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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. I
by 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 agoIRC is and always will be, the greatest social network :)
- martin1975 8y agoyep, despite Zuckerberg's attempt to turn a social network(s) into an online stalking tool for your unrequited lover.
- bengarrr 8y agoBut 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.
- coatmatter 8y agoWhat to you defines a social network?
- j45 8y agoIrc created more new social connections than many networks that came after. Same goes for bbs. We need to find the next thing that truly connects people.
- digi_owl 8y ago"Locality"? BBSs were more of the than not local, with some federation in that the operator or someone he trusted would exchange data between the local BBS and some distant BBS. Similarly IRC used to house a high number of very local channels back when i first came online (and one tried to pick a server on the network that was in one's own nation or a neighboring one to avoid finding oneself on the wrong end of a net split). Social networks offers much the same via various means (groups on facebook, sub-reddits on reddit, etc). Honestly IMO, what killed IRC was IM and SMS. This because now the schoolyard cliques could once more ostracize.
- j45 8y agoLocality, interesting. I'd agree on BBS'. My experience of IRC, thought on efnet was expanding past my local calling area. IM definitely took the bite out of IRC because it was far better at creating beginners that never made it to IRC, and a lot of IRC users got pulled to IM. ICQ, Yahoo, AIM, MSN created a new type of connection.
- Mirioron 8y agoIRC always felt to me more like a public forum, whereas IM was private conversation.
- coatmatter 8y agoThe best private conversations start by branching away from a public space. It's that juxtaposition that makes each half all the more special (think noisy club/bar vs outside). I think the biggest failing of IM is that it's easy to end up with a declining circle of people whom you communicate with. Without a public space to replenish ideas from, privacy becomes a curse. IRC allows both.
- ShabbosGoy 8y agoI met some of the most important people in my life through IRC. I would not have chosen my current career path without the guidance of the many friends I made over the years on various IRC networks and channels. It was also a great place to vent anonymously when I was at the lowest points of my life, in a judgement free environment. I don’t think any social network will come close to capturing the effect of IRC. Decentralization and federation are what makes it a great protocol, IMO.
- u801e 8y agoUsenet isn't that bad either :)
- themodelplumber 8y agoWeird, I felt physically compelled to upvote this just because I used to use IRC a lot. I regret that I had a lot of great BBS and IRC friends with whom I lost touch over the years.
- dmitriid 8y agoI resent that you resent "average people". I'm an average person (with 17 years of professional programming career behind me). I wouldn't give two craps about IRC in 2018. Yes, I really enjoy having a smooth cross-platform experience with inline media, public and private chat rooms, search, file transfers etc. without having to set anything up and without having to deal with half-baked poorly implemented clients who can't even agree on a feature set between each other, and can't produce a single decent mobile client. Same goes for XMPP. BTW, it's extremely hard to make a decent product for the "average user". Self-proclaimed über-men should try it sometime.
- _emacsomancer_ 8y agoBack in the day, lots of 'normal people' used irc too. I like things with open standards, so that people can use the tools that work for them. Bob can use the Gmail web interface to send and receive email, and Sally can use gnus in Emacs to send and receive email on her own local server.
- digi_owl 8y agoOnly for Google to spam-hole anything sally sends...
- peepeepoopoo 8y agoIt really boggles my mind that a few actors were able to essentially lock down a federated protocol.
- rasengan 8y agoExactly. That actually causes me anger. Email is so decentralized as a protocol and implementation and yet Google, Yahoo, etc now control email and then made it hard to send email using SPAM as an excuse.
- greglindahl 8y agoBack in the day, the IRC crowd had a lot more 'normal people' than Usenet, which was the other social outlet on the Internet.
- thaumasiotes 8y ago> The internet has been inundated with the "average" people who unfortunately are not interested in "aplications" like mIRC/irssi/bitchX. You know, I have a hard time blaming "average" people for not wanting to use bitchX. That's a pretty huge unforced error in terms of marketing.
- jschwartzi 8y agoOne man's stumbling block is another man's competency test.
- Leszek 8y agoOne man's competency is another man's elitism
- jschwartzi 8y agoOne man's pithy saying is another man's frustrating truism.
- welly 8y agoWhat an obnoxious comment.
- justin66 8y ago> The basis of old internet protocols are simple, open and powerful > Email, IRC, HTML, FTP FTP sucked back in the day and it still sucks. Otherwise, yeah.
- tptacek 8y agoI used command line IRC clients in the 1990s. I wrote IRC clients in the 1990s. I'm not interested in going back to IRC, an "open" 7-bit effectively-centralized protocol with line-length limits and lowest-common-denominator clients that can't even show an image. I don't use Mutt to get access to my email, anymore, either. I guess that makes me "average". IRC, FTP, and, yes, SMTP are all bad protocols from the 1980s era of protocol design. All are on their way out, some more gradually than others. Good riddance. How sad it would be if the Internet of 2020 looked the same as it did in 1995.
- codemac 8y agoA protocol existing is better than no protocol at all.
- bitexploder 8y agoIn the modern age of surveillance some protocols could be actively worse. Sad times, but IRC has no real place in the world of someone hoping to preserve their privacy.
- na85 8y agoAre you implying that discord, slack, et al have a better privacy model?
- hamandcheese 8y agoSignal, keybase, iMessage all have a better privacy model.
- rasengan 8y agoSignal requires a phone number. Keybase is an identity service. iMessage requires a phone number and is not verifiable. IRC on the other hand allows ephemeral usernames, you have the option to use e2e encryption if you choose, etc.
- app4soft 8y ago> Long live IRC > There will always be new platforms like slack, discord, gitter, and whatever. IRC was and still is great. Here is XKCD[0] for this ;-) [0] http://xkcd.com/1782 http://xkcd.com/1782
- floatingatoll 8y agoIRC is dying because no one invests months and years of code into server protocol extensions and client user interface for non-engineer users. Write an IRCv3 scrollback and search extension, and you’ll win the hearts of millions.
- prawnsalad 8y agohttps://github.com/ircv3/ircv3-specifications/pull/292 https://github.com/ircv3/ircv3-specifications/pull/292 Kiwi IRC actually implements this and has a ZNC module being released soon for it. Hopefully soon, other bouncers. These type of specs and actually getting them implemented in clients and servers is exactly the type of things the irc.com foundation will be supporting.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- u801e 8y ago> IRC is dying because no one invests months and years of code into server protocol extensions and client user interface for non-engineer users. I never understood this sentiment. In the '90s and the previous decade, I corresponded with many people over IRC and usenet who were definitely "non-engineer users". What changed in the last 10 years to make many people believe that one has to have a technical/engineering background to be capable of using things like IRC?
- coatmatter 8y agoIt's probably just relative. I would think the proportion on IRC is now more technical than ever before. Twenty years ago, you would need to know where to plug a cable in to even have a computer turn on. For better or worse, the barrier for entry these days is a lot lower. IRC has remained relatively the same while other services like Facebook or even MSN Messenger promised the world. I don't agree that IRC is dead. It will continue to outlast many companies.
- shitloadofbooks 8y agoDo you connect with a 1200 baud acoustic coupler modem or are you average person who uses a fibre connection and off-the-shelf router? Do you take a horse and cart to work or are you an average person who drives a car or catches the train? Do you mill your own bread, or are you an average person who eats machine milled and produced bread? Do you pump and sanitize your own water, or are you an average person who turns on the tap? Calling people "average" for not using outdated and poorly designed applications that were written by 1 or 2 people in their spare time, versus applications and services designed by tens-to-hundreds of people, with the input of designers, UI and UX engineers, etc is moronic. IRC, FTP, SMTP, Token Ring, etc are as good as they could have been at the time, but they are awful by modern standards. We should learn from them and design better successors.
- na85 8y agoIrc with proper roaming support and push notifications would blow discord or slack out of the water. Newer is not necessarily better.
- digi_owl 8y agoAka a bouncer?
- na85 8y agoYes, but baked in. Bouncers are horrible UX and a huge obstacle to onboarding. "this service is only usable on your phone if you also sign up for another service" pretty much makes it a non-starter.
- Karunamon 8y agoAnd logging and services that aren’t hacky god clients and user accounts as first class and... IRC has had literal decades to be improved and only now do people get serious about it after Slack and friends sucked all the oxygen out of the room. Older isn’t necessarily better either. IRC has stagnated hard, about the only thing it has on the competitors is that it’s free.
- xkcd-sucks 8y agoIf only someone would pay Kanye to promote IRC
- nasredin 8y agoYo XKCD Sucks, I'm really happy for you, I'm gonna let you finish but IRC did not have the best UI of all time!
- _arvin 8y agoYou so nailed it, man. Thanks for that. I really miss those old days. I'm turning 33, but I'm constantly chasing old nostalgia these days and realizing all the old things that used to make me happy, _still_ make me just as happy. (and you're damn right I still use BitchX)
- Shorel 8y agoI remember the Ops, Sops, +v and all the medieval hierarchy that ensued. I remember channel takeovers. I remember the flooding and the script kiddies with their obnoxious scripts. In a way, IRC let people show the worst of themselves, and I didn't stop using it because new technologies were better, I stopped using it because 90% was silly politics and power struggles.
- coatmatter 8y ago> In a way, IRC let people show the worst of themselves, and I didn't stop using it because new technologies were better, I stopped using it because 90% was silly politics and power struggles. This sounds vaguely familiar and I'm not talking about IRC.
- stickshift 8y agoThis was literally my first comment when I installed Slack for the first time: Isn't this essentially what IRC did for many years?
- minitech 8y ago> The basis of old internet protocols are simple, open and powerful > Email, IRC, HTML, FTP These protocols are anything but simple. “Be liberal in what you accept” was a huge mistake we’re still paying for. E-mail effectively can’t be made private. There’s lots of room for improvement in open protocols. (Start by not making them text-based, please.)
- u801e 8y ago> E-mail effectively can’t be made private. It definitely can be both in transit and when stored.
- minitech 8y agoIf you run your own mail server and everyone who sends you mail makes a direct encrypted connection to it, sure. That’s not a solution for most people.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- walshemj 8y agoText has a lot of advantages - I know as I had to debug OSI binary protocols - You had to dump it out to a textual representation. unless you had spent years and could read the protocol in its binary form
- kqr 8y agoHave you looked at Matrix.org? It's essentially the "modern IRC" people are asking for. I strongly suggest giving it a chance.
- coatmatter 8y agoI'm being semi facetious, but what does Matrix offer that I'm not able to get from my 24/7 tmux+irssi virtual private instance? Please don't say more notifications or addictiveness.
- kqr 8y agoTo me, it offered the ability of my fiancee and family (who don't have 24/7 tmux+weechat VMs) coming online. I now have them in my IRC client. It's wonderful, and I have wanted that for so long.