IRCd service (2024)

The standard Discord experience has you look for and join a "server", each of which is meant to feel like distinct island. This has every server duplicate the same set of boilerplate #general, #off-topic etc. channels, as if there are no others. As a result the vast majority of servers are fairly dead and barren, the userbase is spread too thin. Also because the UX makes switching between servers a fairly heavy context switch, so monitoring this deluge of channels is not fun and nobody can stay on top of all of their servers.

I once looked around for maker-y/electronics Discords, and joined probably 7-8, and they were all dead. ##electronics on Libera is highly active.

Its not hard if the client isn't monolithic. I use ircs/ircx on Plan 9 which is a two part client: server that maintains connection to a network and channels the user joins. The server buffers incoming messages to a flat text file while the client just attaches to these buffers. I have a CPU server running 24/7 at home so it runs the server half and I can run the client on as many terminals as I want. It might be too simple but that is what I prefer.

True geeks and nerds never left.

There are nice Jabber/XMPP servers out there too.

>besides, those people are largely reachable on slightly more modern services these days

The thing is, people are NOT reachable on IRC in general. They join when they wake up (or return from school, or return from work). When they leave you can't contact them (and you can criticise/praise them freely if you want). Sometimes a new person joins and never returns again. Sometimes they join tomorrow, the day after, and become a regular. Other times someone starts joining less and less frequently, then one day leaves and never returns.

People say "hi" when joining and "bye" when leaving.

I'm general, I realized this is much more similar to talking with real people than modern groupchats. Of course this is just a protocol, and nowadays this behavior is just a choice (everyone can install a mobile client and stay always online. Even back then it was possible with a bouncer). But I'm surprised how invested I became in this micro-community, in a way i never would on a discord server.

While the rest of the internet has turned into some weird corporate thing, IRC is still a nice play for us nerds to hang out.

LONG LIVE LIBERA

Awk started life as a unique, weird, but extremely clever and expressive environment with which you could do tricks that were impractical anywhere else. And that's sort of back where it is now.

But for a solid decade and a half, awk was a forgotten dinosaur that no one cared about. Because in the era where Everyone Knew Perl, awk had no home. Perl was awk but bigger and better.

But now all us perl nuts have moved on or gone silent, all the kids are writing code for node or python or whatnot, and No One Knows Perl.

And in a world where no one knows perl, awk looks clever again.

This awk contraption is launched by inetd, and there's not much of any kind of sanity checks for anything. As a result, there was around ten thousand processes running :)

And also, thanks for showing interest. I'll push the source code on the website on the weekend.

Any special reason? AFAIK, it's effectively the same network run by the same people, just under a different name.