinvention of a newer protocol (I didn't name Matrix, Fediverse or XMPP), nothing like email.". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42633785

Personally, part of the charm of the IRC protocol is the simplicity. You can implement a client effortlessly in most languages in just an hour or two.

Then slack did the modern IRC client.

But the reality is also that it has also been a decade since Discord was released. Meaning that for almost a decade people have been able to experience a very low threshold experience of joining entire servers and creating their own.

I don't want to discredit all the work that went into the protocol and clients. All I am saying is that after almost a decade it is quite clear that as far as IRC replacements go most of the internet moved to Discord. Which I also am not a fan of, but I can see why it did happen as Matrix simply didn't have all the features back then. I also do recognize that Matrix at this stage is much more user-friendly and offers many of the features discord also does. Spaces in place of servers and at least one client that is still quite okay. Though I do think some of the things I said a few years ago still apply https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30328120#30333252.

And the fact that after a decade there is still only one client having feature parity still stands out to me. I know that discord officially only has one client. But since there are multiple clients advertised for matrix it does add to confusion and therefore detracts from convenience.

Having said that, I firmly believe there is a place for matrix. It is clear there are vibrant communities on the platform, so I am not saying it is a dead platform. Just also not one that I see being more widely adopted in the near future.

I also have seen other applications that I found quite novel and pleasant. Just last year I had to do an online interactive training with a trainer. The platform itself with breakout rooms and trainer interaction was all based on matrix and element as far as I could tell.