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No, stop. Please. I was a huge proponent of IRC but the lack of developments the past... decades has killed it for me. Discord is straight up better. Yes it's

No, stop. Please. I was a huge proponent of IRC but the lack of developments the past... decades has killed it for me. Discord is straight up better. Yes it's proprietary, but no, IRC is just not a good alternative at this point, it hasn't kept up. And I love to death what the IRCCloud guys are doing but it's just not good enough to use as a proper communication tool especially in a company. Admitting this is the first step to fixing it. If you want open source alternatives to win, you can't get stuck telling people the things they like aren't worth supporting. I like the fact that I can do text, voice and video in the same tool; that I have a searchable message history; that I don't have to manage the server myself; that I can make interesting bots with a webhook system and a websocket API; that I can interact with people programmatically over an OAuth2 API; that I can use markdown in messages, embed files and youtube videos, pin messages; that I can manage large communities using a thorough group and permission system (I'm managing a Discord server that has 20k+ people on it, this is stuff that can't be done over IRC quite simply). And you know what, I like the custom emojis too. Quassel isn't good enough (speaking as someone who loves quassel). IRCCloud isn't good enough (speaking as someone who loves IRCCloud and heartily recommend everyone here to support them by buying a subscription). I used to say: Our best chance is that Hangouts is open sourced. Nowadays, I'm rooting for Matrix but I think our best chance is that Discord is open sourced. These protocols, they get developed with very little awareness of what people actually want -- they copy features left and right, try to either support everything and end up a bloated or unusable plugin mess (XMPP) or support nothing and end up unpopular. Most of them are toys. In the end, we need serious players, passionate about creating not just protocols but good interfaces to them. This is hard to find in open source.

mattl 9y ago
You need to go where your community is. If your audience is primarily on IRC, you can't just ignore it.
- scrollaway 9y ago
  At the end of 2014, I was in a solid ~40 irc channels and active in maybe 15 of them. Today, I'm in 10 and active in none. All the channels I left, even some of the ones I'm still in now, have switched to Discord, Slack or Matrix. The two only channels I care about are actually both mirrored on Discord using the excellent Matterbridge (https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge/ https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge/). I was a heavy IRC user. The audience is gone.
daxorid 9y ago
None of the features you mention are useful for actually communicating and getting work done. Your concept of "better" is distinctly different from mine. In my world, software without completely useless and unnecessary features is better than bloatware. irssi + tmux + logging + grep works great for 100% of actual not-embedding-useless-cat-videos-to-avoid-having-to-actually-get-work-done use cases. In the interest of adopting your own borderline-uncivil tone: Stop assuming objectivity in your notion of evolution and improvement being the same as everyone else. It's not. Just stop. Please.
- pavel_lishin 9y ago
  > None of the features you mention are useful for actually communicating and getting work done. I respectfully disagree. It's incredibly helpful to be able to video/voice call a coworker instead of typing back and forth. It's also incredibly helpful to be able to quickly past a screenshot of an issue you're seeing, or to paste a quick snippet of code, or log, with nice formatting. Yes, I could use my phone or another app, and I could paste my image to imgur and share a link, or point them to github - but that's another step, another roadblock on the road to communication and understanding.
  - kuschku 9y ago
    And that is why I and many others are working on adding exactly that into today's IRC clients. Why I'm working on copy-paste of images and long text for quassel. Why people are working on WebRTC via IRC. All this is coming.
    - pavel_lishin 9y ago
      > All this is coming. And when it gets here, then IRCCloud and Quassel would be a good answer to my original comment. But now, those clients don't provide those features, while Slack does.
      - kuschku 9y ago
        I’m writing on these things right now. They’re going to be in Quassel at least before the end of the year, on desktop and mobile. In developer builds they’ll already be in in a few weeks or a month. And almost all functionality already is there anyway, as said.

mattl 9y ago

You need to go where your community is. If your audience is primarily on IRC, you can't just ignore it.

scrollaway 9y ago
At the end of 2014, I was in a solid ~40 irc channels and active in maybe 15 of them. Today, I'm in 10 and active in none. All the channels I left, even some of the ones I'm still in now, have switched to Discord, Slack or Matrix. The two only channels I care about are actually both mirrored on Discord using the excellent Matterbridge (https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge/ https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge/). I was a heavy IRC user. The audience is gone.

daxorid 9y ago

None of the features you mention are useful for actually communicating and getting work done. Your concept of "better" is distinctly different from mine. In my world, software without completely useless and unnecessary features is better than bloatware. irssi + tmux + logging + grep works great for 100% of actual not-embedding-useless-cat-videos-to-avoid-having-to-actually-get-work-done use cases. In the interest of adopting your own borderline-uncivil tone: Stop assuming objectivity in your notion of evolution and improvement being the same as everyone else. It's not. Just stop. Please.

pavel_lishin 9y ago
> None of the features you mention are useful for actually communicating and getting work done. I respectfully disagree. It's incredibly helpful to be able to video/voice call a coworker instead of typing back and forth. It's also incredibly helpful to be able to quickly past a screenshot of an issue you're seeing, or to paste a quick snippet of code, or log, with nice formatting. Yes, I could use my phone or another app, and I could paste my image to imgur and share a link, or point them to github - but that's another step, another roadblock on the road to communication and understanding.
- kuschku 9y ago
  And that is why I and many others are working on adding exactly that into today's IRC clients. Why I'm working on copy-paste of images and long text for quassel. Why people are working on WebRTC via IRC. All this is coming.
  - pavel_lishin 9y ago
    > All this is coming. And when it gets here, then IRCCloud and Quassel would be a good answer to my original comment. But now, those clients don't provide those features, while Slack does.
    - kuschku 9y ago
      I’m writing on these things right now. They’re going to be in Quassel at least before the end of the year, on desktop and mobile. In developer builds they’ll already be in in a few weeks or a month. And almost all functionality already is there anyway, as said.