27 ms·

IRC.com Bought by London Trust Media, Pledges an IRC Revival

493 points by metabrew 8y ago

slater 8y ago
"IRC is a transcended level of humanity" Just how high are these folks on their own supply?
- giancarlostoro 8y ago
  Of all the descriptions of IRC I gotta say, that one definitely does not sound like it comes from a sober mind. Nice Scarface reference btw.
  - rasengan 8y ago
    My apologies. What I'm trying to say with that overly-loaded statement is that IRC values people for who they are and doesn't judge a book by its cover.
    - aarpmcgee 8y ago
      IRC is a protocol.
      - LocalH 8y ago
        Then replace "IRC" with "IRC culture"
    - giancarlostoro 8y ago
      All good, sorry if we're being too harsh it's just a bit hard to grasp where you're coming from when staring from the outside.
- toomuchtodo 8y ago
  It's not that far out of line with the status quo: "Indeed, to assess WeWork by conventional metrics is to miss the point, according to [Chief Executive Officer Adam] Neumann. WeWork isn’t really a real estate company. It’s a state of consciousness, he argues, a generation of interconnected emotionally intelligent entrepreneurs." https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-04-27/wework-accounts-for-consciousness https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-04-27/wework-ac...
  - nathanaldensr 8y ago
    We are always told by marketing types that what we perceive isn't real; instead, it's always something at least one level above that. Purely designed to manipulate an emotional response from the reader/viewer. I can say for me it certainly does cause an emotional response, but not the one WeWork or London Trust Media are hoping for.
- drb91 8y ago
  I dunno, I think it’s an expression of the internet that’s better than the average.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
passedby 8y ago
A fair few open source projects mentioned there. If they can be keeping things open while truly helping the existing IRC projects then that would be cool.
agumonkey 8y ago
irc is lively enough, steady and just right. Thanks but no thanks
- sgt 8y ago
  I'm on irc still.. but i've cut down on all the channels I used to hang around in, and now I'm basically only in #motorcycles on EFNet, where IRC is alive and well. Topics range from rebuilding carburetors to the innards of Erlang.
  - noeatnosleep 8y ago
    Huh, I'll have to drop in. I didn't realize efnet had an active #motorcycles channel. I'm in one on freenode and one on snoonet, though.
ve55 8y ago
I'm interested to see how they manage to convince communities to use their IRC services over competitors like Discord when so many users see Discord as easy, free, trendy, etc. Of course services liks Slack, Telegram, Skype, etc, are also potential competitors in this ecosystem. >IRC Gaming (We're going to have literally hundreds of thousands in cash prizes!) I suppose literally paying users money is one way, but it doesn't sound very sustainable. Some of their other projects like "IRC Ventures (VC/Incubation on IRC!)" are pretty hard to imagine the specifics about, but hopefully we'll see some interesting positive actions sooner or later to show us what they really intend to do.
- alehul 8y ago
  While it requires having a service worth staying on once you're familiarized to be successful, paying users is a valid strategy when a network effect is important. PayPal, as an example, is the result of a merger between Confinity (Thiel's) and X (Musk's) competing services. While I believe Confinity had started earlier, X caught up through literally giving people $20 towards eBay purchases if they sign up.
  - zajd 8y ago
    Ahh yes, price dumping, one of the big forces behind "disruption" see: Uber, Lyft, any number of startups growing by losing money, and one of the main anti-competitive forces the government has no desire in addressing. Don't have billions in investor money to lose? You can't play. edit. bring on the downvotes bootlickers, "valid strategy" my ass
    - schoen 8y ago
      Hi zajd, I want to upvote your comment but I don't think I can do that while it calls HN downvoters "bootlickers". Would you consider removing that part?
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
sirfz 8y ago
I can fairly say that it was IRC that introduced me to the coding world (where I learned to code TCL scripts for Eggdrops) when I was in high school and made me decide to switch my major to Computer Science after my first semester as a Graphic Design student (which I only chose because my brother had switched off Internet access from me for a few months which affected my judgment apparently)
- HoppyHaus 8y ago
  I'm of a generation after you, likely, but I'm in the same boat. I learned python by maintaining an IRC bot, which started out rolling d20s. It then expanded into a 1000+ line monstrosity, which was a mess, but the features taught me many aspects of programming, and let me apply it. The bot has since been rewritten into much, much cleaner code, and is one of a few projects I'm proud of. All thanks to RFC1459.
  - sirfz 8y ago
    One of my greatest achievements back then was allprotection.tcl[1] (over 2000+ lines of spaghetti) LOL but I have no doubt that TCL scripting taught me a lot and gave me a huge advantage during my studies! I'm sure you enjoyed what you were doing ;) [1] https://github.com/sirfz/allprotection.tcl https://github.com/sirfz/allprotection.tcl
    - HoppyHaus 8y ago
      Hah, looks better than my original code. When it was starting to be created, I didn't even know how to write a function, and there were a grand total of I think two when it was retired. Here [1] is my updated code. Apologies for some edgy commands, my IRC server has some... interesting people in it. [1] https://hoppy.haus/git/Failure/MIPS https://hoppy.haus/git/Failure/MIPS
- cup-of-tea 8y ago
  IRC is what introduced me to client-server architecture. Like many back then and still today I had this vague idea of "server" meaning some kind of powerful computer with no monitor. I used to love IRC but I was only in dialup Internet and wasn't allowed to use it very often. I sorely wanted to be able to idle on IRC at all times like some people did. But then I discovered I could actually install unrealircd on my own computer! I had my own little network with eggies talking to each other. I experimented with different clients and even connecting manually with telnet. It was great!
bonyt 8y ago
Oh man. The description of how IRC has impacted his life really hits me. I've been using IRC since I was in middle school, I've made and lost friends there, I've learned to program, I've helped others, I've grown as a person. It pains me to watch it fade as we move to platforms like reddit or discord. https://xkcd.com/1782/ https://xkcd.com/1782/
beefhash 8y ago
As a routine user of IRC: This scares – nay, terrifies – me. London Trust Media is colossal. They seem to have control over freenode and Snoonet, two networks basically unchallenged in their niche. Snoonet hasn't been doing so well since Discord, but that's another story. They also seem to own Private Internet Access. If a player becomes too big, they'll change the rules of the game. Just look at the state of Internet advertising: A few corporations probably know a lot more about most better than you wish they did. Re "IRC University": Practically every non-trivial network has its own software stack of some sort. Trying to teach people every kind of IRCd/services combination is more or less doomed to fail. Mainly because people usually just don't want to know. Re "IRC Ventures": There's no money to be made on IRC, at least in its current form. Slack, Discord, etc. gained traction because IRC is fundamentally inaccessible. It does not meet any of the common needs of today: server-side storage of history, mobile-friendly data usage and session management, built-in uploading, profiles and profile pictures, first class support for emoji. Though whether addressing them is correct is another story. However, these would all need to be addressed to try and make IRC competitive on any kind of market. The IRCv3 team, which does have a decently broad amount of adoption, has had issues pushing through much more trivial issues. Hell, we don't even have everybody on the same page about TLS – QuakeNet and UnderNet are still plaintext only. QuakeNet undeniably intentionally so[1]. Mark me highly skeptical of this undertaking. [1] https://www.quakenet.org/articles/99-trust-is-not-transitive-or-why-irc-over-ssl-is-pointless https://www.quakenet.org/articles/99-trust-is-not-transitive... EDIT: Seems I misunderstood some points, see also neatnosleep's response to this comment.
- j45 8y ago
  Slack is today's version of a modern accessible IRC client. It doesn't preclude from the issues of slack being solved by another group. edit: For the IRC uninitiated who enjoy drive-by downvoting: Slack is IRC-inspired - the concept of channels, usernames, private messaging and bots.... in slack is almost all directly inherited from IRC.
  - ihuman 8y ago
    Slack deprecated their IRC and XMPP gateways, so its no longer an IRC client.
caiocaiocaio 8y ago
Meh. I'm still waiting for the triumphant return of the pets.com puppet.
ulkesh 8y ago
I love the optimism. Really. However, while IRC is a great collaboration tool, and one I also grew up using, I find that though users are anonymous and no one can see each other, there are still plenty of trolls who have many ways of getting under one's skin. This utopia of IRC simply doesn't exist. It is still comprised of humans. Anonymous humans. And anonymity tends to bring out the worst in people.
- pmoriarty 8y ago
  My experience with the FreeNode IRC network has been pretty troll-free. They could do even better by requiring everyone to register. In my experience, trolling on IRC is mostly a thing of the past.
  - mattl 8y ago
    > They could do even better by requiring everyone to register. Many channels have this. For example, a lot of the GNU and FSF channels do this so we can keep them relatively spam and troll free.
- geergar 8y ago
  Social Networks with real name policies can be just as anonymous as 4chan. And sometimes, an IRC channel where everyone has a pseudonym can be more intimate than anything else. What makes the difference is: - Moderation - Small Groups - Regulars who get to know each other You can achieve this anywhere online. But I think IRC lends itself to smaller, closely knit communities.
- superkuh 8y ago
  No utopia exists. But IRC is a hell of a lot more pleasant than you make it sound. What I'm afraid of are the centralized proprietary chat networks and the perverse incentives that creates for censorship. Censorship is the worst in people. Anonymity just means people aren't constantly playing identity and power social games.
lcnmrn 8y ago
I just launched https://superthread.net https://superthread.net the other day. It basically replaces IRC with a modern tech stack. Sorry for self promotion, but it’s a bit strange that someone else is having the same idea at the same time.
- orliesaurus 8y ago
  https://spectrum.chat https://spectrum.chat is also very similar! I love the minimalist approach tho!
mepian 8y ago
I don't expect anything good to come out of this for the current IRC users. Hopefully they aren't going to play the embrace-extend-extinguish game in the long run to steal the name for their own proprietary protocol.
- wencha 8y ago
  Remove “proprietary” and that’s what IRCv3 did.
  - strkek 8y ago
    It's like the devs of Clang and GCC suddenly joined to define what "C20" means but bypassing ANSI and ISO processes.
- confounded 8y ago
  Why do you think this? London Trust Media have pretty public and open positions on Net Neutrality, user privacy, and open source software. They are a major donor to various open source projects, and are the primary sponsor of the FSF's LibrePlanet conference (to name one that I happen to be aware of).
ummjackson 8y ago
London Trust Media recently hired Mt. Gox (yes that Mt. Gox) ex-CEO Mark Karpeles as CTO. https://www.engadget.com/2018/04/22/mt-gox-chief-returns-as-cto-of-vpn-giant/ https://www.engadget.com/2018/04/22/mt-gox-chief-returns-as-...
- yborg 8y ago
  That would seem to immediately nullify the "Trust" part.
  - ryanlol 8y ago
    There's no "London" at play here either.
- MaxLeiter 8y ago
  The co-founder of LTM was head of North America operations at Mt. Gox as well, read the first quote: https://www.newsbtc.com/2018/04/19/disgraced-ceo-of-mt-gox-appointed-cto-at-london-trust-media/ https://www.newsbtc.com/2018/04/19/disgraced-ceo-of-mt-gox-a...
  - dmix 8y ago
    And they run Private Internet Access VPN: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Internet_Access https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Internet_Access
- jacquesm 8y ago
  That's pretty tone-deaf. No matter what the guys qualities are that name is toxic.
  - rasengan 8y ago
    Sure, but at the same time, someone who is unwilling to give second chances to the pioneers who took risks before them -- that's more toxic. I want this society to work. And I refuse to let such a chilling effect of fear of failure stop our society from progressing. We all know that you learn best from mistakes. And we, as a society, have gotten much stronger and more resilient.
j45 8y ago
I don't know about trascended... But it definitely has gone backwards since. But irc in its heyday had far higher quality and duration of connection than much that followed it. Maybe it was truly the first generation of the internet. I still have many of those teenage irc connections in my life years later. It's not hard to imagine IRC surviving if it had a natural path to instant messaging when Icq/aim/yahoo arrived. I welcome a return of a modern IRC.
- criddell 8y ago
  I'm waiting on an NNTP revival.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - j45 8y ago
    Rss too
    - gsich 8y ago
      RSS was and is not dead.
      - j45 8y ago
        Didn't mean to imply rss is dead. It's definitely not at the top of the pile where it should be either.
crooked-v 8y ago
IRC will never get popular again. Server-based history and connections shared across devices are just too useful.
- MaxLeiter 8y ago
  This is all possible via clients, like TheLounge or Quassel
  - crooked-v 8y ago
    Not enough people will ever do that to make IRC popular again.
- noeatnosleep 8y ago
  You should try irccloud. Or one of the many clients that do this.
  - crooked-v 8y ago
    Now teach the other hundreds of thousands of ex-IRC users how to set up their own bouncer servers and get them to actually stick with it for any amount of time.
    - always_good 8y ago
      Exactly. "Just use a good client that's always online" doesn't change the fact that almost everyone else on IRC goes offline when they shut their laptop or into a tunnel and you can't even send them a message while they're offline. IRC has deficiencies that ensure that only a small cabal of power users will endure it. I prefer to be part of communities that are more accessible to more walks of life than the person who was bothered to install irssi on his spare EC2 instance. People who suggest that IRC is the pinnacle of chat really seem out of touch to me. For example, look how every Twitch streamer and subreddit have a Discord and almost never an IRC channel.
      - 8y ago
cantelope 8y ago
If I may interject.. Until 4 months ago I didn't know LTMH existed, but I knew I loved Freenode, and IRC in general. Since then I've learned much about LTMH, having been hired by them as a developer and designer. They have treated me very well so far, and I believe in my core that their interests are benevolent. They believe in protecting privacy, freedom of speech, openness of software, and connecting individuals from around the globe. In my experience, LTMH has never sacrificed these principles in the pursuit of financial gain, and I believe this endeavor (the IRC.com project) will, as all their other projects do, serve the community upon which they depend.
mabynogy 8y ago
IRC is great and IMHO still the best chat system we have. I'm active in a IRC-based community of programmers (http://dailyprog.org/chat/ http://dailyprog.org/chat/). I'd like to know more about Andrew Lee (especially if he is reachable on IRC).
lerie82 8y ago
not sure it need a revival. i have been using irc since 99
itchyjunk 8y ago
Freenode already has channels like ##math, ##physics etc where lot of actual lecturers and professors lurk. I've gotten all my math help past few years over there as the quality of help is considerably better than the tutors on campus. So what does "IRC University" mean? Have accredited classes? Or just the same idea ?
orliesaurus 8y ago
Read the article, a bit skeptical, but we'll see. P.S. I been registered on rizon since 2002 - who else is a an oldschool IRC user in here?
- trumped 8y ago
  EFnet was my first favorite network... haven't used that network in years though... #warez950 I think was one of the channels...
nopacience 8y ago
Long live IRC There will always be new platforms like slack, discord, gitter, and whatever. IRC was and still is great. IRC is simple, its text, its stable. Its simple to program on and a lot can be done above it. IRC is open. The basis of old internet protocols are simple, open and powerful Email, IRC, HTML, FTP And as the article points out, irc has no face. IRC was a time people had to ask for a picture. Different from the newer trendier platforms. Back then people used to engage a lot more before they became curios to put a face on a nickname. The internet has been inundated with the "average" people who unfortunately are not interested in "aplications" like mIRC/irssi/bitchX. Looks like average people need apps that are simpler to use than IRC, apps that allow them to promote their profile to the next level, have followers and likes statistic. Which is alright, in the end they are just the average people that wont put effort to learn nonclickable platforms like IRC. The web really exploded when the smartphone came and apps like facebook came also and made the average people go online and understand what internet was for. There was a time when only the nerds understood what internet really was. Nowadays the internet guy is not a "nerd" anymore. Nerd is not perjorative as it once was. IRC is still open, IRC is still kicking. If you are on IRC, dont let the shiny and newer take you out from IRC. Long live IRC
- cmsj 8y ago
  IRC is and always will be, the greatest social network :)
  - martin1975 8y ago
    yep, despite Zuckerberg's attempt to turn a social network(s) into an online stalking tool for your unrequited lover.
  - bengarrr 8y ago
    But its not really a social network...BBSs were/are great too! Plus BBs let you actually manage content versus just chat and link. IRC is great and always will be but a social network it is not...and I doubt we are gonna see any real revival.
    - 8y ago
xf86alsa 8y ago
https://matrix.org https://matrix.org is essentially a modern IRC, but federated and completely FOSS. I suggest people drawn to an IRC-like experience without the proprietary nature of Slack and Discord [give it a shot](https://riot.im https://riot.im).
- warmwaffles 8y ago
  You know that IRC is FOSS as well right?
  - schoen 8y ago
    Maybe the intended contrast isn't between IRC and Matrix, but between Matrix and Slack (which a lot of people like to call "modern IRC" and which isn't FOSS).
  - strkek 8y ago
    And federated too, if I may add.
- progval 8y ago
  Riot is the only stable client officially recommended on Matrix's website, and it's in-browser. So it's not really a viable alternative for a lot of IRC users.
  - Avamander 8y ago
    And it's slow.
a_lieb 8y ago
It's good that they want to maintain and nourish the culture that has grown up around IRC, but in the long run, shouldn't the focus be on keeping the culture but moving it toward newer federated systems like Matrix? IRC is late 80's technology with no security.
- erikb 8y ago
  Just because a protocol is old, doesn't mean you need to replace it. And newer stuff often is just a reiteration of the old stuff anyways.
- fiatjaf 8y ago
  Slack, Discord and Telegram also have no security. IRC is pretty good for public conversations.
- LinuxBender 8y ago
  I am not sure I follow. I've run UnrealIRCD for a very long time and it has more security and privacy capabilities than any of the newer chat systems.
ge0rg 8y ago
Everything in this post except the personal sentiment could be about any semi-anonymous text based communication medium, be it mailing lists, web forums or any other chat system with group chats / channels. As somebody who has been on irc for over 20 years now, and shares most of the sentiment, I still wouldn't invest into the tech. As others have written, the protocol simply isn't adequate for today's usage scenarios. This is a problem that people have been fighting with some success on xmpp, which is far more flexible and is a superset of what irc provides, and there are the obvious web stack based solutions like Slack, Matrix and Mattermost. Still, people rather use Facebook groups today, and we won't convert them by making irc better.
Fukkaudeku 8y ago
Let IRC die. Shit protocol, horrible usability.
- gsich 8y ago
  Noob detected.
  - Fukkaudeku 8y ago
    I've used IRC for ~10 years, but sure.
    - gsich 8y ago
      Confirms my suspision.
fimdomeio 8y ago
hmm... To me irc was great as a young teenager in the first half of the 90's because my friends were there. I used a lot of geographical local channels so at some point people started organizing dinners, and I ended up knowing a lot of people. I still love the concept of irc but people are gone and they are never coming back unless someone destroys fb, snapchat or whatever they are using right now.
csixty4 8y ago
I used to live on IRC, but it's been years since I was a regular user. Are channel takeovers still a thing? That was one of the things that turned me off on it after getting locked out of the channel I called home for most of a decade.
- progval 8y ago
  No, channel admins register their channel to a bot (ChanServ) with special privileges over the network, so the bot can never be taken over. I've been using IRC for about a decade, and almost all networks I have seen have such a bot.
badrabbit 8y ago
I like IRC but it's 2018 and even the latest drafts of ircv3 lack built in e2e encryption for private and group messages. Using IRC is like using ftp or email. We've been there and tried that,slapping on a solution to secure it just won't work well. They've been trying to fix email for decades now and the best solutions we have(gpg and s/mime) still don't provide metadata security (I don't think their encryption can be callend end to end either) In my opinion, a new end to end encrypted protocol that preserves the properties of IRC people like would be ideal.
- CapacitorSet 8y ago
  Isn't IRC compatible with e2e? I could see it working at a "transport" layer, with additional commands to import, export and view keys.
  - badrabbit 8y ago
    If you break backwards compatibility? Maybe to an extent. How do you handle clients that don't support it? How do you secure channels and allow some of the current server op/admin (what freenoders call staffer) functionality? By the time you consider that and more you might as well make a new protocol. Let's say someone with an older irc client or who doesn't want e2e messages you,what then? Now your irc conversations become opportunistically secure. That means only arbitrary conversations are secure. Email does this and it sucks. Another problem,clients that don't have e2e almost always also store logs in plain text. Yet another problem - no protocol level e2e plans as of yet. So why try to fix it? This approach does not work. The least we can do is learn from history. Unlike email or ftp, there aren't a whole lot of people that depend on irc being the current irc protocol. What people want is a distributed server architecture with a user interface that is similar to the current irc. What protocol engineers seem to get wrong is that they use the opportunity to also add other fancy features which simply ends up working against adoption.
    - strkek 8y ago
      I can perfectly see this implemented without breaking backwards compatibility, similar to how we have usermodes for "connected via SSL" and channel modes for "requires SSL". It doesn't require breaking backwards compatibility because, as far as outdated clients are concerned, they just "can't enter a channel because they lack a required usermode" or "can't send a message to some user because they lack a required usermode". We only need the spec to define "some way" to do it so clients can announce their support and servers know what to do with the supporting clients. Then it's up to IRC daemons to provide some modes for it.
kuon 8y ago
This is a bit off topic, and I love IRC, but I'd love a modern IRC client. Features I'd like: - Inline images and media - html preview - people list, friends, but also an automatic highlight system, when I chat with someone I don't know for some time, I'd like to have that person on some list. - Conversation history (a way to jump to my conversations within the channel history). - More advanced profiles (image, bio...) Option to publish my public channel list. - End to end encryption if in private channels - Notifications - Status (busy, helping...) - Activity summary (mostly for private channels but being able to know who was active, and what was discussed). - Reactions (on busy channels it is quite fun and a fun way to say thanks without pollution). - Threads.
- prawnsalad 8y ago
  (kiwiirc.com dev here) You might want to take a look at irccloud.com and kiwiirc.com/nextclient These 2 clients cover most of your use case while others such as end to end encryption are currently being developed. Hopefully with with irc.com support multiple IRC clients can be reaching all of these features and in a standard open way.
badrabbit 8y ago
Isn't london trust media the owner of freenode and privateinternetaccess?
- prawnsalad 8y ago
  Yup! https://londontrustmedia.com/ https://londontrustmedia.com/
- dredmorbius 8y ago
  And Linux Journal.
amatecha 8y ago
I mean, IRC is still going pretty strong. I've used IRCCloud [0] for years and swear by it. IRC is still pretty much the universal chat protocol you can expect to find discussion forums for pretty much any subject, and not encumbered by centralized commercial systems like Slack or Discord (as much as I like them). [0] https://www.irccloud.com/ https://www.irccloud.com/
alanpost 8y ago
We do customer support over IRC, on Freenode and OFTC. Particularly with the availability of web clients on Freenode, casual IRC users can reach us with minimal hassle while long-time users idle and voice when they're highlighted or the discussion interests them. My experience of Freenode is improved since PIA's involvement. Staff lurk in our channel on-hand to help if something comes up. Last month when services went down a developer put their head in to talk about the outage and share the patch developed from the experience. I don't think there is another chat platform with that kind of robust community. The tooling for IRC makes the experience more like an auditorium than a parlor. I'm optimistic about this announcement--if IRC has a future I believe it will be due to the social scale at which it is capable of operating.
- nopacience 8y ago
  Support over IRC is historical in open source. irc.perl.org -- perl language support and development irc.mozilla.org -- mozila related support and development irc.freenode.net has many support channels: #mysql #postgresql #vim #emacs #nodejs #css #javascript #python #manjaro -- manjaro linux distro #archlinux -- arch linux distro #freebsd #linux #vuejs -- horrible support (frontend channel) #angularjs -- horrible support (frontend channel) #elasticsearch #sqlite #xen #docker #git and the list goes on. many great people there :)
  - dikiaap 8y ago
    #vuejs is created by Evan You. As a topic on the channel, he seems abandoned the channel and suggest people go to Gitter for active support.
xor1 8y ago
Please no ircoin.
Dowwie 8y ago
My first experience with the internet was through IRC. I had read about IRC in a book I had gotten at a computer show in 1991. I had no idea what I was looking at but figured out how to join a channel. I chatted with someone from Indonesia! How cool was that. None of my friends could relate. I continue to use IRC regularly. The Python community is thriving on Freenode and Rust community on Mozilla
st3fan 8y ago
Who cares about the domain. Don’t need a fancy .com for a revival.
giancarlostoro 8y ago
I'd love to see IRCv3 take off more: https://ircv3.net/irc/ https://ircv3.net/irc/ I also want to understand web clients more, do they use WebSockets? Can we spec that out to be part of every IRC server out there?
- prawnsalad 8y ago
  Most use a websocket library like sockjs or socket.io which uses websockets and falls back to long polling if there's an issue with that. Some IRC servers are starting to implement native websockets but that introduces several issues, so many networks use a websocket gateway to accept websockets to their network, such as https://github.com/kiwiirc/webircgateway https://github.com/kiwiirc/webircgateway Then for IRCv3, most clients these days do support their specs in some form of way, and it's growing :)
valeg 8y ago
Fediverse has a better shot than this.
hestefisk 8y ago
We should be pleased that someone actually wants to move irc forward and invest in it. I first discovered IRC in 1995 hanging out on #hackerzlair and later various Linux channels on EFnet. Without the countless hours on irssi inside GNU screen (yes, there was something before tmux!) I wouldn’t be where I am today in my career. That said, we need to keep it distributed as much as possible; too few owners could be poisonous. To my last point, I could easily see a second revival of irc using IPFS as the transport layer. Same feeling of community and privacy in a text terminal, but no central nodes.
- moises_silva 8y ago
  Wait, there is something after screen?
jaequery 8y ago
Long time user of IRC and I never ever heard of irc.com till now. What is it for and what does it do??? I have been saddened to see the state of IRC declining year after year. I love the fact someone is trying to do something about it!
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
madprops 8y ago
I love IRC. Use it every day. I'm developing my own chat stack though, which supports images, video, and audio changes as core features of it. This is how an empty room looks like: https://i.imgur.com/ir3qyUp.jpg https://i.imgur.com/ir3qyUp.jpg Code can be found in https://github.com/madprops/Hue https://github.com/madprops/Hue Been working on it since 2016
noddingham 8y ago
IRC revival? What do people think Slack, Hipchat, Discord, Stride, etc. are? They're IRC derivatives. I spent my formative years online in IRC rooms so for me I feel like the "revival" has been going on for years.
ekianjo 8y ago
Revival? I did not know IRC was dead. I am still using it every day.
znpy 8y ago
I am part of a student association of GNU/Linux users in my university. A long time ago many of the founders met on IRC, and after founding this association, they also founded a dedicated IRC channel. This was nearly twenty years ago. Time has passed, many new presidents and members have proposed new communication media (slack, zulip, mattermost among the many) and after some initial enthusiasm they all faded, their problems had become evident and their usage has dropped since. Needless to say, that IRC channel remained. Despite everything.
noway421 8y ago
IRC should surpass the notion of just a protocol and become a real product. The UX is still not user friendly. There's no standard way of doing threads. Rolling out IRC in an organisation is extremely hard. Cloud-based IRC hosting providers are hardly credible and not endorsed by anyone as enterprise-ready. IRC Clients are offering drastically different level of experience, if even usable out-of-the-box. Authentication is hard (why do we have a hack like NICKSERV if that stuff should be in the protocol?). Offline message retention, history viewing, and seamless offline/online transitions are completely broken (Bouncer usually solves those with terrible UX). Messaging is not easy. There are teams out there who are working on solving those hard problems full time while having the luxury of having a centralised specification with full control over implementation. IRC won't be ever be able to achieve that without transitioning into a centralised product. There are reasons why going as centralised product is best. Twitter did the same (it was easy from the technical point of view, hard from community point of view). They managed to up their game in the user experience by doing so. I'm not sure IRC can even do that at this point, the protocol is in the wild and making additions to it/standardising them, getting clients to adopt the changes would be hard. But it would be the only way for IRC to compete with other solutions.
kuba-orlik 8y ago
For me the thing that IRC desperately needs is a set of features that would make it usable on mobile... While constantly switching networks (wifi, 3g etc) it's almost certain I will miss some of the messages. That is a real dealbreaker for me and the reason why we've decided to have an irc->telegram vridge so people can keep up with the conversation on the go. Spoiler alert: now everybody just uses Telegram
- cup-of-tea 8y ago
  Back when I used IRC for work I always ran irssi on a server in screen and ssh'd in. I had a window that picked up any highlight that happened and, of course, logged everything. I liked this solution. After a while people would understand that you are always idling and probably afk but that you would pick up any messages as soon as you can. Nowadays you could idle using a raspberry pi or something. It would use less power than your phone. I don't want IRC while I'm out. That's not the point of it.
  - jan-jakub 8y ago
    Of course I can do that - and I did, with znc on my vps. But it's not a solution for beginners or less-technical people. Lack of server-side history also makes it basically impossible for new members to read into the conversation history... Adding it to the spec would make it 1000x easier to onboard new users
    - cup-of-tea 8y ago
      > But it's not a solution for beginners or less-technical people. I don't see a problem. You don't give beginners enough credit. We were beginners once and we managed it just fine. If anything beginners today are cleverer than us :) > Lack of server-side history also makes it basically impossible for new members to read into the conversation history Is this actually something people do? For one of my channels I had stats generated from the logs and ability to search the entire log. I'm sure that could be trivially setup nowadays with Elasticsearch or something. If you control the server you can guarantee you'll catch every message too and won't lose any in a netsplit.
babbit999 8y ago
A friend introduced me to IRC around mid 90s when internet was getting popular in Sweden. DALnet was the network and it was late hours due to the channels main participants where from overseas. My friend went to the channels IRL get together in the US. Met there his love of his life, married and moved to the US. I think it’s a great story about the impact of internet and IRC was and probably is. Turning to today, I think IRC can be a big player in the area of IoT. Especially because internet is going into a period of decentralisation. It’s starts with the geeks, like you and I, and later the main caucas will trend on. Long Live IRC!
GyYZTfWBfQw 8y ago
DO NOT invite the normies!
J0BC6xEIDNi4 8y ago
I tried to find contact details for LondonTrustMedia but I couldn't so I'll write this here. Please implement and offer first class support for an onion hidden service.
Jigsy 8y ago
How can you revive something that never died? :>
wst_ 8y ago
The biggest problem, and biggest fail of IRC. It is too low level and requires people to write scripts when they need anything else beyond simple text message. I am torn apart here, because I really do like hacking things. The issue is - most people don't. They just want to use it, and they want to use it consistently - no matter the platform, the client, the server they are connecting to. And I totally understand that. More of it, I also understand that if you fail to provide this consistency your service have failed in the design phase and will never get widespread usage. The sooner we, tech savvy people, understand that, the sooner we'll be able to deliver a successful open services that actually stand a chance with their closed counterpart. So obviously, give people way to hack, but you must to: * Design a rich protocol covering needs of the biggest target possible while allowing optionally disable features. Channels history, disappearing messages, embedded media, text formatting, emoji, stickers, web hooks, API for bots, you name it. The protocol must cover most of them, so there is no need to write scripts anymore, unless you need something niche. * Design a strict spec for the clients, so all of them must keep to the spec, or they fail to be part of the service. And this is critical - do no allow client to behave differently and have a missing features. * Design clients so they are trivial to use. They must be usable out of box and all (most) of the features must be enabled after installation. Necessary steps to start using it (connection, channels, etc.) should be reduced to minimum and intuitive. * Keep a community of server and client developers so they can share info and be able to build uniform solution for the users. * And probably most important - promote the service. And do promote it heavily, unless you want to design something niche, which, I guess, is not what we are talking here. I've used IRC for years in the past. It was great, I do admit - not anymore. Today I require at least few formatting options (bold, inline code, block code) and no 3rd party tools needed to get anything else work properly. I have no time to hack things I need to use. I would rather spend my time to hack things I like. IRC is just a tool to communicate, I want to use it, not hack it. I loathe to jump here and there to accomplish tasks that should be done within a second with one click. The biggest problem I observe with many things in the industry is - made by devs for devs. Never for average Joe. Average Joe have no idea about keeping your session attached so you don't loose nick, logs, etc. Neither he cares about that stuff. And honestly - the older I get, the less time I have for this kind of stuff as well. Just make it work or face the failure.
whywhywhywhy 8y ago
IRC proves that having a barrier to entry can be a beautiful thing in some cases. I hang about in an IRC channel with less than 10 active users, still more valuable than any Slack channel I lurk in with hundreds.

493 points by metabrew 8y ago

slater 8y ago

"IRC is a transcended level of humanity" Just how high are these folks on their own supply?

giancarlostoro 8y ago
Of all the descriptions of IRC I gotta say, that one definitely does not sound like it comes from a sober mind. Nice Scarface reference btw.
- rasengan 8y ago
  My apologies. What I'm trying to say with that overly-loaded statement is that IRC values people for who they are and doesn't judge a book by its cover.
  - aarpmcgee 8y ago
    IRC is a protocol.
    - LocalH 8y ago
      Then replace "IRC" with "IRC culture"
  - giancarlostoro 8y ago
    All good, sorry if we're being too harsh it's just a bit hard to grasp where you're coming from when staring from the outside.
toomuchtodo 8y ago
It's not that far out of line with the status quo: "Indeed, to assess WeWork by conventional metrics is to miss the point, according to [Chief Executive Officer Adam] Neumann. WeWork isn’t really a real estate company. It’s a state of consciousness, he argues, a generation of interconnected emotionally intelligent entrepreneurs." https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-04-27/wework-accounts-for-consciousness https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-04-27/wework-ac...
- nathanaldensr 8y ago
  We are always told by marketing types that what we perceive isn't real; instead, it's always something at least one level above that. Purely designed to manipulate an emotional response from the reader/viewer. I can say for me it certainly does cause an emotional response, but not the one WeWork or London Trust Media are hoping for.
drb91 8y ago
I dunno, I think it’s an expression of the internet that’s better than the average.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

passedby 8y ago

A fair few open source projects mentioned there. If they can be keeping things open while truly helping the existing IRC projects then that would be cool.

agumonkey 8y ago

irc is lively enough, steady and just right. Thanks but no thanks

sgt 8y ago
I'm on irc still.. but i've cut down on all the channels I used to hang around in, and now I'm basically only in #motorcycles on EFNet, where IRC is alive and well. Topics range from rebuilding carburetors to the innards of Erlang.
- noeatnosleep 8y ago
  Huh, I'll have to drop in. I didn't realize efnet had an active #motorcycles channel. I'm in one on freenode and one on snoonet, though.

ve55 8y ago

I'm interested to see how they manage to convince communities to use their IRC services over competitors like Discord when so many users see Discord as easy, free, trendy, etc. Of course services liks Slack, Telegram, Skype, etc, are also potential competitors in this ecosystem. >IRC Gaming (We're going to have literally hundreds of thousands in cash prizes!) I suppose literally paying users money is one way, but it doesn't sound very sustainable. Some of their other projects like "IRC Ventures (VC/Incubation on IRC!)" are pretty hard to imagine the specifics about, but hopefully we'll see some interesting positive actions sooner or later to show us what they really intend to do.

alehul 8y ago
While it requires having a service worth staying on once you're familiarized to be successful, paying users is a valid strategy when a network effect is important. PayPal, as an example, is the result of a merger between Confinity (Thiel's) and X (Musk's) competing services. While I believe Confinity had started earlier, X caught up through literally giving people $20 towards eBay purchases if they sign up.
- zajd 8y ago
  Ahh yes, price dumping, one of the big forces behind "disruption" see: Uber, Lyft, any number of startups growing by losing money, and one of the main anti-competitive forces the government has no desire in addressing. Don't have billions in investor money to lose? You can't play. edit. bring on the downvotes bootlickers, "valid strategy" my ass
  - schoen 8y ago
    Hi zajd, I want to upvote your comment but I don't think I can do that while it calls HN downvoters "bootlickers". Would you consider removing that part?
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]

sirfz 8y ago

I can fairly say that it was IRC that introduced me to the coding world (where I learned to code TCL scripts for Eggdrops) when I was in high school and made me decide to switch my major to Computer Science after my first semester as a Graphic Design student (which I only chose because my brother had switched off Internet access from me for a few months which affected my judgment apparently)

HoppyHaus 8y ago
I'm of a generation after you, likely, but I'm in the same boat. I learned python by maintaining an IRC bot, which started out rolling d20s. It then expanded into a 1000+ line monstrosity, which was a mess, but the features taught me many aspects of programming, and let me apply it. The bot has since been rewritten into much, much cleaner code, and is one of a few projects I'm proud of. All thanks to RFC1459.
- sirfz 8y ago
  One of my greatest achievements back then was allprotection.tcl[1] (over 2000+ lines of spaghetti) LOL but I have no doubt that TCL scripting taught me a lot and gave me a huge advantage during my studies! I'm sure you enjoyed what you were doing ;) [1] https://github.com/sirfz/allprotection.tcl https://github.com/sirfz/allprotection.tcl
  - HoppyHaus 8y ago
    Hah, looks better than my original code. When it was starting to be created, I didn't even know how to write a function, and there were a grand total of I think two when it was retired. Here [1] is my updated code. Apologies for some edgy commands, my IRC server has some... interesting people in it. [1] https://hoppy.haus/git/Failure/MIPS https://hoppy.haus/git/Failure/MIPS
cup-of-tea 8y ago
IRC is what introduced me to client-server architecture. Like many back then and still today I had this vague idea of "server" meaning some kind of powerful computer with no monitor. I used to love IRC but I was only in dialup Internet and wasn't allowed to use it very often. I sorely wanted to be able to idle on IRC at all times like some people did. But then I discovered I could actually install unrealircd on my own computer! I had my own little network with eggies talking to each other. I experimented with different clients and even connecting manually with telnet. It was great!

bonyt 8y ago

Oh man. The description of how IRC has impacted his life really hits me. I've been using IRC since I was in middle school, I've made and lost friends there, I've learned to program, I've helped others, I've grown as a person. It pains me to watch it fade as we move to platforms like reddit or discord. https://xkcd.com/1782/ https://xkcd.com/1782/

beefhash 8y ago

As a routine user of IRC: This scares – nay, terrifies – me. London Trust Media is colossal. They seem to have control over freenode and Snoonet, two networks basically unchallenged in their niche. Snoonet hasn't been doing so well since Discord, but that's another story. They also seem to own Private Internet Access. If a player becomes too big, they'll change the rules of the game. Just look at the state of Internet advertising: A few corporations probably know a lot more about most better than you wish they did. Re "IRC University": Practically every non-trivial network has its own software stack of some sort. Trying to teach people every kind of IRCd/services combination is more or less doomed to fail. Mainly because people usually just don't want to know. Re "IRC Ventures": There's no money to be made on IRC, at least in its current form. Slack, Discord, etc. gained traction because IRC is fundamentally inaccessible. It does not meet any of the common needs of today: server-side storage of history, mobile-friendly data usage and session management, built-in uploading, profiles and profile pictures, first class support for emoji. Though whether addressing them is correct is another story. However, these would all need to be addressed to try and make IRC competitive on any kind of market. The IRCv3 team, which does have a decently broad amount of adoption, has had issues pushing through much more trivial issues. Hell, we don't even have everybody on the same page about TLS – QuakeNet and UnderNet are still plaintext only. QuakeNet undeniably intentionally so[1]. Mark me highly skeptical of this undertaking. [1] https://www.quakenet.org/articles/99-trust-is-not-transitive-or-why-irc-over-ssl-is-pointless https://www.quakenet.org/articles/99-trust-is-not-transitive... EDIT: Seems I misunderstood some points, see also neatnosleep's response to this comment.

j45 8y ago
Slack is today's version of a modern accessible IRC client. It doesn't preclude from the issues of slack being solved by another group. edit: For the IRC uninitiated who enjoy drive-by downvoting: Slack is IRC-inspired - the concept of channels, usernames, private messaging and bots.... in slack is almost all directly inherited from IRC.
- ihuman 8y ago
  Slack deprecated their IRC and XMPP gateways, so its no longer an IRC client.

caiocaiocaio 8y ago

Meh. I'm still waiting for the triumphant return of the pets.com puppet.

ulkesh 8y ago

I love the optimism. Really. However, while IRC is a great collaboration tool, and one I also grew up using, I find that though users are anonymous and no one can see each other, there are still plenty of trolls who have many ways of getting under one's skin. This utopia of IRC simply doesn't exist. It is still comprised of humans. Anonymous humans. And anonymity tends to bring out the worst in people.

pmoriarty 8y ago
My experience with the FreeNode IRC network has been pretty troll-free. They could do even better by requiring everyone to register. In my experience, trolling on IRC is mostly a thing of the past.
- mattl 8y ago
  > They could do even better by requiring everyone to register. Many channels have this. For example, a lot of the GNU and FSF channels do this so we can keep them relatively spam and troll free.
geergar 8y ago
Social Networks with real name policies can be just as anonymous as 4chan. And sometimes, an IRC channel where everyone has a pseudonym can be more intimate than anything else. What makes the difference is: - Moderation - Small Groups - Regulars who get to know each other You can achieve this anywhere online. But I think IRC lends itself to smaller, closely knit communities.
superkuh 8y ago
No utopia exists. But IRC is a hell of a lot more pleasant than you make it sound. What I'm afraid of are the centralized proprietary chat networks and the perverse incentives that creates for censorship. Censorship is the worst in people. Anonymity just means people aren't constantly playing identity and power social games.

lcnmrn 8y ago

I just launched https://superthread.net https://superthread.net the other day. It basically replaces IRC with a modern tech stack. Sorry for self promotion, but it’s a bit strange that someone else is having the same idea at the same time.

orliesaurus 8y ago
https://spectrum.chat https://spectrum.chat is also very similar! I love the minimalist approach tho!

mepian 8y ago

I don't expect anything good to come out of this for the current IRC users. Hopefully they aren't going to play the embrace-extend-extinguish game in the long run to steal the name for their own proprietary protocol.

wencha 8y ago
Remove “proprietary” and that’s what IRCv3 did.
- strkek 8y ago
  It's like the devs of Clang and GCC suddenly joined to define what "C20" means but bypassing ANSI and ISO processes.
confounded 8y ago
Why do you think this? London Trust Media have pretty public and open positions on Net Neutrality, user privacy, and open source software. They are a major donor to various open source projects, and are the primary sponsor of the FSF's LibrePlanet conference (to name one that I happen to be aware of).

ummjackson 8y ago

London Trust Media recently hired Mt. Gox (yes that Mt. Gox) ex-CEO Mark Karpeles as CTO. https://www.engadget.com/2018/04/22/mt-gox-chief-returns-as-cto-of-vpn-giant/ https://www.engadget.com/2018/04/22/mt-gox-chief-returns-as-...

yborg 8y ago
That would seem to immediately nullify the "Trust" part.
- ryanlol 8y ago
  There's no "London" at play here either.
MaxLeiter 8y ago
The co-founder of LTM was head of North America operations at Mt. Gox as well, read the first quote: https://www.newsbtc.com/2018/04/19/disgraced-ceo-of-mt-gox-appointed-cto-at-london-trust-media/ https://www.newsbtc.com/2018/04/19/disgraced-ceo-of-mt-gox-a...
- dmix 8y ago
  And they run Private Internet Access VPN: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Internet_Access https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Internet_Access
jacquesm 8y ago
That's pretty tone-deaf. No matter what the guys qualities are that name is toxic.
- rasengan 8y ago
  Sure, but at the same time, someone who is unwilling to give second chances to the pioneers who took risks before them -- that's more toxic. I want this society to work. And I refuse to let such a chilling effect of fear of failure stop our society from progressing. We all know that you learn best from mistakes. And we, as a society, have gotten much stronger and more resilient.

j45 8y ago

I don't know about trascended... But it definitely has gone backwards since. But irc in its heyday had far higher quality and duration of connection than much that followed it. Maybe it was truly the first generation of the internet. I still have many of those teenage irc connections in my life years later. It's not hard to imagine IRC surviving if it had a natural path to instant messaging when Icq/aim/yahoo arrived. I welcome a return of a modern IRC.

criddell 8y ago
I'm waiting on an NNTP revival.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- j45 8y ago
  Rss too
  - gsich 8y ago
    RSS was and is not dead.
    - j45 8y ago
      Didn't mean to imply rss is dead. It's definitely not at the top of the pile where it should be either.

crooked-v 8y ago

IRC will never get popular again. Server-based history and connections shared across devices are just too useful.

MaxLeiter 8y ago
This is all possible via clients, like TheLounge or Quassel
- crooked-v 8y ago
  Not enough people will ever do that to make IRC popular again.
noeatnosleep 8y ago
You should try irccloud. Or one of the many clients that do this.
- crooked-v 8y ago
  Now teach the other hundreds of thousands of ex-IRC users how to set up their own bouncer servers and get them to actually stick with it for any amount of time.
  - always_good 8y ago
    Exactly. "Just use a good client that's always online" doesn't change the fact that almost everyone else on IRC goes offline when they shut their laptop or into a tunnel and you can't even send them a message while they're offline. IRC has deficiencies that ensure that only a small cabal of power users will endure it. I prefer to be part of communities that are more accessible to more walks of life than the person who was bothered to install irssi on his spare EC2 instance. People who suggest that IRC is the pinnacle of chat really seem out of touch to me. For example, look how every Twitch streamer and subreddit have a Discord and almost never an IRC channel.
    - 8y ago

cantelope 8y ago

If I may interject.. Until 4 months ago I didn't know LTMH existed, but I knew I loved Freenode, and IRC in general. Since then I've learned much about LTMH, having been hired by them as a developer and designer. They have treated me very well so far, and I believe in my core that their interests are benevolent. They believe in protecting privacy, freedom of speech, openness of software, and connecting individuals from around the globe. In my experience, LTMH has never sacrificed these principles in the pursuit of financial gain, and I believe this endeavor (the IRC.com project) will, as all their other projects do, serve the community upon which they depend.

mabynogy 8y ago

IRC is great and IMHO still the best chat system we have. I'm active in a IRC-based community of programmers (http://dailyprog.org/chat/ http://dailyprog.org/chat/). I'd like to know more about Andrew Lee (especially if he is reachable on IRC).

lerie82 8y ago

not sure it need a revival. i have been using irc since 99

itchyjunk 8y ago

Freenode already has channels like ##math, ##physics etc where lot of actual lecturers and professors lurk. I've gotten all my math help past few years over there as the quality of help is considerably better than the tutors on campus. So what does "IRC University" mean? Have accredited classes? Or just the same idea ?

orliesaurus 8y ago

Read the article, a bit skeptical, but we'll see. P.S. I been registered on rizon since 2002 - who else is a an oldschool IRC user in here?

trumped 8y ago
EFnet was my first favorite network... haven't used that network in years though... #warez950 I think was one of the channels...

nopacience 8y ago

Long live IRC There will always be new platforms like slack, discord, gitter, and whatever. IRC was and still is great. IRC is simple, its text, its stable. Its simple to program on and a lot can be done above it. IRC is open. The basis of old internet protocols are simple, open and powerful Email, IRC, HTML, FTP And as the article points out, irc has no face. IRC was a time people had to ask for a picture. Different from the newer trendier platforms. Back then people used to engage a lot more before they became curios to put a face on a nickname. The internet has been inundated with the "average" people who unfortunately are not interested in "aplications" like mIRC/irssi/bitchX. Looks like average people need apps that are simpler to use than IRC, apps that allow them to promote their profile to the next level, have followers and likes statistic. Which is alright, in the end they are just the average people that wont put effort to learn nonclickable platforms like IRC. The web really exploded when the smartphone came and apps like facebook came also and made the average people go online and understand what internet was for. There was a time when only the nerds understood what internet really was. Nowadays the internet guy is not a "nerd" anymore. Nerd is not perjorative as it once was. IRC is still open, IRC is still kicking. If you are on IRC, dont let the shiny and newer take you out from IRC. Long live IRC

cmsj 8y ago
IRC is and always will be, the greatest social network :)
- martin1975 8y ago
  yep, despite Zuckerberg's attempt to turn a social network(s) into an online stalking tool for your unrequited lover.
- bengarrr 8y ago
  But its not really a social network...BBSs were/are great too! Plus BBs let you actually manage content versus just chat and link. IRC is great and always will be but a social network it is not...and I doubt we are gonna see any real revival.
  - 8y ago

xf86alsa 8y ago

https://matrix.org https://matrix.org is essentially a modern IRC, but federated and completely FOSS. I suggest people drawn to an IRC-like experience without the proprietary nature of Slack and Discord [give it a shot](https://riot.im https://riot.im).

warmwaffles 8y ago
You know that IRC is FOSS as well right?
- schoen 8y ago
  Maybe the intended contrast isn't between IRC and Matrix, but between Matrix and Slack (which a lot of people like to call "modern IRC" and which isn't FOSS).
- strkek 8y ago
  And federated too, if I may add.
progval 8y ago
Riot is the only stable client officially recommended on Matrix's website, and it's in-browser. So it's not really a viable alternative for a lot of IRC users.
- Avamander 8y ago
  And it's slow.

a_lieb 8y ago

It's good that they want to maintain and nourish the culture that has grown up around IRC, but in the long run, shouldn't the focus be on keeping the culture but moving it toward newer federated systems like Matrix? IRC is late 80's technology with no security.

erikb 8y ago
Just because a protocol is old, doesn't mean you need to replace it. And newer stuff often is just a reiteration of the old stuff anyways.
fiatjaf 8y ago
Slack, Discord and Telegram also have no security. IRC is pretty good for public conversations.
LinuxBender 8y ago
I am not sure I follow. I've run UnrealIRCD for a very long time and it has more security and privacy capabilities than any of the newer chat systems.

ge0rg 8y ago

Everything in this post except the personal sentiment could be about any semi-anonymous text based communication medium, be it mailing lists, web forums or any other chat system with group chats / channels. As somebody who has been on irc for over 20 years now, and shares most of the sentiment, I still wouldn't invest into the tech. As others have written, the protocol simply isn't adequate for today's usage scenarios. This is a problem that people have been fighting with some success on xmpp, which is far more flexible and is a superset of what irc provides, and there are the obvious web stack based solutions like Slack, Matrix and Mattermost. Still, people rather use Facebook groups today, and we won't convert them by making irc better.

Fukkaudeku 8y ago

Let IRC die. Shit protocol, horrible usability.

gsich 8y ago
Noob detected.
- Fukkaudeku 8y ago
  I've used IRC for ~10 years, but sure.
  - gsich 8y ago
    Confirms my suspision.

fimdomeio 8y ago

hmm... To me irc was great as a young teenager in the first half of the 90's because my friends were there. I used a lot of geographical local channels so at some point people started organizing dinners, and I ended up knowing a lot of people. I still love the concept of irc but people are gone and they are never coming back unless someone destroys fb, snapchat or whatever they are using right now.

csixty4 8y ago

I used to live on IRC, but it's been years since I was a regular user. Are channel takeovers still a thing? That was one of the things that turned me off on it after getting locked out of the channel I called home for most of a decade.

progval 8y ago
No, channel admins register their channel to a bot (ChanServ) with special privileges over the network, so the bot can never be taken over. I've been using IRC for about a decade, and almost all networks I have seen have such a bot.

badrabbit 8y ago

I like IRC but it's 2018 and even the latest drafts of ircv3 lack built in e2e encryption for private and group messages. Using IRC is like using ftp or email. We've been there and tried that,slapping on a solution to secure it just won't work well. They've been trying to fix email for decades now and the best solutions we have(gpg and s/mime) still don't provide metadata security (I don't think their encryption can be callend end to end either) In my opinion, a new end to end encrypted protocol that preserves the properties of IRC people like would be ideal.

CapacitorSet 8y ago
Isn't IRC compatible with e2e? I could see it working at a "transport" layer, with additional commands to import, export and view keys.
- badrabbit 8y ago
  If you break backwards compatibility? Maybe to an extent. How do you handle clients that don't support it? How do you secure channels and allow some of the current server op/admin (what freenoders call staffer) functionality? By the time you consider that and more you might as well make a new protocol. Let's say someone with an older irc client or who doesn't want e2e messages you,what then? Now your irc conversations become opportunistically secure. That means only arbitrary conversations are secure. Email does this and it sucks. Another problem,clients that don't have e2e almost always also store logs in plain text. Yet another problem - no protocol level e2e plans as of yet. So why try to fix it? This approach does not work. The least we can do is learn from history. Unlike email or ftp, there aren't a whole lot of people that depend on irc being the current irc protocol. What people want is a distributed server architecture with a user interface that is similar to the current irc. What protocol engineers seem to get wrong is that they use the opportunity to also add other fancy features which simply ends up working against adoption.
  - strkek 8y ago
    I can perfectly see this implemented without breaking backwards compatibility, similar to how we have usermodes for "connected via SSL" and channel modes for "requires SSL". It doesn't require breaking backwards compatibility because, as far as outdated clients are concerned, they just "can't enter a channel because they lack a required usermode" or "can't send a message to some user because they lack a required usermode". We only need the spec to define "some way" to do it so clients can announce their support and servers know what to do with the supporting clients. Then it's up to IRC daemons to provide some modes for it.

kuon 8y ago

This is a bit off topic, and I love IRC, but I'd love a modern IRC client. Features I'd like: - Inline images and media - html preview - people list, friends, but also an automatic highlight system, when I chat with someone I don't know for some time, I'd like to have that person on some list. - Conversation history (a way to jump to my conversations within the channel history). - More advanced profiles (image, bio...) Option to publish my public channel list. - End to end encryption if in private channels - Notifications - Status (busy, helping...) - Activity summary (mostly for private channels but being able to know who was active, and what was discussed). - Reactions (on busy channels it is quite fun and a fun way to say thanks without pollution). - Threads.

prawnsalad 8y ago
(kiwiirc.com dev here) You might want to take a look at irccloud.com and kiwiirc.com/nextclient These 2 clients cover most of your use case while others such as end to end encryption are currently being developed. Hopefully with with irc.com support multiple IRC clients can be reaching all of these features and in a standard open way.

badrabbit 8y ago

Isn't london trust media the owner of freenode and privateinternetaccess?

prawnsalad 8y ago
Yup! https://londontrustmedia.com/ https://londontrustmedia.com/
dredmorbius 8y ago
And Linux Journal.

amatecha 8y ago

I mean, IRC is still going pretty strong. I've used IRCCloud [0] for years and swear by it. IRC is still pretty much the universal chat protocol you can expect to find discussion forums for pretty much any subject, and not encumbered by centralized commercial systems like Slack or Discord (as much as I like them). [0] https://www.irccloud.com/ https://www.irccloud.com/

alanpost 8y ago

We do customer support over IRC, on Freenode and OFTC. Particularly with the availability of web clients on Freenode, casual IRC users can reach us with minimal hassle while long-time users idle and voice when they're highlighted or the discussion interests them. My experience of Freenode is improved since PIA's involvement. Staff lurk in our channel on-hand to help if something comes up. Last month when services went down a developer put their head in to talk about the outage and share the patch developed from the experience. I don't think there is another chat platform with that kind of robust community. The tooling for IRC makes the experience more like an auditorium than a parlor. I'm optimistic about this announcement--if IRC has a future I believe it will be due to the social scale at which it is capable of operating.

nopacience 8y ago
Support over IRC is historical in open source. irc.perl.org -- perl language support and development irc.mozilla.org -- mozila related support and development irc.freenode.net has many support channels: #mysql #postgresql #vim #emacs #nodejs #css #javascript #python #manjaro -- manjaro linux distro #archlinux -- arch linux distro #freebsd #linux #vuejs -- horrible support (frontend channel) #angularjs -- horrible support (frontend channel) #elasticsearch #sqlite #xen #docker #git and the list goes on. many great people there :)
- dikiaap 8y ago
  #vuejs is created by Evan You. As a topic on the channel, he seems abandoned the channel and suggest people go to Gitter for active support.

xor1 8y ago

Please no ircoin.

Dowwie 8y ago

My first experience with the internet was through IRC. I had read about IRC in a book I had gotten at a computer show in 1991. I had no idea what I was looking at but figured out how to join a channel. I chatted with someone from Indonesia! How cool was that. None of my friends could relate. I continue to use IRC regularly. The Python community is thriving on Freenode and Rust community on Mozilla

st3fan 8y ago

Who cares about the domain. Don’t need a fancy .com for a revival.

giancarlostoro 8y ago

I'd love to see IRCv3 take off more: https://ircv3.net/irc/ https://ircv3.net/irc/ I also want to understand web clients more, do they use WebSockets? Can we spec that out to be part of every IRC server out there?

prawnsalad 8y ago
Most use a websocket library like sockjs or socket.io which uses websockets and falls back to long polling if there's an issue with that. Some IRC servers are starting to implement native websockets but that introduces several issues, so many networks use a websocket gateway to accept websockets to their network, such as https://github.com/kiwiirc/webircgateway https://github.com/kiwiirc/webircgateway Then for IRCv3, most clients these days do support their specs in some form of way, and it's growing :)

valeg 8y ago

Fediverse has a better shot than this.

hestefisk 8y ago

We should be pleased that someone actually wants to move irc forward and invest in it. I first discovered IRC in 1995 hanging out on #hackerzlair and later various Linux channels on EFnet. Without the countless hours on irssi inside GNU screen (yes, there was something before tmux!) I wouldn’t be where I am today in my career. That said, we need to keep it distributed as much as possible; too few owners could be poisonous. To my last point, I could easily see a second revival of irc using IPFS as the transport layer. Same feeling of community and privacy in a text terminal, but no central nodes.

moises_silva 8y ago
Wait, there is something after screen?

jaequery 8y ago

Long time user of IRC and I never ever heard of irc.com till now. What is it for and what does it do??? I have been saddened to see the state of IRC declining year after year. I love the fact someone is trying to do something about it!

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

madprops 8y ago

I love IRC. Use it every day. I'm developing my own chat stack though, which supports images, video, and audio changes as core features of it. This is how an empty room looks like: https://i.imgur.com/ir3qyUp.jpg https://i.imgur.com/ir3qyUp.jpg Code can be found in https://github.com/madprops/Hue https://github.com/madprops/Hue Been working on it since 2016

noddingham 8y ago

IRC revival? What do people think Slack, Hipchat, Discord, Stride, etc. are? They're IRC derivatives. I spent my formative years online in IRC rooms so for me I feel like the "revival" has been going on for years.

ekianjo 8y ago

Revival? I did not know IRC was dead. I am still using it every day.

znpy 8y ago

I am part of a student association of GNU/Linux users in my university. A long time ago many of the founders met on IRC, and after founding this association, they also founded a dedicated IRC channel. This was nearly twenty years ago. Time has passed, many new presidents and members have proposed new communication media (slack, zulip, mattermost among the many) and after some initial enthusiasm they all faded, their problems had become evident and their usage has dropped since. Needless to say, that IRC channel remained. Despite everything.

noway421 8y ago

IRC should surpass the notion of just a protocol and become a real product. The UX is still not user friendly. There's no standard way of doing threads. Rolling out IRC in an organisation is extremely hard. Cloud-based IRC hosting providers are hardly credible and not endorsed by anyone as enterprise-ready. IRC Clients are offering drastically different level of experience, if even usable out-of-the-box. Authentication is hard (why do we have a hack like NICKSERV if that stuff should be in the protocol?). Offline message retention, history viewing, and seamless offline/online transitions are completely broken (Bouncer usually solves those with terrible UX). Messaging is not easy. There are teams out there who are working on solving those hard problems full time while having the luxury of having a centralised specification with full control over implementation. IRC won't be ever be able to achieve that without transitioning into a centralised product. There are reasons why going as centralised product is best. Twitter did the same (it was easy from the technical point of view, hard from community point of view). They managed to up their game in the user experience by doing so. I'm not sure IRC can even do that at this point, the protocol is in the wild and making additions to it/standardising them, getting clients to adopt the changes would be hard. But it would be the only way for IRC to compete with other solutions.

kuba-orlik 8y ago

For me the thing that IRC desperately needs is a set of features that would make it usable on mobile... While constantly switching networks (wifi, 3g etc) it's almost certain I will miss some of the messages. That is a real dealbreaker for me and the reason why we've decided to have an irc->telegram vridge so people can keep up with the conversation on the go. Spoiler alert: now everybody just uses Telegram

cup-of-tea 8y ago
Back when I used IRC for work I always ran irssi on a server in screen and ssh'd in. I had a window that picked up any highlight that happened and, of course, logged everything. I liked this solution. After a while people would understand that you are always idling and probably afk but that you would pick up any messages as soon as you can. Nowadays you could idle using a raspberry pi or something. It would use less power than your phone. I don't want IRC while I'm out. That's not the point of it.
- jan-jakub 8y ago
  Of course I can do that - and I did, with znc on my vps. But it's not a solution for beginners or less-technical people. Lack of server-side history also makes it basically impossible for new members to read into the conversation history... Adding it to the spec would make it 1000x easier to onboard new users
  - cup-of-tea 8y ago
    > But it's not a solution for beginners or less-technical people. I don't see a problem. You don't give beginners enough credit. We were beginners once and we managed it just fine. If anything beginners today are cleverer than us :) > Lack of server-side history also makes it basically impossible for new members to read into the conversation history Is this actually something people do? For one of my channels I had stats generated from the logs and ability to search the entire log. I'm sure that could be trivially setup nowadays with Elasticsearch or something. If you control the server you can guarantee you'll catch every message too and won't lose any in a netsplit.

babbit999 8y ago

A friend introduced me to IRC around mid 90s when internet was getting popular in Sweden. DALnet was the network and it was late hours due to the channels main participants where from overseas. My friend went to the channels IRL get together in the US. Met there his love of his life, married and moved to the US. I think it’s a great story about the impact of internet and IRC was and probably is. Turning to today, I think IRC can be a big player in the area of IoT. Especially because internet is going into a period of decentralisation. It’s starts with the geeks, like you and I, and later the main caucas will trend on. Long Live IRC!

GyYZTfWBfQw 8y ago

DO NOT invite the normies!

J0BC6xEIDNi4 8y ago

I tried to find contact details for LondonTrustMedia but I couldn't so I'll write this here. Please implement and offer first class support for an onion hidden service.

Jigsy 8y ago

How can you revive something that never died? :>

wst_ 8y ago

The biggest problem, and biggest fail of IRC. It is too low level and requires people to write scripts when they need anything else beyond simple text message. I am torn apart here, because I really do like hacking things. The issue is - most people don't. They just want to use it, and they want to use it consistently - no matter the platform, the client, the server they are connecting to. And I totally understand that. More of it, I also understand that if you fail to provide this consistency your service have failed in the design phase and will never get widespread usage. The sooner we, tech savvy people, understand that, the sooner we'll be able to deliver a successful open services that actually stand a chance with their closed counterpart. So obviously, give people way to hack, but you must to: * Design a rich protocol covering needs of the biggest target possible while allowing optionally disable features. Channels history, disappearing messages, embedded media, text formatting, emoji, stickers, web hooks, API for bots, you name it. The protocol must cover most of them, so there is no need to write scripts anymore, unless you need something niche. * Design a strict spec for the clients, so all of them must keep to the spec, or they fail to be part of the service. And this is critical - do no allow client to behave differently and have a missing features. * Design clients so they are trivial to use. They must be usable out of box and all (most) of the features must be enabled after installation. Necessary steps to start using it (connection, channels, etc.) should be reduced to minimum and intuitive. * Keep a community of server and client developers so they can share info and be able to build uniform solution for the users. * And probably most important - promote the service. And do promote it heavily, unless you want to design something niche, which, I guess, is not what we are talking here. I've used IRC for years in the past. It was great, I do admit - not anymore. Today I require at least few formatting options (bold, inline code, block code) and no 3rd party tools needed to get anything else work properly. I have no time to hack things I need to use. I would rather spend my time to hack things I like. IRC is just a tool to communicate, I want to use it, not hack it. I loathe to jump here and there to accomplish tasks that should be done within a second with one click. The biggest problem I observe with many things in the industry is - made by devs for devs. Never for average Joe. Average Joe have no idea about keeping your session attached so you don't loose nick, logs, etc. Neither he cares about that stuff. And honestly - the older I get, the less time I have for this kind of stuff as well. Just make it work or face the failure.

whywhywhywhy 8y ago

IRC proves that having a barrier to entry can be a beautiful thing in some cases. I hang about in an IRC channel with less than 10 active users, still more valuable than any Slack channel I lurk in with hundreds.