IRC is the only viable chat protocol (2022)

https://koshka.love/babel/irc-forever.html

by CHB0403085482 • 3 years ago

338 389 3 years ago

Y_Y• 3 years ago

I haven't used IRC in a long time, but I'd be open to it, especially if it gave that "old internet" feel that I haven't been able to get from the tildaverse.

I dream of having my company use IRC for chat, and I used to fake it by using Slack through the awesome Emacs modes, but now that we're on Teams all hope is dead.

spacecadet2• 3 years ago

I occasionally connect to IRC on an Apple SE over wifi using an original ethernet card and a raspberry pi. Fun project.

fzzzy• 3 years ago

Which client do you use? Back in the day i first loved Homer and then ircle

madeofpalk2• 3 years ago

Even if you have full-on Stockholm syndrome in regard to advertisers data-mining your life to sell you garbage, who knows where else your data could be going? Considering the horrific epidemic of sexual abuse being abetted and covered up in the workplace, is it really too difficult to imagine malicious actors at Discord (or any other technology company) illegitimately accessing the data of their business' users and using it for stalking or other nefarious purposes?

Maybe the author could write something based in fact, rather than their dogmatic authoritarian fan fiction?

IRC isn't viable for the pretty simple and obvious reason - it lacks features users expect. It's telling that things like Signal and Telegram have built IRC-like services (large chat rooms) not on top of IRC.

judge20207• 3 years ago

The only threat to message data on Discord is third party bots like mee6 who are gateway connected to tons of public, private, and "small friend-group" servers, vacuuming up every message data to some data lake for later use. This is why Discord pushed Application Commands[0], which only receive data from Discord when the application is initialized by the user, and made Message Contents a privileged intent[1] that requires identity verification if your bot is in 100 or more servers.

0: https://discord.com/developers/docs/interactions/application...

1: https://support-dev.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/4404772028...

Brybry2• 3 years ago

I don't think the idea of rogue Discord employees accessing uploaded images for nudes or searching logs for personal information is far fetched.

Consider that a Ring employee was doing exactly that, with customer security cameras, and the only reason they were caught is another employee reported them (and Ring has no idea how many other employees were doing the same thing). [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36146062

stagas• 3 years ago

The lack of features, is a feature.

hengheng• 3 years ago

At its core, I agree that the bare-bones nature of IRC can be wonderful. But all of the modern services like Teams, Slack and Discord, have seamlessness between client devices as their first priority. People leave their laptop, go to the bathroom, get their phone out and go on typing.

I used IRC for a brief period even after we began to have multiple devices. It was always through some kind of proxy, or basically an ssh connection through GNU screen, just so that basic functionality like asynchronous messaging worked, and so that my setup would carry over. The whole protocol you would have to build around IRC to achieve client agnosticity would arguably be more complex than IRC itself. To a point where any of the big players could introduce IRC-style channels as a fun retro feature. I'd bet more money on that feature becoming popular than on an IRC resurgence.

s0ss• 3 years ago

What you describe is basically this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BNC_(software)

Also, tangentially related to your first point; I am personally exploring more ways to disconnect. Even if it’s just briefly, like not bringing my phone to the bathroom as you describe. I realize now that I hate being always connected. Vanilla irc sounds like a dream compared to the nightmare of constant connection.

iforgotpassword4• 3 years ago

But all of the modern services like Teams, Slack and Discord, have seamlessness between client devices as their first priority.

Can't speak for the others, but Teams is really hit-or-miss. Missed notifications, missed messages, out of order messages. Then it appears to be fixed for three months only to happen again. It mostly seems to happen on Android.

In general, you're right, multi-device appeared to have been solved for IM - at least MSN messenger and Skype had it - right around the time when the smart phone came around, but then, because somehow those messengers couldn't successfully move to phones, we had the same problem again in the mobile world: WhatsApp and the likes was bound to one device again. They added web access later, but that was more of a hack than true multi-device support.

The big problem the phone messaging apps solved was that their protocols didn't require a persistent connection. Theoretically, all the other protocols, MSN, ICQ, Skype, IRC could have been extended to support this too, but it's always faster to just build something new and be first to market.

If you want to use IRC today and have that modern multi-device experience, IMO the most decent solution is Quassel[1] (and Quasseldroid for Android). It's like a bouncer, but uses a custom protocol between the bouncer (quassel-core) and the GUI (quassel-client), so that it can perfectly sync state across all devices, and work with flaky connections on mobile. It obviously requires you to run the core on some server so it's accessible from everywhere, so nothing for "normies" as TFA calls them, but to me it's what makes IRC usable in the modern world. I wouldn't want to use irssi in a screen via ssh in termux on my phone.

The next best thing, if you're a Web 2.0 aficionado is probably The Lounge[2].

[1] https://quassel-irc.org/

[2] https://thelounge.chat/

nottorp5• 3 years ago

But all of the modern services like Teams, Slack and Discord, have seamlessness between client devices as their first priority.

First? Slack takes ages to sync lately (sometimes you have to explicitly refresh) and has a ... random ... idea of how to move unread counts around.

Discord never notifies me of direct messages from my daughter but always notifies me of announcements in a gaming discord i've explicitly muted to hell and back.

progval7• 3 years ago

The whole protocol you would have to build around IRC to achieve client agnosticity would arguably be more complex than IRC itself.

You don't have to build a new protocol. The Ergo IRCd supports multiple clients connecting to the same account (and using the same nick) at the same time using the regular IRC protocol: https://github.com/ergochat/ergo/blob/master/docs/USERGUIDE....

PaulDavisThe1st• 3 years ago

have seamlessness between client devices as their first priority. People leave their laptop, go to the bathroom, get their phone out and go on typing.

On IRC, I leave my desktop (quasselclient), go to the bathroom, get out my phone and go on typing (quassel app) (*)

All functioning because I'm actually connected to Quassel.

(*) actually I would never do this.

ginko3• 3 years ago

The reliability and lack of bloat that are inherent to IRC ultimately also means that there are a number of fancy modern features that Discord has that IRC lacks, a big one being the inability to view backlogs of conversations that transpired while one was not connected to an IRC server. Although IRC does not itself provide this functionality, the extremely simple nature of IRC allows for a couple of lightweight options for reliably remaining on IRC around the clock and not missing out on a word that anyone says.

The article brushes over this, but IMO the lack of built-in backlog support is the main reason why IRC is essentially doomed. Logging isn't a "fancy" feature and telling people to just run an always-on logging service on top doesn't cut it.

Especially when there are open, federated chat protocols that don't have this problem.

RomanAlexander• 3 years ago

there's built in support for this https://www.unrealircd.org/docs/Channel_history

lucideer6• 3 years ago

The IRC3 chathistory extension is less than 5 years old and still an unstable "work in progress" spec.

Absolutely fantastic that it was finally added but IRC is 34 years old, and this has been an essential feature of chat services for at least 20 of those years.

I'd love to see it's introduction now save IRC but given the seeming resistance to adding it, one wonders how long any other improvements will take.

veave• 3 years ago

I like that IRC has no backlog support. When you join a channel it's like you actually joined a room. You don't know what they were talking about when you weren't there.

Avamander• 3 years ago

Depends on the server. Many servers give you a reasonable amount of backlog before joining. A lot of regular users use something nice like Quassel or ZNC.

lucideer6• 3 years ago

That's nice as an optional feature but as a baseline it just seems like sentimental skeumorphism/metaphorism.

Chat being real-time is certainly "approaching real life" much moreso than fully asynchronous email, but most people don't want either to be real life: chat still needs an element of asynchronicity to distinguish it as a technologically useful medium improving over actually walking into a real room.

To put it another way: if I'm in a real life room where being present for the full conversation is necessary, it's easy to excuse being late or going to the bathroom as unfortunate parts of life when people are repeating themselves. When there's simple technological solutions that can easily prevent me from missing anything important, and someone's telling me they don't want it because they like the inconvenience, that's harder to justify.

Razengan3• 3 years ago

How about partial backlogs? Like say I could "subscribe" to certain keywords (upto a max limit if that's necessary, say 10) and the server will store all messages containing those words or my username.

If I need more context about those messages when I return, I can just ask those users (or a bot).

agumonkey2• 3 years ago

It's a very interesting topic. Feature will alter the sociological / human aspect of the tool. I could feel it on discord, you join a room like on IRC, you join a realm, a group with lots of idiosyncrasies.

When I join an IRC chat there's a lot less baggage.. it's just a label / topic, it's very freeing.

logging, message fixing, embedded replies .. all great but not important in the end. These things are blending professional complexity with normal human moments. Not the right optimization (if optimizations are required at all)

j4529• 3 years ago

Having the days history could be useful.

Still maybe there could be a way to summarize those chats with some kind of a transforming generative text system that I hope exists one day.

tinus_hn• 3 years ago

The system, probably by design but also to limit capacity requirements for the server, is ephemeral, everything only exists in the moment and once everyone leaves the channel it ceases to exist, once your connection breaks your nick ceases to exist. There is no storage at all.

You need the irc services to keep specified information (like ownership of channels and nicknames) and they probably could also collect logs, with some limitations in case of netsplits of course.

phoronixrly• 3 years ago

I prefer no built-in logging (which is and has been easily achieved with bots that loiter in the channel and store messages) in place of orders of magnitude more resources required to run the server. Looking at Matrix btw. XMPP does not have the resource issue, and has XEPs for message archives.

tcfhgj• 3 years ago

You can look at Matrix, but it won't help you, since Matrix additionally has a DAG datastructure for decentralized chatrooms, which allows to recognize and deal with bad servers in an open federation.

Additionally, it's richer in features

masklinn• 3 years ago

Beyond the backlog support, it's the addressing of the backlog.

Discord's search function is so bad it's essentially unusable so having the backlog is often useless, however the ability to "pin" a useful message or discussion by getting a link is very relevant.

Baseline IRC doesn't have message addressing, regardless of backlogging.

You need the "message-tags" extension (https://ircv3.net/specs/extensions/message-tags) and message-ids support (https://ircv3.net/specs/extensions/message-ids.html) for that to even be entertained, plus probably echo-message (https://ircv3.net/specs/extensions/echo-message). I've no idea how well those are supported in servers, to say nothing of clients (which would need a way to surface message ids, and possibly permalinks).

At that point, you probably also want the WIP chathistory extension (https://ircv3.net/specs/extensions/chathistory) which provides backlog support.

cout• 3 years ago

Calling search unusable is hyperbole. I've used search on discord many times to find a discussion from the past.

lightedman3• 3 years ago

"Discord's search function is so bad it's essentially unusable"

Discord's search function is 1,000x better than what's built into Windows 10 and 11. I've found pictures I posted from years ago in discord, Windows 10 can't even find half the files I downloaded and transferred to another drive the other day.

donpark• 3 years ago

Importance of a feature depends largely on use-cases.

Chat is not just for business. Its use-case existed even before notion of business came to be.

pmoriarty3• 3 years ago

Discord has shitty logging and log-search capabilities.

Discord's logging is shitty because:

1 - The logs aren't yours, they're Discord's. If you get banned from the server, your server shuts down, or Discord bans you altogether your access to those logs is gone forever.

2 - Unlike the logs of some IRC channels, Discord's logs aren't available on the web anywhere, so they can't be indexed or searched outside of Discord.

3 - Paging through hours or days of Discord logs is so incredibly painful, because every few screenfuls or so Discord has to load the previous/next logs and that is super slow compared to paging through text logs offline. If you have a lot of logs to page through, this experience is absolutely atrocious.

4 - There's no easy way to export the logs to be processed with standard/powerful text manipulation tools, like text editors, sed, etc..

Discord's search is painful because:

1 - There's no regex search.

2 - No ability to search via web search engines, because the logs aren't available on any website (see above).

3 - No way to search through the logs of multiple servers at once.

I have IRC logs going back decades, from servers I haven't been on in decades, but they're all instantly searchable, and the text in them is easily manipulable.

My Discord logs are trapped in Discord and I'm forced to use Discord's pretty but otherwise horrible UI to search them.

No, the reason Discord is popular has nothing to do with logging, but everything to do with how easy it is to sign up, join, and get a server running. Inline images and not having to learn obscure IRC commands or figure out obtuse IRC clients are also huge plusses for your average user. Discord's client is also visually pleasing -- something that most IRC client developers still haven't figured out. Aesthetics matter to users, as Apple has proved.

But Discord is an information black hole where data goes to die.

imtringued3• 3 years ago

I recorded logs back in my IRC days but I never used them for anything or searched through them. That is a complete red herring. Nobody who uses IRC cares about persistent chat. What most people want is to see the last X hours of chat history while they were offline, so if they open their chat client they don't have to stare at an empty window, not the last X months.

Also you forgot to say that Discord had a high quality voice chat back when such a thing was nonexistent in the web and the various desktop clients like Skype were a crapshot or were obscure and required you to host your own server like Mumble.

op00to8• 3 years ago

IRC is an information black hole where data that crosses the event horizon (scrolls off screen) will never return.

Sure, you can write your own logs, but does your business want you creating even more information to have to submit as evidence if you’re sued? What a nightmare.

1337biz• 3 years ago

I would put logging as a bottom tier feature for most chats. The characteristic of chats is in the moment and not some archival function. I am a heavy discord and telegram user but overall I would value the benefit of everything getting deleted after 72hours higher than the few times I actually search for something older than that.

Renaud• 3 years ago

But Discord is an information black hole where data goes to die.

I'm really saddened and angry that projects end up using Discord as their main forum interface.

Not everything is worth keeping around forever, but Discord is as closed a closed garden as can be.

That's great for private servers between friends, but it's contrary to the ethos of Open Source, as nothing is really in the open.

History is basically unsearchable and everyone lives in a perpetual present where topics need to be discussed over and over again instead of being easily available to newcomers. Once they disappear from the current page, they become really hard to reach.

And discord will happily close your account or prevent you from logging if your activity is deemed suspicious, i.e. if you're travelling and using VPNs, getting in can be a nightmare. The feeling of also being constantly watched, a step away from having your account blocked, is jarring.

I wish there was a good open source alternative that would also allow data to be easily made public and allowed users to just join and participate with whatever existing accounts they have (google, GitHub, any Fediverse account, etc).

Servers could be self-hosted or hosted for free or a minimal fee based on the server size, with some paying additional features (like flair, large audio rooms, automated backups, branding, more customization, etc).

But is discord too big to be taken on by an Open Source project?

redserk5• 3 years ago

Let’s not suggest IRC logs are much better. Individual clients may be able to log but say you just join a project channel with years of discussion — you’d have literally nothing to start with.

Discord gives you a chance at searching old history with zero additional setup if the permissions allow.

For both IRC and Discord you’d need to run a bot to have truly open logs online.

password4321• 3 years ago

In case anyone is not aware, you can download Discord logs.

https://github.com/Tyrrrz/DiscordChatExporter

But beware -- it can result in account termination!

https://support.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/115002192352-A...

kmfrk• 3 years ago

The thing that's driven me crazy about Discord since its launch is how bad its read position logging is compared to the service they copied (Slack). I don't know how you catch up on any conversation regularly, especially in a work environment.

nologic012• 3 years ago

Discord's client is also visually pleasing

Actually I find it ugly, but thats firmly in personal preference territory. A decenct client would be skinnable or css-able to meet users diverse aesthetics.

mylons• 3 years ago

"1 - The logs aren't yours, they're Discord's." is the absolute best selling point. you are at serious risk if you say anything a censor would deem bad if the logs were ever surfaced and your anonymity were compromised.

people in the west have a lot of freedom in this and don't really need to care at the moment, but imagine living in the CCP or Thailand and bad mouthing the supreme leader?

Zetice5• 3 years ago

Literally all of your concerns are 100% solved by adding a log bot to the channels you care about, both on IRC and Discord.

I’m beyond sick of the helplessness performative shtick around Discord. This is an ancient problem with obvious solutions. Do better.

gonehome• 3 years ago

Urbit's current chat implementation solves a lot of these issues and there's a clear path to things like search getting way better since all your chat data is stored on your local urbit.

Dylan168073• 3 years ago

Discord's search can't even find many specific words because it conflates them with other words and the results are flooded.

It's also very bad at URLs.

And sometimes it just breaks and loses results. If I remember right I even hit a situation where searching one word found a chat line, and another word found that same line, but both words didn't find it.

jstummbillig• 3 years ago

Discord has shitty logging and log-search capabilities.

It's shitty, but if you just have to beat "non existant" that will often work.

Fire-Dragon-DoL• 3 years ago

I think everything discord does is still outright better. I was an IRC yser for a long time and I still have a znc server out there running, but:

Everything is painful. Clients tend to be terrible and I cannot search at all in IRC, or I get weird integrations between znc and and the chat client.

All in all, i'd rather use discord than IRC, even with the downsides. I do prefer forums or the "was" reddit for information.

eternityforest3• 3 years ago

Anything based on endless scrolling is already inherently shitful for meaningful persistent content. It makes anything into a black hole where information goes to die. But before that, it gives you a sense of anxiety because everything is moving around and you have no fixed reference points, and encourages random idle chatter....

As far as I'm concerned it is not a technology that should exist aside from realtime viewing of feeds, and things meant from random idle chatter.

People are using Discord like as if it's a forum and a wiki in one. Which isn't the worst thing, because it's better than nothing, but I think it would be better with an integrated real forum that auto-posts new topics in the chat.

If you have something you think is worthy of preserving, say it in a paginated forum where people can find it, if you have an ephemeral shitpost, say it in the chat. If you want to scroll through history of ephemeral shitposts and see what's happening, even that should have a calendar based pagination UI.

Old forums used to have shoutboxes. Proboards and phpbb and the like were basically already perfect.

If I was going to do a community platform, I'd just build a forum. The only thing I think I'd change is I'd make it so you could download archives, and I'd consider having a wikipedia style policy of everything being Creative Commons.

Arch-TK2• 3 years ago

There are good reasons to not have a backlog in a chat system.

For one it stops you from being lazy and not maintaining FAQs and documentation.

It also forces you to stop treating the chat as something you need to keep up to date with. At work I see people commonly scrolling back for pages and pages to find the last read marker and continue reading from there. This seems unhealthy to me.

I use a bouncer but I very rarely use the logs. For all the purposes for which I would use logs, there are normally bots in the channel which can compensate.

op00to8• 3 years ago

I worked on a global team and conversation happens 24/7. When my bouncer dropped, I would miss out on critical stuff.

j4529• 3 years ago

This is a good point.

Using chat as a source of truth is not a good idea

Over time it becomes more and more ridiculous to use it as your knowledge base.

op00to8• 3 years ago

Chat without history is such a waste. I used IRC recreationally back in the day, then at work for 10 years. What a total garbage communication format IRC is. People changing nicks to indicate being away was my biggest complaint.

nmz2• 3 years ago

It is unnecessary, AWAY indicates status, however people prefer changing their nick. of course, on mobile era, AWAY is unnecessary given you have a good mobile irc client.

hoyd• 3 years ago

To preserve logs, I would ssh into a screen on a server that was connected.

j4529• 3 years ago

It’s nice when simple solutions just work.

hprotagonist2• 3 years ago

let’s rebrand “mosh and a vps” as “irc nitro”, and then everyone will be happy.

(ripgrep is a very nice log searching tool, only top tier users will be told about it!)

j4529• 3 years ago

Or be told about the channels that are not for beginners

WesolyKubeczek5• 3 years ago

I somehow fail to see how you cannot implement an IRC server that does logging and offers search/download of them on the side.

That existing IRC implementations may be antiquated mammoth shit shouldn’t prevent anyone from building something new.

bitwize• 3 years ago

It's one of those things like "building an X server that isolates the graphics and events of untrusted clients from evert other client". It could be done, but people won't do it. They'll just whinge about its lack being inherent to the technology because there's more excitement in sweeping away the old tech and starting afresh than there is in building on what's there.

jmclnx• 3 years ago

I think because many people would not want that. I think if some channels start this, people would flee.

zemo• 3 years ago

Not having a backlog is actually the thing I like about it. Discord (and Slack) have this thing where because there’s a backlog, people expect other people to have read everything. I prefer the experience where the assumption is that the people not in the room are assumed to have not seen a message. It makes it more unambiguously a synchronous experience, whereas Discord and Slack chat is pretty ambiguous as to whether it is synchronous or asynchronous.

webstrand• 3 years ago

IRC was bigger while I was growing up. But due to living with an internet connection that'd drop multiple times a day, I was never able to really use IRC because I'd ask a question and then get dropped. Getting dropped does not immediately log you out, the server has a timeout period. So when I'd get back in, I'd have to ask people to repeat whatever they said since the last timestamp I'd seen.

Not to mention some IRC channels are really high latency, you leave a message and someone else replies ten hours later. If you miss the reply because you were offline, you couldn't expect anyone to be around to repeat missed conversations back to you.

Due to this I've never really liked IRC, its not good for mobile devices or people who live with DSL or dial-up. Sure you can "just get an account on a bouncer" but that's pretty esoteric knowledge that I never encountered until after university.

TylerE2• 3 years ago

Reliability? IRC? Is this article a joke?

Borg3• 3 years ago

Not at all.

Server Up 1375 days, 10:05:01

*.XXX.net[xx.x.x.xx] 0 9696 10570 56550590

Its server to server link, online 56M secs. Now do the math, how much days this link is up (no netsplit).

jrm42• 3 years ago

Genuine question: Why isn't "run bot on top" a solution for this?

And for that matter, for "pretty much everything?"

Seems to me the simplicity of the bot is the biggest feature?

mplewis2• 3 years ago

The average user cannot be expected to run an additional piece of software just to use chat.

ginko3• 3 years ago

Where do you host the bot? Not everyone has an always-on server.

Dalewyn2• 3 years ago

Logging isn't a "fancy" feature

If you're storing data, someone somewhere has to pay for housing it. One of the reasons IRC is lightweight is because a network and its constituent servers only facilitates exchanging data between users.

Consider how Discord is begging you and everyone to sign up for Nitro because they're housing and serving all of their data. Most IRC networks on the other hand operate perfectly fine off of donated volunteer time and hardware for tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of users.

No data to store means cheaper and easier logistics. IRC is just a simple bridge, whereas Discord is a Costco.

wolrah• 3 years ago

Consider how Discord is begging you and everyone to sign up for Nitro because they're housing and serving all of their data. Most IRC networks on the other hand operate perfectly fine off of donated volunteer time and hardware for tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of users.

As of around a year ago Discord claimed to be passing around 4 billion messages a day.

I don't know how their average message size compares to Slack, but I just took a look at an export of messages from my company's Slack server and our busiest day in six years was just over 1MB in uncompressed JSON format, around 1.4KB per message. Compressed it was around 104 bytes per message. If we assume that the average message size is similar and similar amounts of metadata are stored per message, that means we're talking about somewhere between 400GB and 5.6TB per day for the entirety of Discord.

That's a lot of space on an individual basis, but nothing for a global-scale service. Obviously that's just for text and not any uploaded files, inline previews, thumbnails, etc. but still the point remains. Archiving text is not really a hard problem to solve. It's tiny by modern standards.

jokoon2• 3 years ago

Logging chat is really really expensive in terms of hardware and CPU.

I don't really understand why people would need to log chat, it doesn't really make sense to me. Chat is meant to be ephemeral, short lived, and not leave trace. Chat is spontaneous.

If users want to leave a trace, they use a database or email.

Discord added threads and forums, and those should be logged, but not channels.

stefandesu• 3 years ago

It's very interesting how different people's definition of "chat" is. The comment above yours (at the time of reading this) says "Chat without history is such a waste", so the opposite of what you are saying.

I think when I was a teenager, I did a lot of chatting online in the sense you are talking about, and I didn't really care about the backlog. But nowadays, there's no room for "chat without log" because it's way too involved. I don't do synchronous chatting anymore at all, basically. After reading your comment, it seems like "chat" in general is just not for me anymore. Asynchronous messaging, however, still has a big part in my life.

Dylan168073• 3 years ago

Logging chat is really really expensive in terms of hardware and CPU.

I don't know what expense you're imagining, but my IRC logs took almost zero CPU to acquire and they add up to well under a gigabyte per year before I apply transparent 4x compression.

tharne• 3 years ago

Logging isn't a "fancy" feature and telling people to just run an always-on logging service on top doesn't cut it.

If you want a full conversation history then use something like email/listservs. IRC is for real-time chat. We already have a plethora of async options.

qudat2• 3 years ago

the main reason why IRC is essentially doomed

chat history is critical even for realtime chat.

johnea2• 3 years ago

The "standard" config of a leet IRC user is an always on "bouncer", that's then connected to by the user's IRC client.

This provides a really reliable chat framework in a totally open-standards compliant way.

Of course, most people don't care. This is why the corps business model of profit via surveilance is so successful. So, to jump straight to Godwin's Law: this is the same lack of concern, and passive cooperation, that led to the rise of hitler...

zer8k• 3 years ago

I don’t understand the problem. No one really connects to IRC directly. You always go through a bouncer. Bouncers can log.

I understand if what you mean is it’s an extra step the technically challenged don’t want to do but the ability to do so has existed forever.

nathias• 3 years ago

thats why we need to go back to irc with eggdrops

pmarreck• 3 years ago

Retaining old IRC chat while I wasn't present was the original reason I learned how to use the "screen" command.

Of course, this was over 20+ years ago now.

I had an IRCCloud account for the same exact reason until freenode "blew up"

eternityforest3• 3 years ago

Tinkerers really don't seem to understand how much average people want stuff to just work.

It's almost like how math educators sometimes don't understand that we mostly don't have checkbooks to balance. Math is important, but that doesn't mean I have ever sat down with paper and made a budget by hand.

Everyone always talks about flexibility and modularity and control, but what people want is stuff you just install and it works and has all the features already there.

Maintaining even trivial software can be hard, and people are very good at using what they have even if it's not explicitly meant to do the use case, like the story where the old lady was annoyed at her family for not telling her about the knitting program, which was Excel, that she found and figured out herself.

ChainOfFools• 3 years ago

Maybe my memory has decayed a little too much on this, but I thought this is was a solved problem in IRC a long time ago, with the Op running one of the numerous journaling bots available at the time that posted logs to a web page associated with the channel. I realize that bolting on a web server is going outside the IRC protocol itself, but does that matter in context?

fnordpiglet• 3 years ago

A lot of the original ircd/ircII devs and I are on Signal these days, we had a private channel on efnet for about 25 years. Open e2e with history is pretty compelling, and decent mobile clients on top. But we still love irc.

coldblues• 3 years ago

One thing I miss about IRC is the lack of a typing indicator.

HeckFeck2• 3 years ago

Read receipts plus typing indicators... too much information!

It applies heavy pressure and behind that is the motive to monetise attention. Snapchat is the worst for this; it notifies your recipient once you start typing.

jdjdjdhhd• 3 years ago

I always disable that feature in chat software whenever I am allowed to... (prevent it from sending information about me)

frumiousirc• 3 years ago

IRCv3 has it. I've tried it. It truly brings modern levels of irritation to this age-old protocol.

gorgoiler• 3 years ago

We span up a Synapse instance the other day and connected to it with Element on a few different laptops. (This is the Matrix server and client btw — they really need a marketing / branding person!)

It was both hellish and amazing. Hellish in that I had absolutely no idea how to use anything. Channels and rooms and stuff. All very complicated and weird. I just wanted a single, default place to hang out!

It was also amazing because it all worked beautifully all the way from text chit chat up to in channel video calls. Snappy and fast and reliable. Bliss. LDAP integration out of the box (or near enough out of the box) too. Lovely.

If it was just a little bit more seamless it would probably take over the world.

iforgotpassword4• 3 years ago

I'd probably switch to Discord before using Matrix as my primary way of communication. It's a clusterfuck held together by duct-tape and ADHS.

I try it every now and then and within a couple minutes, I manage to break something, that my Matrix-using friends just shrug off. As an example, just a few days ago I used the web client again and had a chat with a friend. Just for fun, he added a bazillion emoji reactions to one of my messages, and after that the client would always claim our conversation has unread messages, even after right-clicking and selecting "mark as read".

But my favorite is how they broke the IRC bridge about 3 months ago: It randomly drops messages from IRC -> Matrix. There's an issue[1] for this with pretty much no reaction from the devs. Like, nobody cares. So on one hand, the Matrix folks always stress how it's the best chat protocol on the planet because of all the bridges that connect it to everything, but then in reality those brides are unreliable and apparently only there to tick a box, working as well as Microsoft's POSIX layer for Windows NT in the 90s.

And apart from the complete lack of interest in getting this fixed, it also just boggles the mind how you can even break it in this way. IRC has a persistent connection and streams messages separated by CRLF. How do you end up parsing the protocol properly and then randomly ignore a received message?

In its current form, the bridge does more harm than good, as you can't always keep in mind during a conversation that the bridge might just have dropped a message again, leading to frustrating misunderstandings every now and then.

[1] https://github.com/matrix-org/libera-chat/issues/6

progval7• 3 years ago

FWIW, someone identified the issue, and next Monday's update (https://matrix.org/blog/2023/07/postponing-libera-chat-depor...) may include a fix

nicoco• 3 years ago

IRC is great! I access through the excellent biboumi gateway, which offers bouncer-like functionality and let me choose between various clients. There are open instances available for everyone to use, although I couldn't give a list of them since I self-host. I like that it's very lightweight, making it a reasonable permacomputing approach to group chats.

I wouldn't go as far as saying it's the only viable chat protocol, if you follow the link below you'll guess what I have in mind saying that. (it starts with an X and ends with two Ps)

https://biboumi.louiz.org/

tester7568• 3 years ago

Discord haters look, it is simple.

Until Discord appeared we had

Ventrilo, Mumble, TeamSpeak, Skype, etc, etc

I've been using those for like 10 years almost everyday

They had voice chat, some had viable text chat, etc, etc.

And then Discord appeared which had:

Voice Chat,

Good text chat (images, code snippets, emojis, reactions, etc)

Streaming Video (!!)

File share

Robust bot integration

Lack of security problem unlike the self-hosted alternatives have.

This one is important in gaming communities in e.g MMORPG games cuz there's nothing better than being DDoSd cuz you left team or because you talked to somebody on wrong TeamSpeak server 5 months ago :)

Push2Talk - this is also important, I dont understand how e.g Teams dont have this shit.

Imagine you're working on remote with kids in the background - having an ability to push button and talk is really useful! So you don't have constantly mute/unmute yourself! Gamers have been doing it for over 2 decades but with the parents in the background instead of kids

One account between all servers with ability to customize your identity

All of that in one solution. That won its market.

Provide something as innovative and robust as Discord and people may consider switching.

__________________

I know that IRC's simplicity may be beautiful for hacker's mind, but it doesn't solve my problems nor make my life easier, so I'm not going to use it over Discord.

nottorp5• 3 years ago

Let's start with one account between all servers.

And one censoring authority.

Nope, not a good idea.

tester7568• 3 years ago

Let's start with one account between all servers.

Go ahead and create 1 account per 1 server, nothing prevents you.

I've actually been doing it for some time - school (1 server) & private discord account (like 10 servers).

And one censoring authority.

Sure, that's valid concern, I respect it.

For me it's a trade off.

imtringued3• 3 years ago

I have so many discord accounts because they won't let you change your avatar based on the server.

Yeah there is a way to register accounts without phone number verification. I did it four times. The trick is that they block you if you do anything suspicious and any account created under this 'suspicious' state demands phone verification. I don't know how they identify you, but you must succeed with your first try. So your best bet is to find an email provider that is trusted by discord that does not need a phone number.

gertrunde• 3 years ago

Apparently Teams does have push-to-talk, although it's not switched on by default.

[ https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/muting-and-unmuti... ]

tester7568• 3 years ago

Interesting, I do wonder whether this is configurable so you can use it on e.g mouse scroll button

QuackyTheDuck2• 3 years ago

Unfortunately, this only works unless you have a textfield focused or something similar that "consumes" your keyboard input. At least in my experience, it's quite unreliable.

TheFreim• 3 years ago

Lack of security problem unlike the self-hosted alternatives have.

This is a major issue. Back in the day TeamSpeak was the primary mode of communication for game servers of a certain kind. Every game server had an associated TS for offering support and many/most of the teams had their own. This was a disaster with people's IP addresses being leaked all over the place, if you joined a server and associated yourself with your in game name there was a high chance that you'd get DDoS'd offline at an important moment. Switching to discord makes this much less likely.

Razengan3• 3 years ago

I get what you're saying, I like Discord, but I wish there was an ecosystem of custom (less bloaty) apps to connect to Discord with, like IRC had.

418tpot• 3 years ago

Except it will never exist for discord because discord is a proprietary communication service instead of an open protocol. At best it can provide an API, but that can be broken or shut down on a whim. This is why it's a much better use of time for developers to make things like Matrix clients match feature parity to discord rather than attempt to give discord the client diversity of Matrix/IRC.

TacticalCoder• 3 years ago

Ventrilo, Mumble, TeamSpeak, Skype, etc, etc

Looks to me that Discord went after those and not after IRC.

robinsonb52• 3 years ago

I don't hate Discord, but I do hate that it's being used in contexts where a good old fashioned web forum would make more sense.

WesolyKubeczek5• 3 years ago

It’s also like Slack but very noisy.

I don’t get its appeal at all.

j4529• 3 years ago

But irc can’t

cs02rm0• 3 years ago

Until Discord appeared we had
Ventrilo, Mumble, TeamSpeak, Skype, etc, etc

And now we have Discord, Ventrilo, Mumble, TeamSpeak, Skype, Slack, Teams, etc etc

j4529• 3 years ago

And the 29 other chat apps on our phones because chat is too “complicated” to run with an interoperable protocol like xmpp for today

baruchel• 3 years ago

https://xkcd.com/927/

j4529• 3 years ago

The way I remember discord is it’s the only chat app kids could generally install, access or use as in school chat.

Then it was the voice chat for any video game play.

Being a Swiss Army knife of chat can be handy to get users together from different chat platforms

How am I doing

magsarion6• 3 years ago

Voice Chat

Integrating a Jitsi bot into the channel solves this.

Good text chat (images, code snippets, emojis, reactions, etc)

All possible with good old web linking. Link to an image host, a pastebin, or a file host of your choice. Many IRC clients support inline display of image/media URLs.

All major IRC clients and servers support UTF-8 as well, so emoji away.

Streaming Video (!!)

Jitsi (with a bot) or web linking.

File share

Web linking.

Robust bot integration

Quite possibly one of the strongest arguments for IRC. The protocol is well-documented, and it's very easy to write an IRC bot.

Lack of security problem unlike the self-hosted alternatives have.

Also lack of transparency. The self-hosted open alternatives are auditable and can be inspected. Nobody knows what Discord does with user data or what security issues exist.

Push2Talk - this is also important, I dont understand how e.g Teams dont have this shit.

Your (possibly self-hosted) Jitsi instance already has this.

One account between all servers with ability to customize your identity

Until you get banned/blocked for some arbitrary reason, at which point you might as well start over, since everything is gone.

tl;dr: Web linking + some bot integration and client affordances solve all these. This is how the web is supposed to work.

tester7568• 3 years ago

Also lack of transparency. The self-hosted open alternatives are auditable and can be inspected. Nobody knows what Discord does with user data or what security issues exist.

This doesnt solve (or doesnt even tries to solve) my issue AT ALL.

I'd rather have Discord have some user data that I'm consciously putting there instead of my enemies from the game DDoSing/Stalking me

I've played hardcore MMORPGs and this is serious concern.

tl;dr: Web linking + some bot integration and client affordances solve all these. This is how the web is supposed to work.

sounds like: go put effort and decrease your UX.

rcxdude4• 3 years ago

So supplement IRC with a bunch of other services? Realising people didn't want to deal with this shit is why discord is so popular.

(Seriously, this response and others like it demonstrate that IRC will continue to remain a niche. I won't fault you if this kind of setup works for you but suggesting this kind of thing is acceptable for the average user is really, truly, genuinely out of touch. I'm among the demographic who can and has done this kind of thing, and I don't want to do it!)

thiht2• 3 years ago

You sound like the Dropbox guy. No one wants to jump 10 hoops for what’s considered a basic feature set nowadays.

Can you even write multi-line messages with IRC now?

aleph_minus_one• 3 years ago

Push2Talk - this is also important, I dont understand how e.g Teams dont have this shit.

MS Teams does support this feature, though you have to activate it first: see

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msteams/forum/all/teams-... (concise answer)
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/muting-and-unmuti... (documentation)

the_gipsy4• 3 years ago

Push to talk

Isn't that solveable on the OS level? I have a global mic mute toggle hotkey, this could be done on keydown/keyup too.

judge20207• 3 years ago

It being apart of the app is what makes it intuitive. Most people don't want to have to go through setting something like that up at the OS level.

Beached• 3 years ago

I love and use discord daily. I totally understand why it is "winning".

I just wished it used an open protocol, and allowed its content to be indexed. I dislike proprietary as a principal, and I get that discord isn't going to open it's secret sauce, but at least allow the discord moderators to click a box that will index text channels for search engines and future people trying to solve the problem that's pinned on you faq I. your discord channel without having to join your discord channel. (mostly for when that discord channel goes away in the future, lal that knowledge isn't completely lost"

Groxx3• 3 years ago

Since you are a Push To Talk user, I'm honestly curious: how is it different from temporarily un-muting yourself? Like, how does it work better for you, or cause fewer problems, or something.

It's so popular in so many places that I assume I'm missing something obvious. I've always just hit a key to toggle mute though.

ranger207• 3 years ago

I mean, practically speaking it is just temporarily unmuting yourself. It's active while being held instead of toggling is the only major difference

tester7568• 3 years ago

e.g

You're playing video game / sharing your IDE / whatever

with discord/ventrilo/whatever being in the background

you push e.g MOUSE3 (scroll) button - talk, and stop holding it.

And you were unmuted just for the moment of holding scroll button.

oskarw85• 3 years ago

Except Discord is not a forum replacement because there is no easily searchable and accessible history. As simple as that.

the_gipsy4• 3 years ago

Matrix is a very viable chat protocol: I have been using it now full-time for some months. I even bridged my whatsapp and telegram accounts so that I exclusively use the matrix clients on my phone and desktop without hiccups.

I find that I can use it both for IRL friend groups á la whatsapp, and for online "rooms" á la IRC/discord/slack (but with history, which IRC is lacking).

jacooper5• 3 years ago

How do you deal with the terrible element client? I use matrix, but I don't bridge my accounts because I can't trust element.

j4529• 3 years ago

What trust issues are there with elements if someone is self hosting?

LorenDB• 3 years ago

I'm not sure why you don't trust Element. It's open source, so you could just look at the code yourself to determine whether you can trust it.

I personally use the nheko client since it is a native client and less bloat (in other words, no Electron stuff).

the_gipsy4• 3 years ago

Element mobile isn't as smooth as WhatsApp/Telegram but it isn't terrible either.

If you don't trust then there a few alternative mobile clients and plenty of options on desktop. I use iamb which is modal TUI like vim.

sph3• 3 years ago

Same. Element is the single reason I dislike Matrix with a passion, and any other client is either another Electron monstrosity, or a crappy native app that's little more than a proof of concept.

Element is so bloated and slow, it's impossible not to feel Matrix is bloated and slow as well.

bhickey2• 3 years ago

Why not matrix? Due to the creeping shitification of Discord my friends moved over to a self-hosted matrix server. It costs about $5/mo and does everything we need it to do.

tiltowait• 3 years ago

What’s Discord done to make itself worse?

bhickey2• 3 years ago

The username change seems like a harbinger.

doix• 3 years ago

My friends and I started a private IRC server when we were in university and still use it to this day (15ish years later). We also used to run a ventrilo server that quickly got replaced by mumble. I can't see us ever switching to discord.

IRC was always a pretty big part of my life, it's where I got into organized quake/cs1.6/Dota matches. I'm not as involved in hardcore gaming now, but I suspect that's all been replaced by discord and automated match-making in games.

I was also a great resource for learning about technical topics. Nowadays most open source communities point to discord/slack/gitter or something like that.

I really wish IRC would make a comeback. All these new networks force you to use their client to connect, and I hate the modern design trends. mIRC (on windows) and irssi(on Linux) got the UX/UI pretty much perfect in my book. Everything since then just adds more whitespace and distractions from the actual important content (the chat).

b112• 3 years ago

Everything since then just adds more whitespace

I always felt that UX people are self-loathing, and thus, view their best work as... nothingness!

The more of nothing they add, the more space, the more emptiness, the more comfortable they are with their work!

The less of them, the better they did!

"Hi, I took this perfect thing, and added ... nothingness, and got paid for it!"

Perhaps, a little voice in my head whispers, the nothingness matches their soul!

nmz2• 3 years ago

~~irssi~~ weechat

__david__• 3 years ago

I don’t have anything against IRC, but to suggest it as an alternative to Discord shows such a fundamental lack of understanding of what Discord is good for that I’m kind of baffled. If you’re looking for self hosted alternatives then Matrix (especially with the latest video/voice chat rooms)is much closer to what Discord offers, but even that isn’t really a viable replacement for the core use case of Discord: voice chat while gaming + seamless video streaming of captured game footage with a UI so smooth that my 8 year old nephews figured it out on their own.

fruitreunion12• 3 years ago

Yeah, I think there's just a disconnect in culture. Making IRC more viable towards those who like Discord etc. would fundamentally change and ruin it for many who like IRC. And vice versa. So IRC will never resurrect and be used by the masses again.

Ekaros• 3 years ago

I think it never was used by masses... Maybe teens and even then I never found it particularly ergonomic.

nemetroid• 3 years ago

I don't think these are the use cases that the article is against. There are plenty of text-only uses of Discord, see e.g.:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36746154

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29712098

HeckFeck2• 3 years ago

Was IRC ever used privately and internally within the workplace? I'd like to know if anyone did. I only ever used it briefly with forum communities and some older OSS projects.

At work, it has only ever been Slack. Some older employees recall using Skype for Business.

fragmede• 3 years ago

Absolutely. Most big tech companies had, at one point, or still have (Google's is alive and well - how do you talk to your coworkers over Google Meet to troubleshoot why Meet is down when Meet is down?) their own internal IRC server that the sysadmins setup because it was easy enough to stand one up and all the tech people were on IRC anyway, back in the day. IRC predates cloud and the virtual machine proliferation, nevermind Docker.

pasc1878• 3 years ago

Yes in Swiss Bank/UBS with logging and other extensions to make it effectively one server across regions. - This was either sold to Microsoft as MindAlign

nottorp5• 3 years ago

Yes we had a private irc server for work in the 2000s.

rascul2• 3 years ago

US Army did. Not sure if they still do.

vq• 3 years ago

Ericsson had an internal IRC server a long time ago.

EdwardDiego2• 3 years ago

RH still has IRC, but it's rather deprecated.

yborg2• 3 years ago

It's funny, still actively working in the tech space I usually don't really feel my age, but topics like this remind me that I've been around a long time. At one point I think you would have found most large *ix-using organizations running internal IRC servers or even networks. When Slack first came out, it had a first-party IRC bridge, partly for this reason.

IRC is very much a first-generation distributed comm protocol, but by the time it was mature it had most of the capabilities of current systems, mostly provided by external services. As Jamie Zawinski once observed about email, team chat has a common set of functions that people will always want and any system used for that eventually implements all of them or is replaced; and if a system implements these functions better, it also replaces its predecessors. I mean, I'm old enough to have regularly used 'talk' at work, evolution is a good thing.

_xivi• 3 years ago

Not receiving a message unless you're online is really the deal breaker for most people

NoNotTheDuo• 3 years ago

That's a feature in many people's eyes

EdwardDiego2• 3 years ago

Define many.

magsarion6• 3 years ago

Most IRC networks have a MemoServ, so that's not an issue.

progval7• 3 years ago

This isn't inherent to IRC; some servers support sending history when you are back online:

* https://github.com/ergochat/ergo/blob/master/docs/USERGUIDE....

* https://docs.inspircd.org/3/modules/chanhistory/

* https://www.unrealircd.org/docs/Channel_history

aykutcan• 3 years ago

Tell me what happened your freenode?

Discord is IRC's next evolution. Next generation chat. Good voice, excellent interactivity.

It has problems (bugs & weak beta phases) but after nearly 20 years of irc, i stopped my bnc (currently znc) instance last week. ~20 years of irc, countless bots, tons of good memories.

it is time to say goodbye for now.

benoliver999• 3 years ago

Look how quick the transition libera.chat was.

If Discord went away no one can just spin up a discord server.

throw20221104012• 3 years ago

Tell me what happened your freenode?

It shat the bed, just like Twitter and Reddit did recently.

The huge difference is that with IRC we were able to painlessly hop over to libera.chat pretty much the same day while a lot of people are still struggling to leave the other two behind. I have learned my lesson, it's open services for anything important.

notpushkin• 3 years ago

TIL about Comic Chat. Looks like a novelty thing to me, but also I would probably use it today! I'm wondering if they do some sort of sentiment analysis on messages sent from other clients.

Working at Microsoft surely must have been a lot more fun back then.

Razengan3• 3 years ago

Why can't we "solve" instant messaging like we have solved email?

QuackyTheDuck2• 3 years ago

How did we solve email?

rvz2• 3 years ago

That ship has sailed. IRC lost to Discord years ago. Don't care about it being closed source. IRC also lost to the Matrix protocol as not only that is much better, it is also just as competitive with Element and they are making money, meaning that they can afford to add more features.

IRC is prehistoric ancient history. It's time to evolve and leave that protocol in the dust and go with modern alternatives like Matrix.

throw20221104012• 3 years ago

IRC lost to Discord years ago.

A couple of years ago you'd have told me the exact same thing but with s/Discord/Slack/

IRC has "lost" many times before and yet it's still around while the previous "winners" are all gone or irrelevant. Even if Discord is tolerable today how long before it becomes terminally enshittified?

rcxdude4• 3 years ago

Last I checked Slack has many more users than IRC

rvz2• 3 years ago

IRC has "lost" many times before and yet it's still around.

IRC is no more relevant than the fossils that are still underneath the ground.

while the previous "winners" are all gone or irrelevant.

So Matrix is gone and irrelevant?

Even if Discord is tolerable today how long before it becomes terminally enshittified?

Even if that happens I can guarantee you that they won't be going back to IRC.

DogLover_• 3 years ago

I am still perplexed that people accept the UX of Discord. It is just so horrible that I can not get myself to use it even if I am looking for a place to engage with communities. There are way too many channels which you cannot opt out of.

firesteelrain• 3 years ago

I use Discord for my CTF team going back four years. Our lead will sometimes say “to prepare for the next one, search Discord…” which kind of works. There are some software that uses Discord for tech support. Since Discord isn’t indexable by Google, all of that information is then locked up in Discord’s “knowledge base” forever.

This is more against the migration of these “knowledge base” services to Discord chat than a knock against Discord itself.

scarygliders3• 3 years ago

I've been on IRC since the 90's and was an Op for Undernet #Linux & #Japan for many years, used to run an IRC server for a small IRC network back in my London days, and also ran a server for the same little network in my Japan days...

The article was excellent, however, it made no mention of Matrix.

Matrix, like IRC, is decentralised.

You can run your own homeserver - just like running an ircd.

Connecting to a Matrix homeserver with a suitable client - I use Element - you get all the equivalent benefits of IRC (chat) but with the additional Discord-like benefits of being able to post images in-chat, text formatting.

Another benefit is chat history (if configured for a room). Also, fully encrypted rooms. You can have voice and video rooms too.

What I'm trying to say, I suppose, is that I'm a full convert now to Matrix. It's better than Discord in that Discord is a walled garden, whereas Matrix - like IRC - is completely decentralised, and I highly recommend using Matrix over IRC these days.

smarx007• 3 years ago

Same thought – I was surprised to see no mention of Matrix or XMPP.

j4529• 3 years ago

Big miss

thiht2• 3 years ago

XMPP is a monstrosity, just let it die… The X is why it failed, depending on the client used by participants, some features wouldn’t work as expected. I remember someone shitting me because the messages I sent were ugly in his client, maybe because of a bad font on one side or the other or something, don’t know, don’t care.

nologic012• 3 years ago

Its still somewhat slow with loading existing chats but Matrix has serious potential. It is already doing much better than the fediverse in terms of discovering niche communities.

scarygliders3• 3 years ago

Agreed.

Some rooms have so many user and so much chat history, that my own puny homeserver struggles to join them. I've tried all sorts of tweaks - from tweaking the PostgreSQL service, to using things like noatime etc. on the ext4 filesystem. This has helped immensely, but some rooms, like the Python room on matrix.org, brings my homeserver to its knees :)

Perhaps in the future the Synapse devs will improve the code so that mammoth rooms don't bring more resource-starved homeservers down. Alternatively I could throw more resources at the homeserver, but for my use-case, the 6GB ram and 6 cores I assign to the VM running the Synapse instance and the PostgreSQL service - and the IRC bridge heheh - is the bare-minimum I can get away with.

On saying all that, I like Matrix more than I like IRC, nowadays, and more folks should IMO get on Matrix.

(p.s. custom emoji's would be lovely on Matrix ;) )

Tmpod• 3 years ago

Matrix 2.0 will put an end to that trait plaguing the protocol's viability. With the new "sliding" sync, clients will be able to fetch stuff much more efficiently (and more akin to Discord's API, for example) than before. Syncing an freshly logged-in account takes seconds instead of minutes and syncing messages when returning to the app is instant. They presented this at FOSDEM this year: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUPJ9zFV5IE

theshrike79• 3 years ago

The slow loading and tracking of who has read what are the two biggest gripes I have about the protocol.

If I'm joining a huge channel with thousands of people I _really_ don't care whether astroboy8756 has read my message or not. I don't want that traffic to enter my client at all.

judge20207• 3 years ago

Do you have the same opinion on GitHub, a completely closed source Git frontend where 99% of OSS code lives?

scarygliders3• 3 years ago

In a way, I do.

Which is why I use self-hosted Gitlab ;)

chromatin2• 3 years ago

Many who have causally read about Matrix and looked into running a homeserver have run across the reference implementation Synapse, which is (IMO only, pls no flame) a bloated python monstrosity. This turned me off for years.

A second-gen (?) alternative written in Go called Dendrite is much lighter weight, but is lacking in some features last I looked.

A couple of years ago, I found Conduit (https://conduit.rs/) an ultra lightweight homeserver implementation written in Rust with an engaged and responsive community. I've been running this for 18-24 months now and use it for family communications, as well as small business and my group at my $DAYJOB. I highly recommend anyone who hasn't already to check out Conduit :)

jcul• 3 years ago

Thanks, will check it out. Last time I looked, dendrite, construct, and conduit were not ready, so synapse was the only option (which I used).

Look forward to trying out conduit.

nullifidian• 3 years ago

bloated python monstrosity
an ultra lightweight

370 crates in Cargo.lock

176 crates downloaded by cargo-tree

wsdookadr• 3 years ago

I'd say IRC and Matrix are the only viable protocols.

The rest are just proprietary, centralized, corporate-owned.

Here's a short list of those: Teams, Zoom, Discord, Whatsapp, Telegram, Skype, Ring.

iamnotsure• 3 years ago

Chanel-less tag-only chat protocols are missing.

timbit42• 3 years ago

What are some examples of such protocols?

pard682• 3 years ago

Incase the website owner is checking HN and sees this:

On mobile the links in your header are fiddly because the links clickable area overlap.

MildRant3• 3 years ago

The fundamental fact that Discord users refuse to see is that the platform isn't run on magic dust and fairy incantations, but actual human beings. Using Discord is no different from having a group of strangers sitting in your room with you, noting down every word you say to your friends and everything you run on your computer, and doing the devil knows what with it.

Anyone making this argument doesn't understand why people use Discord. These articles about why Discord is bad crop up over time and they ALL miss the boat. If your argument is that "Discord isn't private" then you've already lost because no one who uses Discord cares about that and you've shown that you don't actually understand Discord.

jowea3• 3 years ago

Well, in fairness, I believe the guy that got caught posting classified docs in a small private discord server would appreciate privacy, even if I myself and a lot of people almost exclusively use public servers and would prefer if they were even less private so internet search would work.

lolinder2• 3 years ago

His friends passed the documents along to their friends, and they eventually got the attention of the New York Times. At that point tracing the documents back to him would probably have happened regardless of whether he used IRC or anything else.

Do you have any evidence that him using a centralized platform like Discord played a role in him getting caught?

lbourdages• 3 years ago

My main issue about Discord is not what it is, but what it replaced. A lot of websites or forums have been replaced by Discord. It sucks, because it's fundamentally a messaging app, but people will use it for reasons where a website would male sense ("link is in my Discord").

stu2b50• 3 years ago

That's on the things (vbulletin forums, etc) that Discord and Reddit have replaced for being so bad that people would prefer using Discord over them. It's hard to blame Discord for making a good product. As to users, a UX principle is that users aren't wrong, the UX is wrong. There's a reason people use Discord for these purposes, and you need to resolve that reason, not make punitive actions towards users.

Grom_PE• 3 years ago

No, I much prefer XMPP MUC to IRC.

- Doesn't expose your IP address by default

- No need to fiddle with automating responses to NickServ to log in

- No need to register with that specific chat server, can simply use your XMPP account for any server

- No annoying netsplits

- Supports multiline text messages

- Has avatar, away status, profile info support

- Can show about 20 last messages when you join a chat so you have some context of the conversation

- Nicknames can have spaces and Unicode

- Can transparently join from multiple devices under a single nickname, no need to kill a "ghost" from time to time after a lost connection

- Configurable with GUI instead of cryptic modes designated by a single character symbol that varies from server to server

naikrovek• 3 years ago

discord is great, ideal maybe, except for the closed nature.

IRC as a protocol is extremely simple and that has value, and I feel that Discord's UI, search, built-in history, and finer-grained permissions (finer than anything IRC can do, anyway) are all plusses that IRC advocates should not discount.

other great features that Discord has which are discounted by IRC afficionados: replies. inline image and short video support. reactions. very high quality video streaming and voice chat (though IRC can be forgiven here given the time period in which it arose.)

these things almost all matter to modern day users. saying that no one needs them because you don't need them or want them is gatekeeping and is myopic and short-sighted.

schmoooo• 3 years ago

why not using an end2end encrypted p2p only chat lioe https://cabal.chat instead?

NoboruWataya• 3 years ago

Discord vs IRC is just another extension of the "open, decentralised vs proprietary, centralised social media" debate. It baffles me that even people who are aware of, and opposed to, the ongoing enshittification of Twitter and Reddit would so happily choose Discord.

That said, I think privacy is a weak argument against Discord (or, rather, a weak argument for IRC). I have used IRC for many years and I never assumed that anything I put on there was private. Everything you post can be seen and trivially recorded by other users as well as the server operator.

To me it's more about not having your access to social media entirely at the whim of a corporation whose incentives are not aligned with yours and who, sooner or later, is going to come under significant pressure to monetise you. So I guess, in a word, control is the main advantage. This includes control over whether you can access the service, how you access it, what you can access and on what terms you can access it. IRC's simplicity is a definite plus in that regard.

And then you have the "average user", who ruthlessly selects for ease of use and cost and doesn't care about any of this stuff. I think that is a short-sighted position, but ultimately people will make their choice and the average user's preference for walled gardens built by VC-backed corporations is so strong I think it unlikely to be reversed by any amount of blogs or HN comments. I think these services (or their successors) will always continue to exist and will probably always be far more popular than the open alternatives, but it is still worth maintaining and promoting those alternatives, which can provide a sustainable platform for those of us who care about such things.

shrimp_emoji• 3 years ago

I care about privacy and flexibility and the other things decentralization gets you, but I grew up with instant messengers (Yahoo, WLM, now Discord, which is the closest thing to WLM in feature completeness yet still not at parity since it's a thin client where every feature rent seeks). Not only could I barely figure out how to use IRC last time I tried, but it doesn't have things I've come to expect, like avatars, emoticons, file transfer with embedded previews, etc. D: That shit's in the Stone Age!

I'm excited by projects like Element, which is Matrix protocol-powered Discord but open source, but, aside from network performance and feature parity, network effects rule social tech. You're doomed to use Discord if nobody uses Element.

INTPenis• 3 years ago

I dislike web chat for one reason, the overview is very limited.

So Matrix, with a bitlbee plugin or a text client, would be amazing imho.

I'm just so used to seeing many lines of text, and getting a good quick overview of what is going on that way. Sometimes I use /last in irssi, and very rarely I've searched through a channel's web archive. But mostly I just see whatever it is I need directl in the client. If it's a slow chat I see it the next day. It's not going anywhere.

toastal• 3 years ago

I like that Prosody MUCs default to just giving you the last 20 messages–enough to give you context of the current topic. Shipping the entire history like Matrix & others do is more that should be necessary for the communications best suited for chatrooms. If you needed something to be longer lived, it should have been on the forum and/or mailing list.

soldeace• 3 years ago

Anyone who has ever used IRC knows that there is nothing even remotely complicated about using it, but the terminology and the steps required to use one are ostensibly terrifying enough to reliably keep the technically illiterate at bay.

This remark, topped with the author's piece on "normiefication", is the kind of intellectual elitism that reliably keeps me away from IRC whenever I think of coming back to it.

mplewis2• 3 years ago

This person’s view is so insular and so self-centered that they truly seem to believe that IRC is not complicated. This is an excellent illustration of how important it is to stay grounded and connected to your real-world user base.

Spivak• 3 years ago

When the irreducible complexity of a problem is met with a simple implementation the complexity has to go somewhere else, usually the user.

yborg2• 3 years ago

This is a silly statement. The technology doesn't embody any 'elitism', back in the day there were many channels/networks with non-technical users. Back when Shoutcast was a thing, servers often had an associated IRC channel where people would make requests, or just talk music, just as one example. This also makes the "keep technically illiterate users away" statement silly, I've seen middle school age kids connect to IRC channels without any apparent difficulty.

c-cube• 3 years ago

I stopped being engaged when the author uses "normalcattle" in a unironic, disdainful tone. Then later on there's praise of RMS. I like the overall message, as a long time daily IRC user, but the contempt seeping from the whole article is a turn off.

donatj• 3 years ago

IRC had huge momentum like 5 years ago that just disappeared overnight. Freenode jumping the shark didn't help but I'm still surprised.

I loved the days where I'd be in a couple IRC rooms and a couple slack rooms all in the same IRC client. Slack killing IRC support still bums me out.

sylware• 3 years ago

IRC is the perfect chat protocol for interoperabitily between Big Tech and small tech, ofc where it is reasonable. Namely, regulators should enforce the availability of an IRC bridge (with TLS where pertinent authentication is to be used).

Twitch has been providing a non-TLS and public IRC bridge.

Moreover, IRC chat can be extremely well extented, namely with bells and whistle features if the client supports them, and if not can be ignored and and then displays harmless garbage (you can encode A LOT in a short text string, and now with utf-8... you can encode MASSIVE load of things within a short text string).

From a noscript/basic (x)html, just need a irc:// URL and were good. We can even have pre-authencitated irc connection using a transient TCP port opening with IP[46] locking (ok... you will need a pool of IP[46]s for significantly sized services).

Ofc, the bad thing: most of the time the noscript/basic (x)html browser will fire up an irc client, then you get 2 windows. Or we could have an IRC client integrated into a noscript/basic (x)html browser which will open a "frame"/new tab, well... modularity, and this would still be cosmically less costly from a technical point of view than any Big Tech web engine.

It is like some _LEAN_ p2p protocols (streaming, live or not) directly integrated into noscript/basic (x)html browsers with good and honest default (that's the hard part, it will be abused, and if it is too much, won't actually work). Well, a "private" tracker would do the "trick". Still, it could fire up an external p2p-enabled media player (via <video> with the p2p URL with the private tracker and video hash, or the private tracker infos could be part of a dash file).

Ofc, you have to expect the worst from Big Tech: adamant lobbying against that, sabotage up to shadow-hire hacker teams, etc...

urwrong22• 3 years ago

No the only viable option is Messaging Layer Security (MLS)

kyrofa3• 3 years ago

The reliability and lack of bloat that are inherent to IRC [...]

First off, I love IRC and always will. But boy, the author sure must have a stable internet connection. In my experience one blip means a lost message with no indication that it's been lost. That is not my definition of reliable.

progval7• 3 years ago

IRC uses persistent TCP connections as a transport. You can't lose a message in the middle of a stream without the whole connection being closed, and your client would tell you about that.

kyrofa3• 3 years ago

You can't lose a message in the middle of a stream without the whole connection being closed, and your client would tell you about that.

I don't know what to tell you other than "that doesn't mesh up with the reality of my experience" shrug. Even if they did tell me about a connection issue (which they often didn't), those messages are still gone with no indication that I missed anything ("hey your connection blipped" != "here are the messages you missed while you were gone").

kakwa_2• 3 years ago

This was not a really issue... as long as you had access to a shell on a reliable server to screen+irssi (or tmux+weechat if you felt fancy).

kyrofa3• 3 years ago

Well sure, I used a bouncer like everyone else because of this issue (and for persistent presence since I dealt with people in different timezones), but that is a workaround for a protocol that isn't actually reliable, which is sort of my point.

badrabbit• 3 years ago

The one thing I dislike about matrix is how it has to use http. IRC is an escape from the web. The matrix api is simple enough to use a couple of curl commands for basic chat though.

A simple "everything is a json schema" protocol but over TCP/UDP would be cool.

backendanon2• 3 years ago

I used to use PidGin for years. It has both IRC and XMPP. Thinking about using it again. I wonder also about the Freenode shenanigans in recent times and who was behind it. https://pidgin.im/posts/2021-06-irc-network-changes/

jokoon2• 3 years ago

Discord Server moderators will create too many channels, which completely fragment conversations, and many channels have zero conversation. Users cannot "bookmark" channels to only follow one or two channels per server, they have to view a server and then select a channel. Discord should limit the amount of channel and force people to pay to have more channels.

Chatting "accelerates" conversations which considerably reduce their quality, which is cancelled by discord adding the "slow" mode. Online forums are slow which encourage people to make a better effort to write posts and answers.

The UX is not that simple. I have to say discord "forums" are a bit better, but it adds more complexity and there already are threads. It's a lot of noise. Should I write in chat or start a forum post? Discords makes several things at once which will often confuse the user. Discord is mixing chat and forums in a single confusing thing.

On top of this, discord is not federated, because communities are often redundant. For example if I just want to join a community to play a certain game, it's all spread across so many communities that those communities are just awful. Quantity over quality. You have some many battlefield or overwatch servers, it's pointless. Quakenet has one channel per game, and it worked well.

The single thing that IRC needs is a good frontend interface.

I just like minimal software. Discord bloated, and their carbon footprint must be quite high. Not to mention so few people use it for voice or visioconference.

johnea2• 3 years ago

IRC Rulz! Those corps chats suck!

jimmychoozyx• 3 years ago

I've tried Slack and Discord. Of course, ICQ & MSN Messenger long ago.

IRC is #1 in my book. I always come back to it. I like its simplicity and its community. It has been immensely valuable to me, to get guidance and answers to questions, from software engineers with tons of experience.

Libera server all day!

zzo38computer• 3 years ago

IRC has some advantages. You can use with without specialized software (and I have done many times when not having a IRC client), or you can write your own IRC client or use one of many. There may also be web interface if you want them.

Note that you can make IRC server which makes logs of channels and could provide a link to access the file in the MOTD or HELP file, if desired. It can also be done by clients and link in the TOPIC message, which is more common.

IRC is good for fast communication with short messages, but for slow communication with long form messages is also sometimes more useful and for that, NNTP would be better, I think.

valianteffort• 3 years ago

IRC leaks your IP address, for that one reason I wouldn't use it. People can be insane and emboldened by anonymity on the internet, and one disagreement turns into some guy swatting your home and getting you killed. No thanks.

vmladenov• 3 years ago

I wonder why Mattermost hasn’t caught on more. It has most of what I expect from Slack/Discord but it’s open source.

leach• 3 years ago

I’d love to use open source solutions but my friends would never switch over to that because they are lazy and don’t care.

I assume there are many such cases

verandaguy• 3 years ago

This kind of article occasionally pops up on HN and for lack of a better word, it's just kind of detached from reality.

As a preface, I'm not telling you not to use IRC. If it works for you, if you like to use it and deal with its quirks and anachronisms, more power to you. There are loads of great communities out there on various servers.

Having said that...

I couldn't in good conscience recommend IRC to a hypothetical someone who's never used a chat program, under almost any circumstance. The feature set is truly beyond meagre by modern standard, with some, though not all of these shortcomings being resolved by standing up, and administering, a bouncer, and (if you're using something like irssi) a stew of Perl incantations. Which, again — I'm not bashing, necessarily, but Perl just isn't a language most people are learning these days, for a number of reasons.

Following up, though:

- Admining a bouncer, while not a full-time job in the long run, is something you need to keep on top of, from keeping the host up (both in terms of potentially paying bills if you're using commercial hosting and in terms of making sure resource usage is fine, nothing's crashing, and security updates). It's also nontrivial in the strict sense: I couldn't teach my parents to do this.

  - `tmux` or `screen` are _easier_ options, but man, it always feels dodgy to use them like this. I ran Python servers like this when I was an intern because I hadn't figured out how to create an init script and before Docker was the staple that it is now.

- Multi-device support is rough. If you have a bouncer, you're better off, but without one, you're talking about either strictly logging out and back in, or having multiple `handles`, `_handles`, `__handles`, etc.

  - Other commenters have pointed out that Discord, Slack, etc., have occasional sync issues between devices -- but *at least they support multiple devices.*

- Server federation/decentralization, while a feature for some, is more of an extra complication for most, I'd wager, especially without a reasonable central source of truth about identity. In Discord, there are server usernames as well as a global username (which is editable by the user), as well as a non-editable numeric identifier.

- Search is functionally non-existent without a bouncer

  - Once again: this is a feature that's not prefect on other platforms, but at least it's *there.*

- Bots in IRC have no concept of permissions outside of what the default handful of roles offer, because IRC doesn't really do granular permissions on its own (which sort of makes sense, that's application-level, not protocol-level.

I'm not making the argument that Discord/Slack/whatever are universally better than IRC in every way. I'm trying to argue that their usability is top-tier compared to IRC, for most people. I also won't say that Discord "killed" IRC. IRC is an older-generation chat protocol/UX, and by that logic it's gonna keep getting killed with every new generation of chat client. First, it got killed by Teamspeak, then Slack, and now Discord, each using their feature sets and UXes to chip away at what's left of the IRC user base.

This isn't even touching on the other features offered by these chat platforms that IRC just doesn't really touch -- mainly, reasonably reliable audio/video calls and screen sharing. And I gotta say, dealing with self-hosted live video streaming is surprisingly hard to get right for calls of more than 2-3 people, generally speaking.

There's some argument to be made about data ownership, but honestly, the more time goes on the less I believe most people care about that very much for casual chats. If you're worried about the government or (much more likely,) advertisers coming after your private chats, IRC is absolutely not an inherent solution to this, and is by default probably about as bad as any centralized platform in this regard.

Use whatever you want and what works for you. I genuinely don't care. But don't deal in absolutes like this; you'd have to be really full of yourself, or totally out of touch with reality and how users interact with software to make a claim like this article's title. Discord and Slack aren't perfect, and certainly, IRC power users who've been on that platform for years or decades may find it falls short in some ways, but for the average person, they're both likely better alternatives.

It's also kinda weird to fanboy over this kind of thing, which is the impression I always get from these posts. "I use X because the communities/friend groups/features/tools I like or am part of are there" is an extremely valid subjective argument for preferring a platform. "I dislike Y because it has A, B, and C issues which break the user experience for me" is just as valid and more objective. "Everything that's not Z is bad because of $PERSONAL_MORAL_FRAMEWORK reasons, and if you wanna put the work into it, Z can be usable actually."

IRC is the only viable chat protocol (2022)

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