Our love letter to Internet Relay Chat [video]

My dad acquired a dozen identical PCs from decommissioned office equipment at his workplace (very old machines slated for disposal). As a kid in a rural area, I had neither the money nor the means to obtain the necessary router to build the Beowulf cluster I'd been mentioning on a random IRC channel. Then, one day, a quiet "greybeard" who mostly lurked in the logs pinged me out of blue, asked for my address, and sent me his old 5-port router from Germany. This felt incredibly significant because even people who had interacted with him online for over a decade knew nothing beyond his screen name, yet here I was, holding a box with his full name and address.

This gesture, combined with the philosophy and work ethic of him and other greybeards that I deeply admired, literally changed the course of my life. By the time I reached high school, I already had an impressive portfolio of hardware and software projects, spoke fluent English, and was freelancing for amounts that exceeded my father's salary. IRC turned out to be an incredible ROI for me :p

My early software and skills life happened around some late stages of BBS and IRC, and yes, #warez.

I met some absolutely wonderful people from online, and even got to spend some quality time with some very high end hardware that couldn't be gifted, but was effectively almost unlimited, and people with appropriate skills and compassion to match. My early career and schooling made no use of those skills, but once I found my jam a little later on that knowledge still proved to be incredibly important and put me leaps and bounds ahead of my peers, and it's been an amazing ride ever since.

Wow, that must have blown your hair back quite a bit! Thanks for sharing the story. I had a similar upgrade path and that was such a huge leap forward.

I wish our government officials even knew what IRC was, much less had used it. I get the impression 95% of Congress has a Yahoo email address.

Oh wow, I have been hanging out on Undernet since mid 90s, but primarily on #tolkien and #lotr, but looking at her profile it's not impossible she would have popped in there as well...

> One of the channels I am still on is full of VPS hosted ghosts

I remember the collective obituary moment when somebody's bouncer quit for good, almost two years after the person's passing.

You just brought back a core memory. Mass netsplits followed by a few minutes of "wtf", and then some new yorkers who had bouncers not routing through the WTC jumping on channel to let us know what was going on.

I was, and still am, on the other side of the world and lost a few people I talked to every day during that event.

> One of the channels I am still on is full of VPS hosted ghosts;

This hits hard. I might be one of those ghosts. When I last checked in, I saw the same in virtually all the channels that were once important to me. My bouncer is still running, I suppose I'm not quite ready to let go yet.

>irccloud

Very interesting, reminds me of the Movim client for XMPP.

I think to anyone who has used it, it is plain testament that social networks do not scale. This is a social limitation, not a technical one. What killed the Internet is the centralization of platforms compounded by the commercial interest to "engage" on behalf of both corporations and users. IRC worked because it was decentralized and had no commercial interest, nor did it cater to narcissistic tendencies. No interest to comment for points, and decentralized enforcement where you'd fuck around and simply get banned from the(that) server.

I had a _really_ in-depth conversation with a friend with multiple interesting lines of thought going at once that only worked because the chat we were using had a per-message reply feature. The conversation would not have been as meaningful to me otherwise. I'm not sure IRC could have supported a chat like that...

(admittedly I haven't tried anything other than a few basic IRC chats, never really getting deep into IRCv3 or new features and stuff)

Some discord/slack spaces have kinda same feel.

IRC is still there, we just have less time and new kids have new places to talk.

I remember sneaking into their room after they fell asleep to steal the phone extension cable back to reconnect so I could stay up all night talking to Americans! The first time they got one of those massive phone bills I was in SO much trouble.

Eventually, in like '97 or so, my father wound down the ISP he was running and got a 128k leased line into our house (which was basically unheard of). I came home from school and discovered a cable running across the landing and into my bedroom, and quickly figured out I had a permanent 24/7 connection. I don't think I left the keyboard for the entire weekend :D

They took away the mouse, then the keyboard, and eventually the modem. It wasn't about cost - it was the equivalent of taking away the PS5 controller when you have a younger teenager being disrespectful.

I wound up with backups, and eventually my own PC.

Are you me?

(were you on #gb back in the day?)

Wow same. This was my intro as well and I'm glad to not be the only.

One problem when people ask this is that my favorite channels are mode +s (secret, not on the public list or revealed when you whois someone and see what channels they're in) with a dozen or fewer active participants (but often 20-50 total members or more) and inviting new people would risk killing the vibe we have going in there. I found these channels basically by word of mouth or friends of friends. While it might sound like gatekeeping, I think everyone should probably find their own way, based on their interests and network. I will say I tend to hang out on Rizon, though.

I do also idle in a lot of the tech channels in Libera, but that's not where I spend most of my time chatting, I'm basically just in those for tech support. I like to already be in the ones for the programs/distros I use so I can read the last bit of conversation before (and after) posting. Both in case someone else had my problem recently, and because it gives me something to do while I wait, like reading a magazine in a lobby. Sometimes the tech support even goes both ways and I'll chime in on an old convo if I think I can help someone.

If an IRC channel gets too busy it'll be hard to have conversations in also, like the madness you see in Twitch chats with the text scrolling by rapidly.

I’ve found the IRCs hosted by tilde servers to be quite good. See https://tilde.chat/ and https://tildeverse.org/. I’m a member of https://ctrl-c.club (although I haven’t been active for several years).

IRCv3 is being incrementally adopted, even if it is a bit slow. I think in the case of the /history command, Libera had some concerns about implementation and what channels would prefer not to have a history. ... and actually, checking the spec matrix, chathistory is still a draft.

But Libera does have some other IRCv3 features enabled.

https://ircv3.net/support/networks

There's also a #ircv3 on Libera with implementation discussion

HISTSERV blows. keep chats ephemeral.

Jabber works.

To be fair you could implement a Discord client that doesn't suck performance wise. A number one feature of modern instant messaging is message history. For productivity and even personal groups usecases people usually don't want ephemeral chats.

Because Discord has put a lot of money into planting free grass and then building a fence around the sheep.

See also Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, Reddit, etc. It's profitable and it always works.