Simplicity of IRC (2022)

https://susam.net/simplicity-of-irc.html

by susam • 2 years ago

107 70 2 years ago

IRC is great and you can do SSL connections and also encrypted DCC transfers on some servers (Abjects/#moviegods, for example)

_flux6• 2 years ago

However actually establishing those DCC connections in the first place might need some configuration in a typical consumer internet setup?

I've been playing with the idea of adding IRC support to my prototype Matrix WebRTC transfer tool mxrxtx, but I haven't touched that for a while.. And I wouldn't have any use for it anyway.

Arathorn• 2 years ago

ooh, mxrxtx sounds interesting - is this solving https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec/issues/189?

M95D4• 2 years ago

And this is how good old services, protocols and standards get enshittified. Welcome to HTTP(S) v121.99.5146.

dijit2• 2 years ago

That's mostly due to NAT.

When we have some more widespread IPv6 adoption we could (and should already) look into supporting IPv6 with DCC, that would make it function properly and dare-I-say would be excellent from a UX perspective.

Avamander2• 2 years ago

Except it directly reveals your IP to the other peer. Might as well share a magnet link.

Though I would indeed like direct file transfer for more usual purposes in other chat clients. Would be great with Matrix/Element.

fddrdplktrew2• 2 years ago

LoL... sharing your IP with a hacked server doesn't really affect me... but when I use magnets links from my home IP, I keep being harassed by Comcast.

weberer• 2 years ago

You connect to a server, not a peer. Your client does no uploading.

bilekas• 2 years ago

IRC is a beautiful thing. I still write bots for it to unwind, the problem I have is the resistance to updating the protocol spec, some great ideas coming out but nothing seems to move fast enough these days.

creesch2• 2 years ago

IRC as a protocol is indeed incredibly simple and easy to get started with. Years ago did discover this when I was able to make [this atrocity](https://github.com/creesch/discordIRCd) bridging IRC and discord where for IRC I effectively did a simple server implementation.

There is a caveat, though. Like many older protocols (ftp) there is a lot that was not initially written down or left up to clients and server implementations. This, does lead to a lot of edge cases you need to be aware of once you want to actually support a wider user group.

Also, as this is apparently is still a discussion. IRC is not simple from a modern user UX perception. Registration can be complex and confusing, though hidden a bit through clients. Managing channels with various flags is a whole other thing. Then there is also the fact that these days people are no longer used to the fact that they can't see messages from periods where they were not connected. Of course, the latter can be easily handled by a BNC or fancy clients like https://thelounge.chat . But, that is only easy for technically inclined folks.

lifthrasiir3• 2 years ago

Not only that, but IRC server protocol(s) are much more underwhelming. If my last recollection is correct (and I gave up with IRC before IRCv3 became viable enough, which was too late IMO), pretty much every surviving server implementation had their own server protocol.

vilunov5• 2 years ago

IRC is not a federated protocol, so this is not a big problem. Yes, it's a "relay chat", but in the end all servers of a single network must trust each other, and that means they are being run by a single organization and it's just a mechanism for horizontal scalability. This is not the same as XMPP, which has a federation s2s protocol, but each service provider can use a custom server protocol for horizontal scaling.

Sesse__• 2 years ago

The RFC ostensibly covers the server protocol too, but as-is, there are tons of extensions to make things actually work well (e.g. what happens on rejoin after a netsplit).

It's a bit sad IRC servers are no longer all the rage, because it would be interesting to see how good we could actually make them with current technology and programming practice. 1M+ users on a server should be easily attainable, for instance. And presumably a much more robust distributed system than just “connect them all in a spanning tree and accept any inconsistencies” (i.e., support redundant connections). I've seen a couple of times where A deopped B and B was still able to kick A (because they were on different servers), leaving the channel opless :-)

crtasm4• 2 years ago

only easy for technically inclined folks.

Non-technical people might use a TheLounge instance someone else hosts, a free/cheap bouncer, or (likely easiest) pay for a service like IRCCloud.

creesch2• 2 years ago

People like that are often still considered "technical" by the majority of people out there. Registering your nickname is still something that is more involved than sign up for any other web based chat service in the modern era.

Not to mention that people need to know about these are options.

You might scoff and roll your eyes, because to you, it seems easy. But I have seen it first hand for many years. Various online communities (forums, subreddits) I was involved in tried to set up chat side communities through IRC. They never really took of even with heavy promotion and sometimes nifty integrations with the accounts people already had.

Then Discord entered the scene, you only had to post a discord link. Because it was just one click the discord servers would often have more people in them in the period of week than the IRC servers ever had in years.

8BitArmour2• 2 years ago

This guy's article on infosys is good too: https://susam.net/infosys-tcs-or-wipro.html

zer0tonin2• 2 years ago

It's funny how you could make almost exactly the same article about Google/Meta/Amazon

8BitArmour2• 2 years ago

so,startups ftw?

mapreduce• 2 years ago

(2011) that article. That's like 13 years old. I very well remember 13 years ago the FANG were not filled with middle managers like they are today. Massive cultural shifts in these places since then.

t0mas88• 2 years ago

Funny, I did exactly what the article describes. When I was around 12 (previous century...) I learned a lot about coding from writing IRC bots in several languages.

In some ways things have become a lot easier, back in those days we had dial-up internet, no Stackoverflow and definitely no GenAI. But also harder, because protocols are now a lot more locked down, can't just sniff something and figure it out. And ecosystems like IRC have mostly been replaced by closed systems that you can't hack on.

cs02rm0• 2 years ago

I did similar perhaps a touch later with some of the messenger protocols, MSN I think primarily. So long ago it's difficult to remember.

Not sure it'll ever be the same for my kids. Which is a shame, whatever the gains and there are some, I think we've lost something.

sshine• 2 years ago

I did the same, writing IRC clients, bots and extension scripts from the age of 12.

Since you mentioned MSN, one thing I did in high school was connect an Eggdrop IRC bot via Bitlbee to MSN Messenger and hook it up with the MegaHAL module for text synthesis based on hidden Markov models. So basically, a chatbot on MSN. I trained it for a night to make it sound reasonable and respond well to various conversation, and I made it auto-accept connection requests and left it in training mode. Two weeks later, it was ruined. My kid sister's friends had all connected, and it now sounded like a 10 year old hyperactive psychopath. Strangely enough, it was a lot more authentic to them, since it spoke like them.

outime• 2 years ago

I started writing bots and scripts in mIRC Scripting at around the same age, perhaps even a bit earlier. Back then, there were full-fledged bots (as in Nickserv, Chanserv, etc) for servers like UnrealIRCD that were entirely written in mIRC. I fondly remember those times as they were filled with lots of fun and opportunities to meet interesting people every day.

Al-Khwarizmi• 2 years ago

I had lots of fun coding mIRC scripts, and then also some standalone IRC bots, when I was 14 or so (including an ambitious unfinished project of an IRC-based MUD, as well as a quite successful conversational chatbot that many people downloaded and used to fool others, especially with the option of posing as a girl which I added as an afterthought, but was what the overwhelming majority of users chose). I'm now a CS professor, and several others I know who had the same hobby at the time in my city or whereabouts have rather successful careers as tech entrepeneurs or professors :)

I paid the mIRC license like 15 years later, by the way... better late than never... that guy really deserved it.

elpocko• 2 years ago

I haven't paid for a lot of software in my life. But I too paid for a mIRC license, happily even.

definitelyauser• 2 years ago

I paid the mIRC license like 15 years later, by the way...

Probably not valid anymore, fairly recently he changed something requiring a new license.

Not that he doesn't deserve a new license after all these years.

aitchnyu• 2 years ago

Tangential, but what are the examples of low end programming of this generation? There are of course bots for modern messaging apps like Telegram.

caddy• 2 years ago

The first time I (gen z) had a run in with low-level tech was getting a Pi Pico and an ESP32 to talk to each other over the serial protocol. It's probably the only time I've had to get that down and dirty with a protocol. Writing messaging bots for modern apps are definitely fairly easy but it's unlikely you'd ever get that deep into the protocols of it all (probably something like json/graphql over http(s)).

d--b• 2 years ago

At some point though, IRC conversations seem to almost always turn into talking about IRC itself. Whether it’s bots or hostile takeovers, people stealing nicknames, moderation problems, who’s got the best client, and shit of that nature. I spent a lot time on it as a teenager, and it gets a bit old after a while. Discord is significantly better in that regard.

wkat4242• 2 years ago

That's not really my experience on libera. They are just about the projects.

nottorp• 2 years ago

Irc is an old people thing now. And channel admin control is better.

Back when irc was the thing, there were a lot of teenagers on it and in some places the atmosphere was like in a modern competitive shooter if you take out all the "this is a violent game but we pretend it's family friendly" moderation.

rerdavies• 2 years ago

IRC is not simple. Simple if you want to write a bot for a specific channel on a specific server, I suppose; but infuriatingly difficult to write a client for.

The curse of IRC: no standardization. There have been two major attempts to define a standardized version of IRC, neither of which has been successful, and neither of which are entirely adequate.

There are literally hundreds of messages, a large number of which are server-specific, and no two servers work remotely the same.

The protocol is also painfully bound to terminal-style user interfaces. Wrapping a clean graphical user interface around the protocol is difficult if not impossible. And any attempt to do so will require extensive customization for each server variant that the UI intends to support. And anything less than a clean wrap produces a user-interface that demands a sort of computer literacy that ordinary and casual users should not be expected to have.

Character set support is also fascinatingly and tragically broken. The ACTUAL official standard character set: Western European, with DEL replaced with an additional character to support Norwegian users. In practice choice of character set is cultural and varies from server to server, and from channel to channel. Some use Western European character codings, others use local or national codepages, many (but far from all) use UNICODE.

vilunov5• 2 years ago

This might have been true some years ago, but I cannot agree with it now. There is a well-written IRCv3 spec, which I was following when implementing my own IRC server. I also tested it with several clients and I found out that core functionality and official extensions are pretty consistent. Bugs that I encountered always were a misinterpretation of the spec either by me, or by the relatively new IRC client that I was testing with, but they are fixed now.

The encoding is almost always UTF-8, I never encountered anything else on any network I used.

Yes, some networks may be stuck in the past, that's unfortunate, but the modern IRC is pretty good. Also custom extensions are not a problem since the capability negotiation was introduced.

lifthrasiir3• 2 years ago

The encoding is almost always UTF-8, I never encountered anything else on any network I used.

Mainly because there are only a handful of living IRC networks anyway. Korean IRC networks are virtually vanished as of mid-2010s (and I operated one of last such networks), and while many have migrated to UTF-8, EUC-KR never died even at that point.

Honestly speaking, the modern IRC doesn't exist. The IRC today, which you refer as the "modern" IRC, is actually what IRC should have been at least a decade ago. Korean networks didn't even get to that point.

hideout_berlin• 2 years ago

still love irc

boredemployee• 2 years ago

could someone point me a good and active irc server and (possibly) channels?

miss a lot the old days but the last time I tried every person seemed to be "idle"

qiqitori• 2 years ago

The thing is... most small or medium-sized channels are idle most of the time. Some then unidle for a bit if you wait e.g. a couple hours or even days. Even if there's no activity for months, if someone says something, someone may respond. Large channels are often quite active. Most channels have a topic of discussion, which can usually be inferred from the channel's name. If you like computers you may have a favorite programming language or whatever, and often there's a channel for it on chat.libera.org. E.g. #perl, #python, #c, #linux, #debian, #ubuntu, etc. (note, I'm currently on none of these). There's also channels for natural languages, electronics, etc. And most of the time the channel name is #WORD or ##WORD. Some of these channels are very active, some aren't.

Many mature channels have a group of regulars that have been part of the channel for years or decades. Many channels are a bit of a social club. Some channels have regulars that are insufferable.

gaws• 2 years ago

Many mature channels have a group of regulars that have been part of the channel for years or decades. Many channels are a bit of a social club. Some channels have regulars that are insufferable.

Please share some examples.

odc• 2 years ago

There are usage statistics of most IRC servers and channels on https://netsplit.de/networks/top10.php

crtasm4• 2 years ago

https://libera.chat/ is active, take a look at https://hackint.org/ too.

What topics interest you? https://libera.chat/guides/findingchannels

mid-kid• 2 years ago

I had been messing with game-related network protocols before writing my first IRC client, and the sheer simplicity of it was an eye opener.

For many protocols these days, the handshaking/authentication/formatting of the protocol and setting up a connection is so complex that you're already hundreds of lines down before you can do anything with the service, even if it's a dumb text chat like IRC is.

It's completely changed my view of what a network protocol is, and how to judge what features and characteristics are appropriate. Oftentimes this complexity is completely unwarranted! Underlying protocols like TCP and TLS already do a majority of the heavy lifting.

vilunov5• 2 years ago

Personally, after implementing an IRC+XMPP server myself I became very disappointed by prevailance of HTTP-based protocols in everything. All software is so browser-based and/or browser-driven nowadays that HTTP became de-facto the only transport-layer protocol. This is just an additional abstraction and overhead over TCP/UDP, which we cannot remove at all.

kqr• 2 years ago

Well, there are a lot of things one get for free by going over HTTP. Things like header parsing, widely-known status codes, handling of encoding and compression, connection reuse and upgrade, load balancing, caching, etc.

anthk• 2 years ago

Netcat as an IRC client:

http://morena.rest/20230501

henvic• 2 years ago

Because I was maintaining some IRC bots, I knew the IRC protocol quite well back in the days.

I remember when I was about 12 years old...

The school computers were quite limited in terms of software and it was just not viable to download or install mIRC during a class.

So I fired up the telnet application to connect to the IRC network everyone at school used. The computer lab prof. was not impressed... Next class she told me that if something happened to the machines, she knew who did it... lol

* granted, we used a lot of colors / decoration (ctrl + K on mIRC) and while I was able to demonstrate my abilities it was not much practical as it was just too damn hard to read the messages quick enough.

Simplicity of IRC (2022)

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