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irc is so useful that i cant believe it is dying, and aside from freenode perhaps even dead. so what killed the IRC? its not like theres any other alternative

irc is so useful that i cant believe it is dying, and aside from freenode perhaps even dead. so what killed the IRC? its not like theres any other alternative out there. slack seems to come close but its still very different and for a different purpose.

kuschku 9y ago
Gamers moved from Quakenet to Discord, open source projects moved from Freenode to Slack, and that’s it. Luckily, most projects are left on Freenode, as an open source project relying on a proprietary service is something few people can stomach (outside of some people that already accepted the commercialization of the net)
loeg 9y ago
We use IRC sort of interchangeably with Slack at my work. The nice thing about IRC is you can host it on-premise and Slack doesn't have all of your company's confidential information. The downside is that it doesn't come bundled with a pretty webapp with GIFs and emojis.
- awirth 9y ago
  At work we have an onsite Zulip instance which meets both those requirements for us (including SSO integration). It's surprising to me that there aren't more places using it.
  - loeg 9y ago
    That's a good suggestion, thanks.
  - starkruzr 9y ago
    I've been meaning to stand up Zulip at home. Are there good mobile clients for it?
- jancborchardt 9y ago
  There’s always Riot https://about.riot.im/ https://about.riot.im/ which is a nice and fully open source app so you could set that up on-premise too. :)
  - scaryclam 9y ago
    Not sure why you're getting voted down. I'm looking for something to replace hip chat at the moment (we replaced slack with hipchat as slack didn't work well for us either), so I'm genuinely curious why a suggestion for riot is unpopular. Anyone care to comment?
    - e12e 9y ago
      What part of slack didn't work out for you? We're using slack at my workplace - and I think it's okish. Not a fan of it being a web app - but not frustrated enough yet to try the irc bridge with weechat (which is on my todo-list. Seems like a sane way forward, the last irc client I used was BitchX, and I don't think I'll likely to trust such an old c codebase with anything if I can help it..). Now that everyone "knows" what slack is, I wonder if it's time to blow some dust off of Apache (née Google) wave...
      - loeg 9y ago
        The Slack IRC bridge works pretty well, IMO. I use it with irssi. The only negative I can think of is it joins you to every Slack channel you're in every time you reconnect. (Including #general, which you can't permanently leave.) (I guess the other caveat is: it's a 3rd party hosted application; an internet outage or service outage could take it down, and it's potentially vulnerable to massive information leak in a way that your company isn't.)
      - abhirag 9y ago
        Try the wee-slack plugin[https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack], it uses the Slack API and I have been using it on my Android phone(using Termux) and my Linux laptop, works great :)
  - 9y ago
- lscotte 9y ago
  To me, that's not a downside but a positive feature. At work, I connect to slack via the weechat wee-slack plugin, and it's great to filter out all that gunk. I want plain text chat, and this way I can still get it.
CJefferson 9y ago
For me, it is the fact that most people connect with multiple devices, and want to have a smooth transition between them, and to be able to see history on all of them. There is no easy way of doing that with IRC, which kills it for me.
- kuschku 9y ago
  > There is no easy way of doing that with IRC, which kills it for me. Yes, there is! This is exactly what Quassel is made for. Just run the core anywhere (we’re looking into offering it hosted, too), connect with the web ui, the desktop client (Linux, Mac, Windows - uses Qt5, and is only a few megabytes, uses almost no RAM at all. A true native client), or the Android client. As many devices as you want under one account, a smooth transition from one to any other, shared history (just scroll up - all devices remember where the others left off, and you always see exactly the same on all of them). With some minor extra effort, you even get nice and fast fulltext search – this video is recorded on a 2$ OVH VPS, searching through 3 years and 6GB of logs in 65ms: https://s3.kuschku.de/public/quassel-rest-search.mp4 https://s3.kuschku.de/public/quassel-rest-search.mp4 All of this under GPL.
  - CJefferson 9y ago
    I'm glad you are working on that, but "Just run the core anywhere (we’re looking into offering it hosted, too), connect with the web ui," really doesn't count as easy to use -- now everyone on my IRC channel needs to run a server which is is accessable to the internet, worry about security updates, both for the server and your software specifically. Whereas with slack, I just do "make account, login, done". Until it's as easy as slack, I can't pursade people I work with to move over.
    - kuschku 9y ago
      > now everyone on my IRC channel needs to run a server which is is accessable to the internet, worry about security updates, both for the server and your software specifically. Well, the beautiful thing about this is that you can run one quassel core, for dozens, hundreds, or potentially even thousands of users. LDAP login is also supported, and I might add later on automated connecting to a pre-configured network. You can probably imagine that this is very useful already.
LocutusOfBorges 9y ago
Discord, overwhelmingly. Every IRC community I used to be a part of even a year ago has made the jump. It's just more convenient for all concerned- the only holdouts are people clinging to their CLIs and people objecting for ideological reasons. I wish it hadn't come to this, but IRC's just stagnated for too long. The barrier to entry's too high, using it on mobile devices is a chore, the feature set's extremely limited, etc. Had IRCv3 managed to get off the ground and made some strides towards creating a modern user experience maybe two years ago, Discord wouldn't have had such a vulnerable market open for it to stroll in and snatch up. Discord provides seamless cloud message logging, mobile notifications, intuitive clients, a huge ecosystem of easy-to-use bots, and integration with games that just works without the user having to set anything up. Even non-gaming-related communities have been switching to it for convenience's sake.
- kakarot 9y ago
  I just wish this wasn't a battle of decentralization vs centralization. Discord seems cool and all but channel operators lack reasonable amount of ownership over their channels and Discord touches every message that comes through its network.
  - pavel_lishin 9y ago
    I'm not necessarily disagreeing, but do you mean ownership over Discord channels or Discord servers?
    - kakarot 9y ago
      I mean servers. The protocol is locked to the platform.
  - ryandrake 9y ago
    Unfortunately it seems to be an irreversible trend: Decentralized/federated services with many compatible client options are dying and being replaced by many competing and incompatible centralized services, each with few (or one) client options. It's like programmers are all constantly asking the question: "How can we make the Internet worse?" If E-mail were invented today, there would be 5+ competing protocols, owned by 5+ competing companies, you could only use clients written by those companies, and you wouldn't be able to send E-mail to someone on a different service than the one you were on. Kind of like the current text chat app cluster-fuck we have to live with.
curioussavage 9y ago
I think it may be partly that it was largely created and used by people who don’t care about ease of use and appearances, maybe partly because it kept out the masses. Make it hard for new people and eventually your old users are gone with no one to replace them. Personally I try to keep most of my workflow in the terminal but I haven’t been able to find an irc client I like and the rooms I join are always silent. I don’t the etiquette and have zero incentives learn
na85 9y ago
Change aversion killed IRC. A lot of the opers on the big networks are extremely conservative and default to poo-pooing ideas because it's simpler. IRC with good mobile/push support could have taken off, but using it from a mobile device is painful because of the constant drops and the need to have your device responding to ping pongs every few seconds kills your battery.
- kuschku 9y ago
  > IRC with good mobile/push support could have taken off, but using it from a mobile device is painful because of the constant drops and the need to have your device responding to ping pongs every few seconds kills your battery. You mean, something like IRCCloud, or what I’m moving Quasseldroid to right now?
  - na85 9y ago
    Yes, except irc cloud is a 3rd party platform and requires payment as far as I'm aware. "Something like irc cloud" should have been baked into the ircd/protocol so that there's a lower barrier to entry.
    - kuschku 9y ago
      Well, Quassel is the same, open source, under GPL, self-hosted. (Disclaimer: I contribute to Quassel occasionally)
      - na85 9y ago
        Again, it needs to be baked into the server, otherwise it's just another barrier to entry.
        kuschku 9y ago
        That’s not really possible, actually. The push notification systems used by Android and iOS only allow the same person that can authorize updates for an app to send push notifications to this app. This means either every IRC app would need to operate an open gateway for notifications, or you’d need to give every IRC server the same certificate that you use to sign your app updates on the Apple AppStore. Push notifications on mobile devices are designed to only work for situations where the same company controls all servers, and apps.
yumaikas 9y ago
There is still #xkcd on foonetic, #ludumdare on afternet, as well as #lobsters and #proglangdesign on freenode. They may not be active 24/7, but there are good conversationa there if you lurk for awhile.
zanny 9y ago
On the bright side from all the proprietary locked in sell-your-data platforms that were mentioned as IRC successors, Gitter and Matrix are popular and open, and the later is federated. I'm not aware of any major feature IRC has the Matrix protocol doesn't provide, and it has all the niceties of Discord without being the proprietary product of a for profit company.

kuschku 9y ago

Gamers moved from Quakenet to Discord, open source projects moved from Freenode to Slack, and that’s it. Luckily, most projects are left on Freenode, as an open source project relying on a proprietary service is something few people can stomach (outside of some people that already accepted the commercialization of the net)

loeg 9y ago

We use IRC sort of interchangeably with Slack at my work. The nice thing about IRC is you can host it on-premise and Slack doesn't have all of your company's confidential information. The downside is that it doesn't come bundled with a pretty webapp with GIFs and emojis.

awirth 9y ago
At work we have an onsite Zulip instance which meets both those requirements for us (including SSO integration). It's surprising to me that there aren't more places using it.
- loeg 9y ago
  That's a good suggestion, thanks.
- starkruzr 9y ago
  I've been meaning to stand up Zulip at home. Are there good mobile clients for it?
jancborchardt 9y ago
There’s always Riot https://about.riot.im/ https://about.riot.im/ which is a nice and fully open source app so you could set that up on-premise too. :)
- scaryclam 9y ago
  Not sure why you're getting voted down. I'm looking for something to replace hip chat at the moment (we replaced slack with hipchat as slack didn't work well for us either), so I'm genuinely curious why a suggestion for riot is unpopular. Anyone care to comment?
  - e12e 9y ago
    What part of slack didn't work out for you? We're using slack at my workplace - and I think it's okish. Not a fan of it being a web app - but not frustrated enough yet to try the irc bridge with weechat (which is on my todo-list. Seems like a sane way forward, the last irc client I used was BitchX, and I don't think I'll likely to trust such an old c codebase with anything if I can help it..). Now that everyone "knows" what slack is, I wonder if it's time to blow some dust off of Apache (née Google) wave...
    - loeg 9y ago
      The Slack IRC bridge works pretty well, IMO. I use it with irssi. The only negative I can think of is it joins you to every Slack channel you're in every time you reconnect. (Including #general, which you can't permanently leave.) (I guess the other caveat is: it's a 3rd party hosted application; an internet outage or service outage could take it down, and it's potentially vulnerable to massive information leak in a way that your company isn't.)
    - abhirag 9y ago
      Try the wee-slack plugin[https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack https://github.com/wee-slack/wee-slack], it uses the Slack API and I have been using it on my Android phone(using Termux) and my Linux laptop, works great :)
- 9y ago
lscotte 9y ago
To me, that's not a downside but a positive feature. At work, I connect to slack via the weechat wee-slack plugin, and it's great to filter out all that gunk. I want plain text chat, and this way I can still get it.

CJefferson 9y ago

For me, it is the fact that most people connect with multiple devices, and want to have a smooth transition between them, and to be able to see history on all of them. There is no easy way of doing that with IRC, which kills it for me.

kuschku 9y ago
> There is no easy way of doing that with IRC, which kills it for me. Yes, there is! This is exactly what Quassel is made for. Just run the core anywhere (we’re looking into offering it hosted, too), connect with the web ui, the desktop client (Linux, Mac, Windows - uses Qt5, and is only a few megabytes, uses almost no RAM at all. A true native client), or the Android client. As many devices as you want under one account, a smooth transition from one to any other, shared history (just scroll up - all devices remember where the others left off, and you always see exactly the same on all of them). With some minor extra effort, you even get nice and fast fulltext search – this video is recorded on a 2$ OVH VPS, searching through 3 years and 6GB of logs in 65ms: https://s3.kuschku.de/public/quassel-rest-search.mp4 https://s3.kuschku.de/public/quassel-rest-search.mp4 All of this under GPL.
- CJefferson 9y ago
  I'm glad you are working on that, but "Just run the core anywhere (we’re looking into offering it hosted, too), connect with the web ui," really doesn't count as easy to use -- now everyone on my IRC channel needs to run a server which is is accessable to the internet, worry about security updates, both for the server and your software specifically. Whereas with slack, I just do "make account, login, done". Until it's as easy as slack, I can't pursade people I work with to move over.
  - kuschku 9y ago
    > now everyone on my IRC channel needs to run a server which is is accessable to the internet, worry about security updates, both for the server and your software specifically. Well, the beautiful thing about this is that you can run one quassel core, for dozens, hundreds, or potentially even thousands of users. LDAP login is also supported, and I might add later on automated connecting to a pre-configured network. You can probably imagine that this is very useful already.

LocutusOfBorges 9y ago

Discord, overwhelmingly. Every IRC community I used to be a part of even a year ago has made the jump. It's just more convenient for all concerned- the only holdouts are people clinging to their CLIs and people objecting for ideological reasons. I wish it hadn't come to this, but IRC's just stagnated for too long. The barrier to entry's too high, using it on mobile devices is a chore, the feature set's extremely limited, etc. Had IRCv3 managed to get off the ground and made some strides towards creating a modern user experience maybe two years ago, Discord wouldn't have had such a vulnerable market open for it to stroll in and snatch up. Discord provides seamless cloud message logging, mobile notifications, intuitive clients, a huge ecosystem of easy-to-use bots, and integration with games that just works without the user having to set anything up. Even non-gaming-related communities have been switching to it for convenience's sake.

kakarot 9y ago
I just wish this wasn't a battle of decentralization vs centralization. Discord seems cool and all but channel operators lack reasonable amount of ownership over their channels and Discord touches every message that comes through its network.
- pavel_lishin 9y ago
  I'm not necessarily disagreeing, but do you mean ownership over Discord channels or Discord servers?
  - kakarot 9y ago
    I mean servers. The protocol is locked to the platform.
- ryandrake 9y ago
  Unfortunately it seems to be an irreversible trend: Decentralized/federated services with many compatible client options are dying and being replaced by many competing and incompatible centralized services, each with few (or one) client options. It's like programmers are all constantly asking the question: "How can we make the Internet worse?" If E-mail were invented today, there would be 5+ competing protocols, owned by 5+ competing companies, you could only use clients written by those companies, and you wouldn't be able to send E-mail to someone on a different service than the one you were on. Kind of like the current text chat app cluster-fuck we have to live with.

curioussavage 9y ago

I think it may be partly that it was largely created and used by people who don’t care about ease of use and appearances, maybe partly because it kept out the masses. Make it hard for new people and eventually your old users are gone with no one to replace them. Personally I try to keep most of my workflow in the terminal but I haven’t been able to find an irc client I like and the rooms I join are always silent. I don’t the etiquette and have zero incentives learn

na85 9y ago

Change aversion killed IRC. A lot of the opers on the big networks are extremely conservative and default to poo-pooing ideas because it's simpler. IRC with good mobile/push support could have taken off, but using it from a mobile device is painful because of the constant drops and the need to have your device responding to ping pongs every few seconds kills your battery.

kuschku 9y ago
> IRC with good mobile/push support could have taken off, but using it from a mobile device is painful because of the constant drops and the need to have your device responding to ping pongs every few seconds kills your battery. You mean, something like IRCCloud, or what I’m moving Quasseldroid to right now?
- na85 9y ago
  Yes, except irc cloud is a 3rd party platform and requires payment as far as I'm aware. "Something like irc cloud" should have been baked into the ircd/protocol so that there's a lower barrier to entry.
  - kuschku 9y ago
    Well, Quassel is the same, open source, under GPL, self-hosted. (Disclaimer: I contribute to Quassel occasionally)
    - na85 9y ago
      Again, it needs to be baked into the server, otherwise it's just another barrier to entry.
      - kuschku 9y ago
        That’s not really possible, actually. The push notification systems used by Android and iOS only allow the same person that can authorize updates for an app to send push notifications to this app. This means either every IRC app would need to operate an open gateway for notifications, or you’d need to give every IRC server the same certificate that you use to sign your app updates on the Apple AppStore. Push notifications on mobile devices are designed to only work for situations where the same company controls all servers, and apps.

yumaikas 9y ago

There is still #xkcd on foonetic, #ludumdare on afternet, as well as #lobsters and #proglangdesign on freenode. They may not be active 24/7, but there are good conversationa there if you lurk for awhile.

zanny 9y ago

On the bright side from all the proprietary locked in sell-your-data platforms that were mentioned as IRC successors, Gitter and Matrix are popular and open, and the later is federated. I'm not aware of any major feature IRC has the Matrix protocol doesn't provide, and it has all the niceties of Discord without being the proprietary product of a for profit company.