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Just run your IRC client in screen/tmux like we've done for a quarter century. The real advantage of slack isn't even client its stuff like massive logging for

by VLM 10y ago

Just run your IRC client in screen/tmux like we've done for a quarter century. The real advantage of slack isn't even client its stuff like massive logging for e-discovery and single sign on integration. Admittedly not terribly appealing for FOSS but once you use it at work... Also integrations in general are smoother in slack than in IRC. Someone has already written the bot and its a click away to install and it generally works.

kuschku 10y ago
> The real advantage of slack isn't even client its stuff like massive logging for e-discovery and single sign on integration. Admittedly not terribly appealing for FOSS but once you use it at work... Which can also be done with IRC clients. This is a video of a search system I built for the Quassel IRC client: https://dl.kuschku.de/videos/2016-09-16_04-03-36.mp4 https://dl.kuschku.de/videos/2016-09-16_04-03-36.mp4 Quassel is a distributed system, so you have a bouncer and client which integrate tightly, with clients for Linux, Windows, Mac, Web, Android, iOS, which stores backlog in a database. This search system is a very simple one, and simply uses postgres’ fulltext word vector search.
- NateDad 10y ago
  "log in to slack" vs. "deploy 3 services in the cloud by yourself and force everyone to use a specific irc client (good luck)" There's a reason people like slack so much. It does a ton of stuff out of the box with no headaches. Nobody wants to maintain all that stuff.
  - kuschku 10y ago
    > There's a reason people like slack so much. It does a ton of stuff out of the box with no headaches. Nobody wants to maintain all that stuff. So instead of paying someone to maintain it, you pay someone to maintain it who keeps all your data from you and prevents you from accessing it, and who admits he’ll read all your stuff. How is that better again? That said, IRCCloud already does it for free, in the cloud, just works™, and the Quassel people are also working on improving ease of use and deployment.
    - qudat 10y ago
      > So instead of paying someone to maintain it, you pay someone to maintain it who keeps all your data from you and prevents you from accessing it, and who admits he’ll read all your stuff. You aren't paying "someone" you're paying an entire company that is dedicated to making the application highly available, with all the bells and whistles, with zero hassle. Really, if you think IRC is so similar to Slack, then why are so many companies, organizations flocking to it? There has to be a reason.
      - kuschku 10y ago
        > Really, if you think IRC is so similar to Slack, then why are so many companies, organizations flocking to it? There has to be a reason. If HN has higher discussion quality than reddit, why are not all devs on HN instead? If Linux is better for servers, why are people still starting projects on Windows? etc... The power of marketing, directly or word-of-mouth, is important. And a decentral community can never do as perfect marketing as a company can do. There are IRC clients and apps, and third party integrations as powerful as Slack, and as easy to use. But you have to find them, install them separately – there’s no single combined effort to market a single "just works" solution, yet ;)
    - NateDad 10y ago
      How many people maintain their own email servers vs. use gmail? Slack doesn't prevent you from accessing your data, in fact they explicitly built exporting features. We're talking about open source, so reading your stuff shouldn't be a problem. For proprietary, maybe, but even then, reading someone's private slack info would be highly damaging to their brand, and to what benefit?
    - s73ver 10y ago
      You can get upset over this and argue with people, but that's not going to make anyone choose IRC over Slack.
      - eric_h 10y ago
        Slack, Hipchat, Campfire, etc. are all just IRC for normal people. There is without a doubt a barrier to entry to IRC that actually requires a bit of understanding of how the protocol works. "I'm in #this-channel-you-told-me-about, but no one else is in here, wtf?". "Oh, you're on the wrong network - it's EFNet, not Freenode". There is no such barrier for the current set of chat apps. Download > Login with google, start chatting with the person who invited you. Search history? File sharing? No need to remember anything about dcc/xdcc, no need to manage servers running bots, no need to manage anything, really; it's all taken care of by the nerds that run the service. I think one might actually be able to build a business by building a Slack that runs on top of IRC, and releasing client apps that actually significantly reduce the flexibility that a standard IRC client gives you. If you can get the on boarding flow to invite -> download -> log in -> start chatting with the people you want to chat with, you could crush slack (assuming you had the marketing budget to compete with theirs). I think, however, that IRC will remain in some ways as a small haven from eternal September (haha, yeah, I know). The barrier to entry is a feature, not a bug.
- djsumdog 10y ago
  This is the first I've heard of an IRC bouncer. That's a great idea. It still seems like it's and extra step you have to add though, when really it'd be nice to see some work on IRCv3 so you could have multiple clients connect to one IRC server with the same username and sync without the need of a proxy.
  - Filligree 10y ago
    The current answer to that is basically "Use IRCCloud", and that's what I link people who don't already know IRC to. It's a web/android/iphone client only, but it's IRC. The moment someone grows tired of the client, they can get their own.
  - eric_h 10y ago
    When I was a wee lad I was always envious of people on IRC who had these things called "shell accounts" that let them stay connected to IRC 24/7. They could schedule downloads to their remote boxes and wouldn't have to tie up the home phone line for three days downloading the latest warez from that guy who had an ISDN line and let 10 people(!) simultaneously download from his bot at a screaming 5k/s. Now I can have all those things (including the equivalent of 1000 ISDNs), and I don't really use IRC anymore, young me would be so jealous.
- VLM 10y ago
  Encapsulates this era as the battleground of silo'd "as a service" vs "can be done" For example I can have jenkins email build fails to slack in, oh, probably less than two minutes, I've done it before. From memory I make a custom email addrs in slack and tell slack which channel to feed it into, and then add that address to my jenkins that already sent buildSpam. In IRC I could do it... google implies there's a ZenIRCBot project on github and probably many others. Probably there are bots and tools that google didn't immediately find. Its not rocket surgery to use fetchmail and some kind of Perl IRC library to simply POP everything out of a mailbox into a directory /tmp/wtf and probably about 3 lines of perl to read all the files in /tmp/wtf, connect to irc on some channel, output what it found, and if successful delete the emails from /tmp/wtf. Then put fetchmail and the 3 line perl script into cron and away we go. Looks like Zapier is kinda in between "I could do it" and "AAS"
  - jasonjayr 10y ago
    Jenkins has a IRC plugin, already in the stock distribution. Jenkins bot idles in channel, and logs all sorts of failures or successes, or whatever. With the irc server + channels setup, this also takes less than 2 minutes.
  - anonymoushn 10y ago
    You can have Jenkins send IRC messages using a single invocation of netcat. This should take less than two minutes.
to3m 10y ago
> Just run your IRC client in screen/tmux like we've done for a quarter century. Wait... did you just tell me to go fuck myself?
- aiiane 10y ago
  I believe they did, Bob.
compuguy 10y ago
Or you can use a web based interface like the lounge.

by VLM 10y ago

kuschku 10y ago

> The real advantage of slack isn't even client its stuff like massive logging for e-discovery and single sign on integration. Admittedly not terribly appealing for FOSS but once you use it at work... Which can also be done with IRC clients. This is a video of a search system I built for the Quassel IRC client: https://dl.kuschku.de/videos/2016-09-16_04-03-36.mp4 https://dl.kuschku.de/videos/2016-09-16_04-03-36.mp4 Quassel is a distributed system, so you have a bouncer and client which integrate tightly, with clients for Linux, Windows, Mac, Web, Android, iOS, which stores backlog in a database. This search system is a very simple one, and simply uses postgres’ fulltext word vector search.

NateDad 10y ago
"log in to slack" vs. "deploy 3 services in the cloud by yourself and force everyone to use a specific irc client (good luck)" There's a reason people like slack so much. It does a ton of stuff out of the box with no headaches. Nobody wants to maintain all that stuff.
- kuschku 10y ago
  > There's a reason people like slack so much. It does a ton of stuff out of the box with no headaches. Nobody wants to maintain all that stuff. So instead of paying someone to maintain it, you pay someone to maintain it who keeps all your data from you and prevents you from accessing it, and who admits he’ll read all your stuff. How is that better again? That said, IRCCloud already does it for free, in the cloud, just works™, and the Quassel people are also working on improving ease of use and deployment.
  - qudat 10y ago
    > So instead of paying someone to maintain it, you pay someone to maintain it who keeps all your data from you and prevents you from accessing it, and who admits he’ll read all your stuff. You aren't paying "someone" you're paying an entire company that is dedicated to making the application highly available, with all the bells and whistles, with zero hassle. Really, if you think IRC is so similar to Slack, then why are so many companies, organizations flocking to it? There has to be a reason.
    - kuschku 10y ago
      > Really, if you think IRC is so similar to Slack, then why are so many companies, organizations flocking to it? There has to be a reason. If HN has higher discussion quality than reddit, why are not all devs on HN instead? If Linux is better for servers, why are people still starting projects on Windows? etc... The power of marketing, directly or word-of-mouth, is important. And a decentral community can never do as perfect marketing as a company can do. There are IRC clients and apps, and third party integrations as powerful as Slack, and as easy to use. But you have to find them, install them separately – there’s no single combined effort to market a single "just works" solution, yet ;)
  - NateDad 10y ago
    How many people maintain their own email servers vs. use gmail? Slack doesn't prevent you from accessing your data, in fact they explicitly built exporting features. We're talking about open source, so reading your stuff shouldn't be a problem. For proprietary, maybe, but even then, reading someone's private slack info would be highly damaging to their brand, and to what benefit?
  - s73ver 10y ago
    You can get upset over this and argue with people, but that's not going to make anyone choose IRC over Slack.
    - eric_h 10y ago
      Slack, Hipchat, Campfire, etc. are all just IRC for normal people. There is without a doubt a barrier to entry to IRC that actually requires a bit of understanding of how the protocol works. "I'm in #this-channel-you-told-me-about, but no one else is in here, wtf?". "Oh, you're on the wrong network - it's EFNet, not Freenode". There is no such barrier for the current set of chat apps. Download > Login with google, start chatting with the person who invited you. Search history? File sharing? No need to remember anything about dcc/xdcc, no need to manage servers running bots, no need to manage anything, really; it's all taken care of by the nerds that run the service. I think one might actually be able to build a business by building a Slack that runs on top of IRC, and releasing client apps that actually significantly reduce the flexibility that a standard IRC client gives you. If you can get the on boarding flow to invite -> download -> log in -> start chatting with the people you want to chat with, you could crush slack (assuming you had the marketing budget to compete with theirs). I think, however, that IRC will remain in some ways as a small haven from eternal September (haha, yeah, I know). The barrier to entry is a feature, not a bug.
djsumdog 10y ago
This is the first I've heard of an IRC bouncer. That's a great idea. It still seems like it's and extra step you have to add though, when really it'd be nice to see some work on IRCv3 so you could have multiple clients connect to one IRC server with the same username and sync without the need of a proxy.
- Filligree 10y ago
  The current answer to that is basically "Use IRCCloud", and that's what I link people who don't already know IRC to. It's a web/android/iphone client only, but it's IRC. The moment someone grows tired of the client, they can get their own.
- eric_h 10y ago
  When I was a wee lad I was always envious of people on IRC who had these things called "shell accounts" that let them stay connected to IRC 24/7. They could schedule downloads to their remote boxes and wouldn't have to tie up the home phone line for three days downloading the latest warez from that guy who had an ISDN line and let 10 people(!) simultaneously download from his bot at a screaming 5k/s. Now I can have all those things (including the equivalent of 1000 ISDNs), and I don't really use IRC anymore, young me would be so jealous.
VLM 10y ago
Encapsulates this era as the battleground of silo'd "as a service" vs "can be done" For example I can have jenkins email build fails to slack in, oh, probably less than two minutes, I've done it before. From memory I make a custom email addrs in slack and tell slack which channel to feed it into, and then add that address to my jenkins that already sent buildSpam. In IRC I could do it... google implies there's a ZenIRCBot project on github and probably many others. Probably there are bots and tools that google didn't immediately find. Its not rocket surgery to use fetchmail and some kind of Perl IRC library to simply POP everything out of a mailbox into a directory /tmp/wtf and probably about 3 lines of perl to read all the files in /tmp/wtf, connect to irc on some channel, output what it found, and if successful delete the emails from /tmp/wtf. Then put fetchmail and the 3 line perl script into cron and away we go. Looks like Zapier is kinda in between "I could do it" and "AAS"
- jasonjayr 10y ago
  Jenkins has a IRC plugin, already in the stock distribution. Jenkins bot idles in channel, and logs all sorts of failures or successes, or whatever. With the irc server + channels setup, this also takes less than 2 minutes.
- anonymoushn 10y ago
  You can have Jenkins send IRC messages using a single invocation of netcat. This should take less than two minutes.

to3m 10y ago

> Just run your IRC client in screen/tmux like we've done for a quarter century. Wait... did you just tell me to go fuck myself?

aiiane 10y ago
I believe they did, Bob.

compuguy 10y ago

Or you can use a web based interface like the lounge.