Comment by creesch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by creesch | Hacker News Reader

Looking at the statistics I can't help but notice how small IRC is these days. Specifically when you compare it to how many people use the internet. The biggest channels have a few thousand people in them, but those seem to be rare.

One of the biggest channels ironically is one for an IRC client called "the lounge". Which is a very nice web based client with bouncer build in. Though I might be biased as I did contribute to the project years ago.

I was a dedicated IRC user for a long time, even going as far as developing this monstrosity: https://github.com/creesch/discordIRCd

At some point I didn't see the point anymore, as it clearly was just old guard sticking around with no one new joining.

It is a shame that discord as a closed platform is the de facto standard though. I am not sure things could have gone differently. Considering how glacial IRC development was at the time and the convenience and features Discord offers over alternatives like Matrix. I know that Matrix these days has a lot of the same features but certainly is not there as far as convenience goes.

I think that the biggest IRC channels are on twitch. Large streamers have tens of thousands of people in their channels, and probably the servers must have millions in aggregate.

I didn't know twitch uses IRC, though I wouldn't categorize in the same box as traditional channels and networks either. I mean, the protocol might be the same, but it clearly is used in an entirely different context.

I mean, you can connect to twitch using a standard IRC client. And it works equally well, better in some respects, as the browser chat has become a sluggish mess. There are stand-alone twitch chat clients now which support all its extra bling, but AFAIK they are just glorified IRC clients.

First time I've heard about it, really cool! (https://dev.twitch.tv/docs/chat/irc/)

I've always wondered, why was IRC not developed further? Some of the features people take for granted in chat clients today never made it to IRC.

https://ircv3.net/

It was, someone already pointed you to ircV3 which attempted to bring a lot of modern features to irc. But besides the specification process being slow you also had to content with all the different clients and networks. Most of which at that point in time already had stagnated in development.

The instant messengers did that.

Then slack did the modern IRC client.

I'm so old I remember the days when Slack had built-in IRC integration :)

I thought I read somewhere the early versions of slack actually ran on irc.

Moxie Marlinspoke thought hard about that, here’s his conclusion: https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/

That's more Moxie's PR department rationalizing why they didn't go for the better (more resilient, more privacy respecting, more flexible, freer) decentralized approach. It's also extensively debunked: https://gultsch.de/objection.html

Ok. So what do you think are the reasons that IRC has lost marketshare to Slack and Discord?

I would assume it's mostly marketing. There's no entity behind IRC to push its adoption and herd the cats to a singular goal.

The lack of features that Slack/Discord specifically added to differentiate themselves from IRC are also important, but it was a lot simpler to add them to their brand new designs, than to work through having to specify them onto the IRC protocol and then get servers and clients to adopt it. You can look at the IRCv3 page linked higher in the thread to see some of the efforts, but this is 10 years later and we're still not there. :D

Popular irc servers still haven’t adopted ircv3, effectively holding all of irc back from making progress.

I rest my case.

If it supported things like picture messages, then it wouldn't really be IRC any more. I suppose you could create a new protocol that's most similar to IRC, but when creating new protocols, people typically want to make other improvements at the same time, such as the ability for a user to stay in a group while offline.

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

IRC supports picture messaging.

Encode the image to Base64, post the string and have your client decode. Or use your browser.

Simple.

Because there is nothing wrong with good old IRC. It was developed to a point and left alone. Trying to improve it could actually lead to overengeeniring and spoiling the protocol. If IRC is not what you want, look for alternatives. There are plenty of those.

> I've always wondered, why was IRC not developed further?

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.

The small nature of irc is a benefit in my opinion. Theres a certain type of person that only seeks out the place with the biggest audience, and they are notably absent now. Way fewer trolls too. Libera is super cozy these days.

> I know that Matrix these days has a lot of the same features but certainly is not there as far as convenience goes.

For what it's worth, the whole Matrix community has been solidly plugging away improving convenience and making good progress - all the new Matrix 2.0 APIs, and on launching Element X on the Element side: https://matrix.org/blog/2024/10/29/matrix-2.0-is-here/ and https://element.io/blog/we-have-lift-off-element-x-call-and-... etc. A lot of the "Matrix isn't good enough" trope is a few years old now.

I wouldn't expect any other sentiment from the head of Matrix, to put it more bluntly.

I mean yeah, that is all true as Matrix has slowly been improving over the years and is more user-friendly than it was years ago.

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.

I'm about to ditch it entirely because my friend who uses matrix.org cannot see images I send from my homeserver, and vice versa. I thought I fixed all that nonsense when I turned on authenticated media months back but it keeps happening. Kinda pathetic after this many years.

Sounds like your homeserver is having problems, or authenticated media wasn't turned on right. If you can chuck a bug into github.com/element-hq/synapse/issues we'll look at it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com