29 ms·

IRC turns thirty

342 points by worez 8y ago

dcow 8y ago
Barely 30 and all the cool kids have already moved on... I think there's a metaphore in there somewhere.
subhro 8y ago
I am invariably going to see in the world of Slack, "IRC, why don't you die already". No, IRC is not going to die. FreeNode is alive and well. And while you busy slamming and wishing death of IRC, just check the memory usage of your Slack client.
- sithadmin 8y ago
  How does the memory usage of my Slack clients in any way impact the utility of the tool? Private and public communities that are active, relevant, and directly impact my livelihood are on Slack, so I'm also on Slack. I'm also on IRC, Discord, and Telegram. This isn't a zero-sum game.
  - emilsedgh 8y ago
    I'm on all of them. IRC is by far my favorite. Kind of like HN. When someone is commenting on HN I automatically have more interest than eg Facebook vs. Twitter as the primitive experience of HN (Which I personally love) filters out a lot of "noise". There's great communities out there on IRC. Just head to #postgres on freenode and see how helpful they are over there.
  - yeukhon 8y ago
    Because communication should not be expensive.
  - superkuh 8y ago
    The problem is that those communities chose to use Slack. And now they're locked in to a proprietary protocol controlled by a single company with perverse incentives for censorship. In prior years those communities would've chosen IRC. But nowdays everything has to be pretty hand hold your hand for you (ie, host your images, assume you know nothing of how to participate on the 'net by yourself). It is a zero-sum game. And Slack has done the embrace, they done the extend, and they've started the extinguish (by cutting off IRC bridges).
    - ryanisnan 8y ago
      Slack is perfect for organizations, whereas IRC is not. And no, we're not locked into anything.
      - Razengan 8y ago
        > Slack is perfect for organizations, whereas IRC is not. Why not? Organizations can host their own IRC server(s). Won't that be better than relying on a third-party's services? And if needed, they can write their own bots, clients, or even their own specific extensions to the protocol.
        tehbeard 8y ago
        Listen, you want to convince my boss to spend more on the infra. For in house chat w/ drag and drop file hosting, and boost my pay for now having responsibility to manage that, be my guest :)
        dmitriid 8y ago
        Because the last thing organizations eant to do is host their own infra for a chat, implement their own search for a chat, re-implement the bits, the hooks, the integrations for a chat etc.?
        adrianN 8y ago
        Hosting things on their own infrastructure is very popular for large companies. They tend to take security a lot more serious that the average startup.
        Spivak 8y ago
        True and that's why hosted services focus a lot of effort on compliance. https://slack.com/security https://slack.com/security
      - ntnn 8y ago
        > Slack is perfect for organizations, whereas IRC is not. How so? > And no, we're not locked into anything. How so?
- kabacha 8y ago
  My problem with Slack is that while it's much more advanced client it still doesn't feel native, is slow and often bloated. The only thing I miss is markdown, sometimes a bit of formatting is vital to getting the message across.
- CookieMon 8y ago
  Is there a reason IRC couldn't look like slack to the user? kiwiirc is an opensource webUI IRC client (demo at https://kiwiirc.com/ https://kiwiirc.com/). To my untrained eye it looks slack-ish, but not being a slack-native I'm not really sure what Slack's draw is and whether its something webUI clients for IRC can't do.
  - russdpale 8y ago
    Wow, that is pretty darn nice for an IRC client!
  - rakoo 8y ago
    The UI is the easiest thing to fix and as you have shown already has been for some time. What separates IRC and the rest is all the features you would expect by default in a messenger of the 21st century: - history - with search - logins - simple bots - automatic content fetching (wiki/youtube Links, pics and gifs) - file transfers that just work - image pasting - message editing And probably others. Yes, those features exist in one way or another in IRC. The point is not whether you can or not; the point is how much time and energy do I want to spend to install and maintain those. I may have had the patience to do it a few years back, but I value other things now.
    - jenscow 8y ago
      To many, not having such features on IRC is a bonus.
    - caf 8y ago
      As a sidebar, from what I can tell the term "bot" for an automated agent accessible through chat originated on IRC.
      - rakoo 8y ago
        For sure, credit where it's due. However IRC doesn't beat the ease of installation that Slack providers for bots.
  - 8y ago
- ailideex 8y ago
  I like slack quite a bit, but it's not designed to be a replacement for general use case of IRC - it focuses on specific use cases and can be manhandled into other use cases with a lot of pain towards the users. matrix.org/riot.im seems like a more sensible alternative to IRC - but their systems are overloaded and slow - multi second latency is the norm.
  - Qwertie 8y ago
    The speed has gotten better recently. It usually sends messages in under 1 second. The UI is still a little laggy when switching tabs but everything is slowly getting more polished and faster.
    - pteraspidomorph 8y ago
      Some time ago I tried to start a federated homeserver, connected to it and joined the main matrix channel (at the matrix server). Thirty seconds later (IIRC) my client (riot) gave up on the attempt. Nothing showed in the channel. I was told the servers (synapse) were syncing the required information. I checked the logs and, true, a lot of stuff was being sent back and forth. One hour later, a lot of stuff was still being sent back and forth. I still could not join the channel, and there was still no user-friendly feedback on the failure. These are fundamental flaws in usability and design that really need to be addressed before the system can gain more widespread acceptance. Have they since been corrected, or have improvements been made to mitigate them?
    - Un1corn 8y ago
      They are also working on a new server written in Go instead of Python which will hopefully make it faster
    - namibj 8y ago
      I'd blame it on using python to implement the server... Yes, sure, good for a PoC, but there are reasons ejabberd exists.
- jillesvangurp 8y ago
  Irc is all but dead. I see less and less places where it is used. In the same way NNTP is dead as a doornail and completely irrelevant. Last time I saw that used for something else than filesharing was something like 10 years ago. The same place also used IRC. Both failed to modernize or keep up with progress. The only places where this stuff is at all still used/tolerated is places where the average age is well above forty and where the audience is engineers only. Most millennials that I work with don't even know what this stuff is because they simply never encountered anything where this is still in use. The ones that do tend to be male and heavily involved with OSS. It's a somewhat elitist thing at this point. People seem to like to hate slack and similar solutions. The OSS way to deal with stuff like this is to build something better and not get too nostalgic about decades old stuff that did not keep up with a changing world. Here are the design goals for a modern team chat solution: - It must be stupidly easy to create a private team. Think minutes. This is not something you put an engineer on either. That would be a waste of time/resources. - There must be zero admin overhead. This is the first thing you do in a new project. SAAS is the way to go here for most places; sign up, click, click done. There's absolutely no excuse to waste any time setting up software, servers, and committing to managing that for the vast majority of teams. - It has to be inclusive. Anywone should be able to jump in. Especially non technical people. Like your manager, designers, users, etc. - It has to have mobile apps that are usable and fully featured.
  - yoz-y 8y ago
    IRC may be elitist but that can be an advantage. For me it is the place where I feel most confortable to have a social chat with strangers. (Note: there is IRCv3 and irc cloud both of which bring quite a lot of Slack features into IRC)
walrus01 8y ago
A CLI for a workstation without irssi on it is no workstation at all.
VectorLock 8y ago
Somebody unearthed an IRC server in the hinterlands of the intranet of the huge tech company I work for. There was nobody there. The company is big on Jabber though...
- binomialxenon 8y ago
  At least they are using something which is an open standard, that's a good thing
- saagarjha 8y ago
  I'm sure most large, old tech companies have at least one IRC server that someone's forgotten to shut down. And my employer also uses Jabber, but I'm pretty sure it's just because it allows them to have complete control over the relay and client.
- Evidlo 8y ago
  Qualcomm has such an IRC server. I interned there and used IRC to chat with the other interns even though most of the full-time employees used Skype for business.
- Jaruzel 8y ago
  When I worked for an international bank during the late 90s and early 2000s they had a global IRC network on their internal WAN. It was heavily used by all staff, which was fairly unique compared to the other banks at the time. Over time the bank developed their own dedicated client for it, and added extensions to the servers for audit logging and username/realname enforcement, and then eventually spun the department developing the tech off into it's own startup company that then sold the product to other banks and companies. That spin off company is still around selling online collaboration software.
keithnz 8y ago
very cool. I started with IRC circa 92, on a VAX VMS system after discovering it using Gopher :) Was great, though very addictive. The internet wasn't very well known, and not many people were online, and it was very common to make friends all around the world. I travelled and met a lot of people all over the world through IRC. I remember quite a number of people starting relationships and having babies ( many of which would be late 20s now... crazy). I remember in 93 when tanks were rolling into moscow getting live updates from people who were there. Was a glimpse of the future yet to come around major world events. Slowly more and more people started turning up on IRC, new IRC networks appeared, people started to perfer networking with people in their local country or local state.... then later mostly people in their local city. Then it started to die off with the rise of the web and alternative chat software.
- craftyguy 8y ago
  IRC isn't "dying off." Many (many) projects still use it as their main communication channel for developers/users.
  - keithnz 8y ago
    sure.... I still use it. But now IRC is much much more fringe, somewhat like usenet, ftp, telnet, etc is very fringe these days. It used to be like THE social networking tool. Somewhat like facebook. Maybe one day facebook too will be used by developers to communicate while everyone else is in virtual worlds
    - walrus01 8y ago
      ftp is fringe because it's unencrypted and deals very poorly with NAT, and has performance/scaling issues for huge file transfers and transfers with huge numbers of discrete files. telnet is fringe because it's totally plaintext and has obviously been replaced by ssh2 everywhere. whereas irc daemons can easily be linked together by TLS1.2 and irc clients can also talk to servers over TLS.
      - 8y ago
cambalache 8y ago
It is refreshing to still use a technology which mainly has not been tainted with current crap (share, like, subscribe). You have to deal with some mods on power-trips, but it is rare. Happy thirty!
- sdegutis 8y ago
  Not too rare. Several channels are held to their project's Code of Conduct. And some of those CoCs require you to agree to use x-based pronouns when someone requests it, or else banned until you change your mind.
  - twright0 8y ago
    If your go-to example of "mods on power trips" is requiring basic respect for other peoples' personhood and right to their own identity, I'm inclined to agree it's not a particularly large problem.
    - sdegutis 8y ago
      Respect goes both ways. It's not respectful to ask someone to speak differently than what they believe about existence.
      - twright0 8y ago
        If you see an equivalence between asking you to respect someone else's identity, and asking someone else to respect your opinion about their identity - I don't know what to tell you. It's not the same, and it's dishonest to claim it is.
        sdegutis 8y ago
        It's asking me to assent to someone else's belief about the concept identity, all the while completely dismissing my belief about the concept of identity. It's inherently saying their belief is more important than my belief.
protomyth 8y ago
If someone was going to install an irc server, which one is recommended? Also, any client reconditions for Windows and Mac?
- throwawaymath 8y ago
  I like Textual on macOS. It's rather nice. EDIT: Since this seems to be unclear: I was referring to the second question regarding IRC clients.
  - HoppyHaus 8y ago
    Have you encountered unicode errors? A Textual user on my server has been crashed multiple times by people doing weird unicode. I don't know if its just him.
    - throwawaymath 8y ago
      Nope, that's never happened to me. I'm in maybe 30 channels on Freenode so I think it might just be him.
  - Operyl 8y ago
    For those confused: Textual isn't an IRC Server, it's an IRC client.
    - throwawaymath 8y ago
      Yes but that was the latter question, was it not?
- walrus01 8y ago
  ircd-hybrid on debian, personally.
- caf 8y ago
  I would recommend ircd-ratbox, which is the fork of ircd-hybrid most used on efnet.
sysashi 8y ago
I feel like we will end up with another program that abstracts Slack/Telegram/IRC into neat CLI interface and we will go full circle again. :) Happy birth day IRC!
- walrus01 8y ago
  Until they recently shut it down (boooooo), it was possible to bridge a company Slack channel into IRC and vice versa. https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=slack+irc+bridge&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8 https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=sla...
  - no_protocol 8y ago
    My Discord <-> IRC <-> Slack <-> Matrix bridge with Matterbridge [0] still works as of today, I didn't notice anything being shut down. [0]: https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge
  - chrismorgan 8y ago
    Slack’s own IRC bridge was quite terrible and had been for years. It had multiple unimplemented features and multiple bad bugs. Evidently they decided they had done enough embracing and extending, and so rather than fixing it it was time to extinguish.
- orev 8y ago
  Like WeeChat with various plugins?
yeukhon 8y ago
I hate Slack and I particularly despise Gitter. All the communities I had to go on at one point were totally out of service or totally uninterested in helping newbies. I am glad some organizations still use IRC as their main online network.
- movedx 8y ago
  I used IRC Cloud for some time. Pretty good, actually. Works almost everywhere, nice UI. It's certainly no irssi in a tmux/screen, but it's pretty good. Costs $5/month when I was using it (so close to the same as a VPS or proxy.)
  - yeukhon 8y ago
    IRC Cloud is fine, in the end it's still IRC. I used to use Adium, but now my work VPN is over AWS, so I can't (forget what the actual extension I needed Adium to support). Ever since I just use the freenode web client.
  - rane 8y ago
    Running a weechat client on a ipv6, nat ipv4 VPS that costs me 3€/year. With weechat you also get a responsive web client for free through glowing-bear.org, so it's quite close to IRCCloud in the end.
    - movedx 8y ago
      Impressive! Any more details on that?
      - rane 8y ago
        Hey. On which bit in particular?
        movedx 8y ago
        > 3€/year ^ :-)
gt565k 8y ago
ahhh IRC It brought me the joys of learning how to program while trying to write some tcl scripts for eggdrop bots and goofing around in a shell setting up said bot. Every time I think of IRC I get this nostalgic feeling of the good old times when communities were vibrant. It was so much easier to just hop on gamesurge or quakenet and find people to game with, organize pugs, find random channels where you can discuss things that interest you, and of course your favorite local's city mingle spot. I made some good friends from my local city's IRC channel in the early 2000s that I still talk to this day. I feel as though communities aren't as strong as they used to be as IRC has been slowly losing its population. It just had this quick and fluid way of hopping channels and finding people with similar interests. Listing all of the channels with their user count, and seeing what's popular, or even creating your own channel and community was so empowering.
- paulie_a 8y ago
  Irc was awesome, efnet was particularly fun as a teenager. Forcing network splits, installing eggdrop bots to take over a channel. Efnet was the wild west where basically anything was okay. Dalnet was more civilized. Undernet was definitely for warez. I wonder if anyone ever paid for a mirc license in those days.
  - modells 8y ago
    With great warez comes great responsibility.
  - nexxer 8y ago
    Back when I was much more active on Undernet and EFNet, there was talk of 1-2 people actually having paid for an mIRC license. Personally, a couple years ago I found the latest nagging screen guilt-trippy enough that I paid for a license even though I rarely use it.
    - Toenex 8y ago
      Same people bagged themselves a WinZip license too I'll bet!
donatj 8y ago
If you've never poked the IRC protocol directly, Google how to connect to IRC with Telnet. You can pretty reasonably use IRC just by writing to a socket - by hand. It's all human readable and understandable. It's incredible. It's what an open protocol should be. Writing a simple IRC client is a breeze!
- movedx 8y ago
  I keep meaning to write a simple client to get some networking code practice. It's been sometime since I wrote some. > It's what an open protocol should be. I'm not sure how I feel about this. I agree, but I also want to welcome things like gRPC/Protobuffs over HTTP/2 which introduce really fast comms between clients and servers, sacrificing the visibility of the stream's contents.
  - sebcat 8y ago
    > I also want to welcome things like gRPC/Protobuffs over HTTP/2 which introduce really fast comms between clients and servers, sacrificing the visibility of the stream's contents. Protobufs and similar serialization protocols are great for complex data. It is worth pointing out that we've had ASN.1 for a while and it's pretty fast too, at least for limited subsets of OIDs/types, in certain encodings, though XER or JER would probably not compete with BER. HTTP/2 is a complex protocol designed to fix problems with the way people build websites today. A lot of its features does not make sense/is not needed for simple message passing. e.g., some HTTP/2 implementations will probably see HPACK DoS bugs/vulns because HPACK is stateful, whereas if HTTP/2 wouldn't have HPACK that problem would not have existed, but the reason why HTTP/2 has HPACK is because people bloat headers with tons of stuff. IRC works and works well for its use case. Apart from newline-delimited strings - netstrings and TLV are other examples of formats that can build great, simple and introspectable/open formats. I'd venture a guess and say that an RFC1459 PRIVMSG message parses faster than a protobuf message carrying the same information - due to parsing an RFC1459 PRIVMSG message is so simple. Of course, if you want arbitrarily sized messages, or messages with an arbitrary number of nested messages inside it you need more complexity.
- badrabbit 8y ago
fouc 8y ago
Has anyone noticed that Slack communities are a lot less active these days? And IRC communities are less active these days. Where are the chatters going to now?
- iliaznk 8y ago
  Not sure whether Slack communities are less or more active, but what I'm sure is that chatting hardly works as a means to convey knowledge. It's neither rewarding nor persistent. I mean, you spend your time for free answering some (usually) easy to google questions and soon your answer is lost in the countless logs and you have no way to refer to it later like it never happened. All popular and large Slack communities (the same is true for IRC channels) I used to be a member of are very much alike – hundreds of people just sit there busy with their lives just in case somebody would post something interesting, and just occasionally there're small bursts of activity to educate another newbie who did @here in the channel. And even when (oh, miracle) there does occur some conversation you realise you have no time to follow it as it happens and later you're just to lazy to find it and try to make some sense out of it. So, first you turn off notification distractions. And second, after a while, you realise you haven't poked there for weeks and finally just remove it with no regret.
- keyle 8y ago
  People get swallowed in the garden walls of 'social' apps and just browse, mostly interract via <3 and Likes, and don't really have opinions of their own anymore. Also typing, you know, it's a lot easier to tap an icon to mean something than type it awkardly.
- kilon 8y ago
  Discord. It was made mainly for games and it has exploded the last few years for pretty much about everything. I was introduced to Slack because the programming language I was using had its official channel there. They had also an irc channel but people were not willing to use it. Then I made a discord server mainly because I was using Discord for Unreal Engine , which has to this day the most active community there according to my experience. Without me realizing it the main dev of the language I was using abandoned Slack and used my Discord server. I made him admin and the rest of the community reluctantly followed cause being coders saw no point using a game orientated chat client but a year later not only the Slack server was almost completely abandoned but not one even mentioned Slack or IRC.
dagenix 8y ago
/me slow claps
Karrot_Kream 8y ago
For those that just want to use Slack through your IRC clients/bots/whatever, take a look at https://github.com/nolanlum/tanya https://github.com/nolanlum/tanya
xvilka 8y ago
It is worth noting that IRC is in the middle of overhaul and upgrade with IRCv3 [1] standard. Sadly not many clients and servers support it (almost none of them). [1] https://www.ircv3.net https://www.ircv3.net
- brylie 8y ago
  Just want to point out IRC3 aims to have "standardised account registration and verification, allowing clients to provide better interfaces for end users." This is really important, as registering an account on an IRC network can be a barrier to adoption.
- eahman09 8y ago
  It is worth nothing that IRCv3 is a coup d'etat made by a closed coven of developers: Most IRC clients are slowly developed or almost dead these days; the modus operandi of the IRCv3 developers is that they write patches for those IRC clients to support IRCv3 features and then push hard for the maintainers of those clients to merge them ("this is what the future of irc looks like! it's what the other clients are implementing! do you wanna be the only one not implementing it???") They argue the development of their "standards" is open, but the truth is that nobody cares about it (most people are OK with IRC as it is now) so very few people contribute; they pretend that nobody complaining is a tacit agreement that everybody is OK with their changes, when that's far from the truth.
  - dcbadacd 8y ago
    To be fair the protocol was on in my opinion life support and IRCv3 really gives a few more years to the protocol and clients. Actually, I still think most IRC clients stale as f* even with IRCv3, for example embedding images and videos in chats should be trivial but I've yet to see a Linux desktop client do it (without sacrificing other features). IRCv3 doesn't also fix client certificate updating, though neither does any client handle client certs nicely so it's a sweet dream of mine to see auto-updated client certs.
agumonkey 8y ago
You could take away the web 2.0 I may not bother. IRC on the other hand ...
yawz 8y ago
I heavily used IRC in the early and mid 90s. Glad to see that it’s alive and kicking. Happy 30th!
davidw 8y ago
It's interesting that it's actually older than the "World Wide Web".
bkircher 8y ago
Love IRC. But what client should I use on my telephone?
- eindiran 8y ago
  I don't know about iPhones, but for Android there is 'IRC for Android' which had so far been excellent.
- xPaw 8y ago
  You can use a self hosted client like The Lounge which maintains IRC connections on your own server, and then you can view the client via a web browser (so it looks great on a phone, and you can get web push notifications) It basically acts like any other chat client (e.g. works on multiple devices at the same time) https://thelounge.chat https://thelounge.chat https://demo.thelounge.chat https://demo.thelounge.chat
  - bkircher 8y ago
    Sure. However simplicity is quite important when you choose IRC as company chat solution and you want not only your geeky devs to join but also not–so–geeky people like the guy from marketing and the friendly folks from the front–desk.
    - xPaw 8y ago
      You only need to setup Lounge once, it supports multiple users at the same time. A non geeky person should have no trouble joining a channel.
      - bkircher 8y ago
        Oh, wow. I see. With push notifications, mobile clients, TLS encryption this _could_ work in a company setting …provided you keep logs and make search results available for staff, too. Cool. Thanks for the links!
        8y ago
modells 8y ago
Interesting. Last IIRC, Stanford ITS used tinyfugue (tf) MUD which is sorta like IRC.
tapland 8y ago
Met my fiancée over IRC many years ago and we're both using it as our main social communication with others online. It's an enclave untouched by much of the current toxicity of social media. It requires you to make friends with others based on your words and not content filtering algorithms. You are exposed to other people with other ideas since it isn't filtered. All with a reasonably high lowest level since the lack of bells and whistles turn a lot of people away from it.
- Qwertie 8y ago
  I only started using irc about 5 years ago but I have been using it daily since then and yeah the people on it aren't too bad. I have only really seen tech stuff on it recently, all the non tech irc channels I was in moved to discord :L
- fredsir 8y ago
  What channels do you frequent that can be used as "social channels" and aren't either a technical QA channel, or a those channels' "free talk" companion that nobody really uses?
  - eahman11 8y ago
    Visit EFnet or Rizon, but yes, social IRC is mostly dead now
  - tapland 8y ago
    There are plenty. Breakouts from them forming their own communities every few years. The base of our community has been around for at least a decade and the main channel is on its fourth iteration since I joined. Telling exact channel names would out me pretty fast though I reckon.
    - Cthulhu_ 8y ago
      Same in my 'social' bubble, started as a small gaming community that branched off a bigger one (you know, free forums, then a site, then self-hosted forums, IRC channel which later turned into a Skype group chat which nowadays is a Discord channel, etc). These things just form organically.
asdojasdosadsa 8y ago
IRC brings back some memories. I haven't personally used IRC in a few years directly, but I can remember how when I started university, every freshman "had" to login to IRC through SSH and screen :-). That's where the course channels were sitting and you could get help, either if you didn't want to ask face to face, go to school or just needed to ask something. There were other channels too, some where you were invited and had small social groups you chatted with daily. Nowadays, most of the communication has migrated to Telegram from IRC. EDIT: If one was to start using IRC, I guess there isn't a channel or a server where most or some of the people using also Hacker News go?
- pingec 8y ago
  Perhaps #hackernews and #startups on freenode?
  - Doxin 8y ago
    Another good starting point is #xkcd. it is a large channel with a lot of tech-ish and math-y people. EDIT: Note that channel discovery on IRC is largely a word-of-mouth thing so don't be shy to ask people for channel recommendations on irc. Most programming language have a dedicated channel, e.g. #D or #python or whatnot.
    - deleted 8y ago
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    - eahman09 8y ago
      The last thing I want in this world is to enter a channel full of people who like xkcd. It must be insufferable.
    - schindlabua 8y ago
      Are you talking about freenode? I just joined #xkcd and it's 8 people and no topic set. 3 other users joined and immediately left, I guess those were from HN aswell. (A big channel for everyone to join is ##programming, by the way.)
schindlabua 8y ago
I always envy the guy who registered the nick "e" on freenode. He must be ancient, one of the first users since NickServ came into being, and I imagine him as this grey-bearded programmer wizard who speaks in x86 assembly. He hangs around in ##C and I've seen him speak occasionally I think.
- deleted 8y ago
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dakom 8y ago
IRC was where I learned to program in the late 90's. Both through instruction on channels like #C, and also literally implementing the RFC's - building both bots and servers. It was a rush building "bot/server" combos like Nickserv... felt like superpowers and you could do all kinds of things through spoofing names and whatnot. (I mean it was pointless since the only servers I could pair with were other empty ones with one or two people... but still - it was fun!) I guess at some point my trajectory just.. changed - moving from that world to less heady stuff like Flash and so on... but the nostalgia is strong and I feel very lucky to have gotten my start in tech that way.
josteink 8y ago
And the IRC network I help run must have turned 15 by now. It’s not filled to the brim with thousands and thousands of users. It’s not monetizable. But instead we have a nice, small community where we can hang out, be ourselves and do whatever we like without having to adhere some other company’s “community standards”. It’s how I like the internet to be, and I don’t care one bit if it’s old-fashioned.
kilon 8y ago
I was never a fan of IRC although I am still a part time user since 1995. I was always annoyed losing replies just because I went offline and of course all the weird self disconnects and occasional banning bots. Sending files was also a big pain. But was simple to use and with tons of communities so I never actively complained about it. I converted to Discord and never looked back. On the other hand I was never deep into social activity online.
dewey 8y ago
The communities around torrent tracker was and is always very active on IRC as having your own IRC network is pretty standard for a tracker. I probably spent the majority of my time during my studies on IRC, and because of timezones it was mostly during the night. I have very fond memories of this time and I'm a bit sad that I don't use it that much any more. I really can't wrap my head around how communities, especially for programming languages use Slack where all the information gets fed into some silo and is not publicly available. Especially if they don't pay for it, which most open source projects don't do for money reasons and the history gets wiped after a while. If I were to decide what to use in a company I'd probably go for https://www.irccloud.com/ https://www.irccloud.com/ - it's an open protocol but still has the convenience of not having to set up a bouncer and run your own IRC server.
lcnmrn 8y ago
Superthread, https://superthread.net/ https://superthread.net/ is a web based alternative to IRC. You might want to check it out.
mabynogy 8y ago
IRC is simple and efficient. It's a real pleasure for me to use it daily to talk to my fellow programmers. Yeah we don't have images but we have links and a pastebin (https://github.com/solusipse/fiche https://github.com/solusipse/fiche) to replace that. I'm on #dailyprog at irc.rizon.net (https://dailyprog.org/ https://dailyprog.org/). It's an irc-based programming community. We also share a server with ssh access. We do small programming projects together. At the moment the idea is to make an exhausive list of all existing IRC servers with massscan and nmap (the output of the running massscan instance: https://dailyprog.org/~mabynogy/irc-servers.txt https://dailyprog.org/~mabynogy/irc-servers.txt).
nullify88 8y ago
Would anyone know of any active communities for sysadmins on IRC or otherwise? Or a directory to find such channels? Never really been one for being involved in online communities but being a one man team at work has got me looking for people of similar interests.
- crtasm 8y ago
  You can search Freenode's channel list at http://irc.netsplit.de/channels/?net=freenode http://irc.netsplit.de/channels/?net=freenode I've noticed a #reddit-sysadmin , likely there's a ##sysadmin too and probably others. The double # indicates a topic https://freenode.net/kb/answer/namespaces https://freenode.net/kb/answer/namespaces
rhlala 8y ago
My issue with irc is everyone can see your ip adress right? Is there any chanel of hackernewsers with the same spirit as HN?
- Doxin 8y ago
  That depends somewhat. Freenode for example allows you to request a "cloak" to hide your IP as long as you're a) registered, b) not using the web client.
  - crtasm 8y ago
    And to their credit they still allow Tor connections, albeit to an existing registered account and authenticating with key-based SASL.
anfilt 8y ago
Long live IRC!
crtasm 8y ago
Smart filtering of join/part messages makes irc so much nicer to use, available in my preferred client Weechat as well as Hexchat and surely others. I only see a join/part if it happens within x minutes of someone speaking, and there's a shortcut to switch to unfiltered view when I want it.
mxuribe 8y ago
I remember back in 1992 (my freshmen year of college), my first exposure to this thing called the internet was via email AND irc. Ah, good ol' irc; what wonderful memories! Happy birthday irc!
Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago
Here's to the next thirty years! There's no better way to chat online than IRC. You'll have to tear it from our cold, dead hands.
fuzzyoneuk 8y ago
I've met some great people and fellow Devs on efnet back in the day, it used to be pretty much my only socialising back in the late 90s, some really disturbing toxic people too but a great experience all together. Still pop in every now and then.
triviatise 8y ago
I used IRC (a lot) in the early 90s. I built the first online texas holdem poker game hosted as an IRC bot around 1994. There were a few hundred players, many of them asked to play for real money. People created graphical clients and another guy extended the code to add tournament rules. Apparently poker pro chris ferguson first started playing poker on IRC. I definitely missed a huge opportunity to monetize it. IRC these days is a bit of a mess with custom authentication protocols that make it too hard to use. Slack is extremely easy to setup for an organization and just works.
lx3459683 8y ago
For anyone wondering where IRC users have migrated these days, the answer is Discord. There are several programming-themed servers with thousands of concurrent users, and many more high population servers for other interest groups.

342 points by worez 8y ago

dcow 8y ago

Barely 30 and all the cool kids have already moved on... I think there's a metaphore in there somewhere.

I am invariably going to see in the world of Slack, "IRC, why don't you die already". No, IRC is not going to die. FreeNode is alive and well. And while you busy slamming and wishing death of IRC, just check the memory usage of your Slack client.

sithadmin 8y ago
How does the memory usage of my Slack clients in any way impact the utility of the tool? Private and public communities that are active, relevant, and directly impact my livelihood are on Slack, so I'm also on Slack. I'm also on IRC, Discord, and Telegram. This isn't a zero-sum game.
- emilsedgh 8y ago
  I'm on all of them. IRC is by far my favorite. Kind of like HN. When someone is commenting on HN I automatically have more interest than eg Facebook vs. Twitter as the primitive experience of HN (Which I personally love) filters out a lot of "noise". There's great communities out there on IRC. Just head to #postgres on freenode and see how helpful they are over there.
- yeukhon 8y ago
  Because communication should not be expensive.
- superkuh 8y ago
  The problem is that those communities chose to use Slack. And now they're locked in to a proprietary protocol controlled by a single company with perverse incentives for censorship. In prior years those communities would've chosen IRC. But nowdays everything has to be pretty hand hold your hand for you (ie, host your images, assume you know nothing of how to participate on the 'net by yourself). It is a zero-sum game. And Slack has done the embrace, they done the extend, and they've started the extinguish (by cutting off IRC bridges).
  - ryanisnan 8y ago
    Slack is perfect for organizations, whereas IRC is not. And no, we're not locked into anything.
    - Razengan 8y ago
      > Slack is perfect for organizations, whereas IRC is not. Why not? Organizations can host their own IRC server(s). Won't that be better than relying on a third-party's services? And if needed, they can write their own bots, clients, or even their own specific extensions to the protocol.
      - tehbeard 8y ago
        Listen, you want to convince my boss to spend more on the infra. For in house chat w/ drag and drop file hosting, and boost my pay for now having responsibility to manage that, be my guest :)
      - dmitriid 8y ago
        Because the last thing organizations eant to do is host their own infra for a chat, implement their own search for a chat, re-implement the bits, the hooks, the integrations for a chat etc.?
        adrianN 8y ago
        Hosting things on their own infrastructure is very popular for large companies. They tend to take security a lot more serious that the average startup.
        Spivak 8y ago
        True and that's why hosted services focus a lot of effort on compliance. https://slack.com/security https://slack.com/security
    - ntnn 8y ago
      > Slack is perfect for organizations, whereas IRC is not. How so? > And no, we're not locked into anything. How so?
kabacha 8y ago
My problem with Slack is that while it's much more advanced client it still doesn't feel native, is slow and often bloated. The only thing I miss is markdown, sometimes a bit of formatting is vital to getting the message across.
CookieMon 8y ago
Is there a reason IRC couldn't look like slack to the user? kiwiirc is an opensource webUI IRC client (demo at https://kiwiirc.com/ https://kiwiirc.com/). To my untrained eye it looks slack-ish, but not being a slack-native I'm not really sure what Slack's draw is and whether its something webUI clients for IRC can't do.
- russdpale 8y ago
  Wow, that is pretty darn nice for an IRC client!
- rakoo 8y ago
  The UI is the easiest thing to fix and as you have shown already has been for some time. What separates IRC and the rest is all the features you would expect by default in a messenger of the 21st century: - history - with search - logins - simple bots - automatic content fetching (wiki/youtube Links, pics and gifs) - file transfers that just work - image pasting - message editing And probably others. Yes, those features exist in one way or another in IRC. The point is not whether you can or not; the point is how much time and energy do I want to spend to install and maintain those. I may have had the patience to do it a few years back, but I value other things now.
  - jenscow 8y ago
    To many, not having such features on IRC is a bonus.
  - caf 8y ago
    As a sidebar, from what I can tell the term "bot" for an automated agent accessible through chat originated on IRC.
    - rakoo 8y ago
      For sure, credit where it's due. However IRC doesn't beat the ease of installation that Slack providers for bots.
- 8y ago
ailideex 8y ago
I like slack quite a bit, but it's not designed to be a replacement for general use case of IRC - it focuses on specific use cases and can be manhandled into other use cases with a lot of pain towards the users. matrix.org/riot.im seems like a more sensible alternative to IRC - but their systems are overloaded and slow - multi second latency is the norm.
- Qwertie 8y ago
  The speed has gotten better recently. It usually sends messages in under 1 second. The UI is still a little laggy when switching tabs but everything is slowly getting more polished and faster.
  - pteraspidomorph 8y ago
    Some time ago I tried to start a federated homeserver, connected to it and joined the main matrix channel (at the matrix server). Thirty seconds later (IIRC) my client (riot) gave up on the attempt. Nothing showed in the channel. I was told the servers (synapse) were syncing the required information. I checked the logs and, true, a lot of stuff was being sent back and forth. One hour later, a lot of stuff was still being sent back and forth. I still could not join the channel, and there was still no user-friendly feedback on the failure. These are fundamental flaws in usability and design that really need to be addressed before the system can gain more widespread acceptance. Have they since been corrected, or have improvements been made to mitigate them?
  - Un1corn 8y ago
    They are also working on a new server written in Go instead of Python which will hopefully make it faster
  - namibj 8y ago
    I'd blame it on using python to implement the server... Yes, sure, good for a PoC, but there are reasons ejabberd exists.
jillesvangurp 8y ago
Irc is all but dead. I see less and less places where it is used. In the same way NNTP is dead as a doornail and completely irrelevant. Last time I saw that used for something else than filesharing was something like 10 years ago. The same place also used IRC. Both failed to modernize or keep up with progress. The only places where this stuff is at all still used/tolerated is places where the average age is well above forty and where the audience is engineers only. Most millennials that I work with don't even know what this stuff is because they simply never encountered anything where this is still in use. The ones that do tend to be male and heavily involved with OSS. It's a somewhat elitist thing at this point. People seem to like to hate slack and similar solutions. The OSS way to deal with stuff like this is to build something better and not get too nostalgic about decades old stuff that did not keep up with a changing world. Here are the design goals for a modern team chat solution: - It must be stupidly easy to create a private team. Think minutes. This is not something you put an engineer on either. That would be a waste of time/resources. - There must be zero admin overhead. This is the first thing you do in a new project. SAAS is the way to go here for most places; sign up, click, click done. There's absolutely no excuse to waste any time setting up software, servers, and committing to managing that for the vast majority of teams. - It has to be inclusive. Anywone should be able to jump in. Especially non technical people. Like your manager, designers, users, etc. - It has to have mobile apps that are usable and fully featured.
- yoz-y 8y ago
  IRC may be elitist but that can be an advantage. For me it is the place where I feel most confortable to have a social chat with strangers. (Note: there is IRCv3 and irc cloud both of which bring quite a lot of Slack features into IRC)

walrus01 8y ago

A CLI for a workstation without irssi on it is no workstation at all.

VectorLock 8y ago

Somebody unearthed an IRC server in the hinterlands of the intranet of the huge tech company I work for. There was nobody there. The company is big on Jabber though...

binomialxenon 8y ago
At least they are using something which is an open standard, that's a good thing
saagarjha 8y ago
I'm sure most large, old tech companies have at least one IRC server that someone's forgotten to shut down. And my employer also uses Jabber, but I'm pretty sure it's just because it allows them to have complete control over the relay and client.
Evidlo 8y ago
Qualcomm has such an IRC server. I interned there and used IRC to chat with the other interns even though most of the full-time employees used Skype for business.
Jaruzel 8y ago
When I worked for an international bank during the late 90s and early 2000s they had a global IRC network on their internal WAN. It was heavily used by all staff, which was fairly unique compared to the other banks at the time. Over time the bank developed their own dedicated client for it, and added extensions to the servers for audit logging and username/realname enforcement, and then eventually spun the department developing the tech off into it's own startup company that then sold the product to other banks and companies. That spin off company is still around selling online collaboration software.

keithnz 8y ago

very cool. I started with IRC circa 92, on a VAX VMS system after discovering it using Gopher :) Was great, though very addictive. The internet wasn't very well known, and not many people were online, and it was very common to make friends all around the world. I travelled and met a lot of people all over the world through IRC. I remember quite a number of people starting relationships and having babies ( many of which would be late 20s now... crazy). I remember in 93 when tanks were rolling into moscow getting live updates from people who were there. Was a glimpse of the future yet to come around major world events. Slowly more and more people started turning up on IRC, new IRC networks appeared, people started to perfer networking with people in their local country or local state.... then later mostly people in their local city. Then it started to die off with the rise of the web and alternative chat software.

craftyguy 8y ago
IRC isn't "dying off." Many (many) projects still use it as their main communication channel for developers/users.
- keithnz 8y ago
  sure.... I still use it. But now IRC is much much more fringe, somewhat like usenet, ftp, telnet, etc is very fringe these days. It used to be like THE social networking tool. Somewhat like facebook. Maybe one day facebook too will be used by developers to communicate while everyone else is in virtual worlds
  - walrus01 8y ago
    ftp is fringe because it's unencrypted and deals very poorly with NAT, and has performance/scaling issues for huge file transfers and transfers with huge numbers of discrete files. telnet is fringe because it's totally plaintext and has obviously been replaced by ssh2 everywhere. whereas irc daemons can easily be linked together by TLS1.2 and irc clients can also talk to servers over TLS.
    - 8y ago

cambalache 8y ago

It is refreshing to still use a technology which mainly has not been tainted with current crap (share, like, subscribe). You have to deal with some mods on power-trips, but it is rare. Happy thirty!

sdegutis 8y ago
Not too rare. Several channels are held to their project's Code of Conduct. And some of those CoCs require you to agree to use x-based pronouns when someone requests it, or else banned until you change your mind.
- twright0 8y ago
  If your go-to example of "mods on power trips" is requiring basic respect for other peoples' personhood and right to their own identity, I'm inclined to agree it's not a particularly large problem.
  - sdegutis 8y ago
    Respect goes both ways. It's not respectful to ask someone to speak differently than what they believe about existence.
    - twright0 8y ago
      If you see an equivalence between asking you to respect someone else's identity, and asking someone else to respect your opinion about their identity - I don't know what to tell you. It's not the same, and it's dishonest to claim it is.
      - sdegutis 8y ago
        It's asking me to assent to someone else's belief about the concept identity, all the while completely dismissing my belief about the concept of identity. It's inherently saying their belief is more important than my belief.

protomyth 8y ago

If someone was going to install an irc server, which one is recommended? Also, any client reconditions for Windows and Mac?

throwawaymath 8y ago
I like Textual on macOS. It's rather nice. EDIT: Since this seems to be unclear: I was referring to the second question regarding IRC clients.
- HoppyHaus 8y ago
  Have you encountered unicode errors? A Textual user on my server has been crashed multiple times by people doing weird unicode. I don't know if its just him.
  - throwawaymath 8y ago
    Nope, that's never happened to me. I'm in maybe 30 channels on Freenode so I think it might just be him.
- Operyl 8y ago
  For those confused: Textual isn't an IRC Server, it's an IRC client.
  - throwawaymath 8y ago
    Yes but that was the latter question, was it not?
walrus01 8y ago
ircd-hybrid on debian, personally.
caf 8y ago
I would recommend ircd-ratbox, which is the fork of ircd-hybrid most used on efnet.

sysashi 8y ago

I feel like we will end up with another program that abstracts Slack/Telegram/IRC into neat CLI interface and we will go full circle again. :) Happy birth day IRC!

walrus01 8y ago
Until they recently shut it down (boooooo), it was possible to bridge a company Slack channel into IRC and vice versa. https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=slack+irc+bridge&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8 https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=sla...
- no_protocol 8y ago
  My Discord <-> IRC <-> Slack <-> Matrix bridge with Matterbridge [0] still works as of today, I didn't notice anything being shut down. [0]: https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge
- chrismorgan 8y ago
  Slack’s own IRC bridge was quite terrible and had been for years. It had multiple unimplemented features and multiple bad bugs. Evidently they decided they had done enough embracing and extending, and so rather than fixing it it was time to extinguish.
orev 8y ago
Like WeeChat with various plugins?

yeukhon 8y ago

I hate Slack and I particularly despise Gitter. All the communities I had to go on at one point were totally out of service or totally uninterested in helping newbies. I am glad some organizations still use IRC as their main online network.

movedx 8y ago
I used IRC Cloud for some time. Pretty good, actually. Works almost everywhere, nice UI. It's certainly no irssi in a tmux/screen, but it's pretty good. Costs $5/month when I was using it (so close to the same as a VPS or proxy.)
- yeukhon 8y ago
  IRC Cloud is fine, in the end it's still IRC. I used to use Adium, but now my work VPN is over AWS, so I can't (forget what the actual extension I needed Adium to support). Ever since I just use the freenode web client.
- rane 8y ago
  Running a weechat client on a ipv6, nat ipv4 VPS that costs me 3€/year. With weechat you also get a responsive web client for free through glowing-bear.org, so it's quite close to IRCCloud in the end.
  - movedx 8y ago
    Impressive! Any more details on that?
    - rane 8y ago
      Hey. On which bit in particular?
      - movedx 8y ago
        > 3€/year ^ :-)

gt565k 8y ago

ahhh IRC It brought me the joys of learning how to program while trying to write some tcl scripts for eggdrop bots and goofing around in a shell setting up said bot. Every time I think of IRC I get this nostalgic feeling of the good old times when communities were vibrant. It was so much easier to just hop on gamesurge or quakenet and find people to game with, organize pugs, find random channels where you can discuss things that interest you, and of course your favorite local's city mingle spot. I made some good friends from my local city's IRC channel in the early 2000s that I still talk to this day. I feel as though communities aren't as strong as they used to be as IRC has been slowly losing its population. It just had this quick and fluid way of hopping channels and finding people with similar interests. Listing all of the channels with their user count, and seeing what's popular, or even creating your own channel and community was so empowering.

paulie_a 8y ago
Irc was awesome, efnet was particularly fun as a teenager. Forcing network splits, installing eggdrop bots to take over a channel. Efnet was the wild west where basically anything was okay. Dalnet was more civilized. Undernet was definitely for warez. I wonder if anyone ever paid for a mirc license in those days.
- modells 8y ago
  With great warez comes great responsibility.
- nexxer 8y ago
  Back when I was much more active on Undernet and EFNet, there was talk of 1-2 people actually having paid for an mIRC license. Personally, a couple years ago I found the latest nagging screen guilt-trippy enough that I paid for a license even though I rarely use it.
  - Toenex 8y ago
    Same people bagged themselves a WinZip license too I'll bet!

donatj 8y ago

If you've never poked the IRC protocol directly, Google how to connect to IRC with Telnet. You can pretty reasonably use IRC just by writing to a socket - by hand. It's all human readable and understandable. It's incredible. It's what an open protocol should be. Writing a simple IRC client is a breeze!

movedx 8y ago
I keep meaning to write a simple client to get some networking code practice. It's been sometime since I wrote some. > It's what an open protocol should be. I'm not sure how I feel about this. I agree, but I also want to welcome things like gRPC/Protobuffs over HTTP/2 which introduce really fast comms between clients and servers, sacrificing the visibility of the stream's contents.
- sebcat 8y ago
  > I also want to welcome things like gRPC/Protobuffs over HTTP/2 which introduce really fast comms between clients and servers, sacrificing the visibility of the stream's contents. Protobufs and similar serialization protocols are great for complex data. It is worth pointing out that we've had ASN.1 for a while and it's pretty fast too, at least for limited subsets of OIDs/types, in certain encodings, though XER or JER would probably not compete with BER. HTTP/2 is a complex protocol designed to fix problems with the way people build websites today. A lot of its features does not make sense/is not needed for simple message passing. e.g., some HTTP/2 implementations will probably see HPACK DoS bugs/vulns because HPACK is stateful, whereas if HTTP/2 wouldn't have HPACK that problem would not have existed, but the reason why HTTP/2 has HPACK is because people bloat headers with tons of stuff. IRC works and works well for its use case. Apart from newline-delimited strings - netstrings and TLV are other examples of formats that can build great, simple and introspectable/open formats. I'd venture a guess and say that an RFC1459 PRIVMSG message parses faster than a protobuf message carrying the same information - due to parsing an RFC1459 PRIVMSG message is so simple. Of course, if you want arbitrarily sized messages, or messages with an arbitrary number of nested messages inside it you need more complexity.
badrabbit 8y ago

fouc 8y ago

Has anyone noticed that Slack communities are a lot less active these days? And IRC communities are less active these days. Where are the chatters going to now?

iliaznk 8y ago
Not sure whether Slack communities are less or more active, but what I'm sure is that chatting hardly works as a means to convey knowledge. It's neither rewarding nor persistent. I mean, you spend your time for free answering some (usually) easy to google questions and soon your answer is lost in the countless logs and you have no way to refer to it later like it never happened. All popular and large Slack communities (the same is true for IRC channels) I used to be a member of are very much alike – hundreds of people just sit there busy with their lives just in case somebody would post something interesting, and just occasionally there're small bursts of activity to educate another newbie who did @here in the channel. And even when (oh, miracle) there does occur some conversation you realise you have no time to follow it as it happens and later you're just to lazy to find it and try to make some sense out of it. So, first you turn off notification distractions. And second, after a while, you realise you haven't poked there for weeks and finally just remove it with no regret.
keyle 8y ago
People get swallowed in the garden walls of 'social' apps and just browse, mostly interract via <3 and Likes, and don't really have opinions of their own anymore. Also typing, you know, it's a lot easier to tap an icon to mean something than type it awkardly.
kilon 8y ago
Discord. It was made mainly for games and it has exploded the last few years for pretty much about everything. I was introduced to Slack because the programming language I was using had its official channel there. They had also an irc channel but people were not willing to use it. Then I made a discord server mainly because I was using Discord for Unreal Engine , which has to this day the most active community there according to my experience. Without me realizing it the main dev of the language I was using abandoned Slack and used my Discord server. I made him admin and the rest of the community reluctantly followed cause being coders saw no point using a game orientated chat client but a year later not only the Slack server was almost completely abandoned but not one even mentioned Slack or IRC.

dagenix 8y ago

/me slow claps

Karrot_Kream 8y ago

For those that just want to use Slack through your IRC clients/bots/whatever, take a look at https://github.com/nolanlum/tanya https://github.com/nolanlum/tanya

xvilka 8y ago

It is worth noting that IRC is in the middle of overhaul and upgrade with IRCv3 [1] standard. Sadly not many clients and servers support it (almost none of them). [1] https://www.ircv3.net https://www.ircv3.net

brylie 8y ago
Just want to point out IRC3 aims to have "standardised account registration and verification, allowing clients to provide better interfaces for end users." This is really important, as registering an account on an IRC network can be a barrier to adoption.
eahman09 8y ago
It is worth nothing that IRCv3 is a coup d'etat made by a closed coven of developers: Most IRC clients are slowly developed or almost dead these days; the modus operandi of the IRCv3 developers is that they write patches for those IRC clients to support IRCv3 features and then push hard for the maintainers of those clients to merge them ("this is what the future of irc looks like! it's what the other clients are implementing! do you wanna be the only one not implementing it???") They argue the development of their "standards" is open, but the truth is that nobody cares about it (most people are OK with IRC as it is now) so very few people contribute; they pretend that nobody complaining is a tacit agreement that everybody is OK with their changes, when that's far from the truth.
- dcbadacd 8y ago
  To be fair the protocol was on in my opinion life support and IRCv3 really gives a few more years to the protocol and clients. Actually, I still think most IRC clients stale as f* even with IRCv3, for example embedding images and videos in chats should be trivial but I've yet to see a Linux desktop client do it (without sacrificing other features). IRCv3 doesn't also fix client certificate updating, though neither does any client handle client certs nicely so it's a sweet dream of mine to see auto-updated client certs.

agumonkey 8y ago

You could take away the web 2.0 I may not bother. IRC on the other hand ...

yawz 8y ago

I heavily used IRC in the early and mid 90s. Glad to see that it’s alive and kicking. Happy 30th!

davidw 8y ago

It's interesting that it's actually older than the "World Wide Web".

bkircher 8y ago

Love IRC. But what client should I use on my telephone?

eindiran 8y ago
I don't know about iPhones, but for Android there is 'IRC for Android' which had so far been excellent.
xPaw 8y ago
You can use a self hosted client like The Lounge which maintains IRC connections on your own server, and then you can view the client via a web browser (so it looks great on a phone, and you can get web push notifications) It basically acts like any other chat client (e.g. works on multiple devices at the same time) https://thelounge.chat https://thelounge.chat https://demo.thelounge.chat https://demo.thelounge.chat
- bkircher 8y ago
  Sure. However simplicity is quite important when you choose IRC as company chat solution and you want not only your geeky devs to join but also not–so–geeky people like the guy from marketing and the friendly folks from the front–desk.
  - xPaw 8y ago
    You only need to setup Lounge once, it supports multiple users at the same time. A non geeky person should have no trouble joining a channel.
    - bkircher 8y ago
      Oh, wow. I see. With push notifications, mobile clients, TLS encryption this _could_ work in a company setting …provided you keep logs and make search results available for staff, too. Cool. Thanks for the links!
      - 8y ago

modells 8y ago

Interesting. Last IIRC, Stanford ITS used tinyfugue (tf) MUD which is sorta like IRC.

tapland 8y ago

Met my fiancée over IRC many years ago and we're both using it as our main social communication with others online. It's an enclave untouched by much of the current toxicity of social media. It requires you to make friends with others based on your words and not content filtering algorithms. You are exposed to other people with other ideas since it isn't filtered. All with a reasonably high lowest level since the lack of bells and whistles turn a lot of people away from it.

Qwertie 8y ago
I only started using irc about 5 years ago but I have been using it daily since then and yeah the people on it aren't too bad. I have only really seen tech stuff on it recently, all the non tech irc channels I was in moved to discord :L
fredsir 8y ago
What channels do you frequent that can be used as "social channels" and aren't either a technical QA channel, or a those channels' "free talk" companion that nobody really uses?
- eahman11 8y ago
  Visit EFnet or Rizon, but yes, social IRC is mostly dead now
- tapland 8y ago
  There are plenty. Breakouts from them forming their own communities every few years. The base of our community has been around for at least a decade and the main channel is on its fourth iteration since I joined. Telling exact channel names would out me pretty fast though I reckon.
  - Cthulhu_ 8y ago
    Same in my 'social' bubble, started as a small gaming community that branched off a bigger one (you know, free forums, then a site, then self-hosted forums, IRC channel which later turned into a Skype group chat which nowadays is a Discord channel, etc). These things just form organically.

asdojasdosadsa 8y ago

IRC brings back some memories. I haven't personally used IRC in a few years directly, but I can remember how when I started university, every freshman "had" to login to IRC through SSH and screen :-). That's where the course channels were sitting and you could get help, either if you didn't want to ask face to face, go to school or just needed to ask something. There were other channels too, some where you were invited and had small social groups you chatted with daily. Nowadays, most of the communication has migrated to Telegram from IRC. EDIT: If one was to start using IRC, I guess there isn't a channel or a server where most or some of the people using also Hacker News go?

pingec 8y ago
Perhaps #hackernews and #startups on freenode?
- Doxin 8y ago
  Another good starting point is #xkcd. it is a large channel with a lot of tech-ish and math-y people. EDIT: Note that channel discovery on IRC is largely a word-of-mouth thing so don't be shy to ask people for channel recommendations on irc. Most programming language have a dedicated channel, e.g. #D or #python or whatnot.
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  - eahman09 8y ago
    The last thing I want in this world is to enter a channel full of people who like xkcd. It must be insufferable.
  - schindlabua 8y ago
    Are you talking about freenode? I just joined #xkcd and it's 8 people and no topic set. 3 other users joined and immediately left, I guess those were from HN aswell. (A big channel for everyone to join is ##programming, by the way.)

schindlabua 8y ago

I always envy the guy who registered the nick "e" on freenode. He must be ancient, one of the first users since NickServ came into being, and I imagine him as this grey-bearded programmer wizard who speaks in x86 assembly. He hangs around in ##C and I've seen him speak occasionally I think.

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dakom 8y ago

IRC was where I learned to program in the late 90's. Both through instruction on channels like #C, and also literally implementing the RFC's - building both bots and servers. It was a rush building "bot/server" combos like Nickserv... felt like superpowers and you could do all kinds of things through spoofing names and whatnot. (I mean it was pointless since the only servers I could pair with were other empty ones with one or two people... but still - it was fun!) I guess at some point my trajectory just.. changed - moving from that world to less heady stuff like Flash and so on... but the nostalgia is strong and I feel very lucky to have gotten my start in tech that way.

josteink 8y ago

And the IRC network I help run must have turned 15 by now. It’s not filled to the brim with thousands and thousands of users. It’s not monetizable. But instead we have a nice, small community where we can hang out, be ourselves and do whatever we like without having to adhere some other company’s “community standards”. It’s how I like the internet to be, and I don’t care one bit if it’s old-fashioned.

kilon 8y ago

I was never a fan of IRC although I am still a part time user since 1995. I was always annoyed losing replies just because I went offline and of course all the weird self disconnects and occasional banning bots. Sending files was also a big pain. But was simple to use and with tons of communities so I never actively complained about it. I converted to Discord and never looked back. On the other hand I was never deep into social activity online.

dewey 8y ago

The communities around torrent tracker was and is always very active on IRC as having your own IRC network is pretty standard for a tracker. I probably spent the majority of my time during my studies on IRC, and because of timezones it was mostly during the night. I have very fond memories of this time and I'm a bit sad that I don't use it that much any more. I really can't wrap my head around how communities, especially for programming languages use Slack where all the information gets fed into some silo and is not publicly available. Especially if they don't pay for it, which most open source projects don't do for money reasons and the history gets wiped after a while. If I were to decide what to use in a company I'd probably go for https://www.irccloud.com/ https://www.irccloud.com/ - it's an open protocol but still has the convenience of not having to set up a bouncer and run your own IRC server.

lcnmrn 8y ago

Superthread, https://superthread.net/ https://superthread.net/ is a web based alternative to IRC. You might want to check it out.

mabynogy 8y ago

IRC is simple and efficient. It's a real pleasure for me to use it daily to talk to my fellow programmers. Yeah we don't have images but we have links and a pastebin (https://github.com/solusipse/fiche https://github.com/solusipse/fiche) to replace that. I'm on #dailyprog at irc.rizon.net (https://dailyprog.org/ https://dailyprog.org/). It's an irc-based programming community. We also share a server with ssh access. We do small programming projects together. At the moment the idea is to make an exhausive list of all existing IRC servers with massscan and nmap (the output of the running massscan instance: https://dailyprog.org/~mabynogy/irc-servers.txt https://dailyprog.org/~mabynogy/irc-servers.txt).

nullify88 8y ago

Would anyone know of any active communities for sysadmins on IRC or otherwise? Or a directory to find such channels? Never really been one for being involved in online communities but being a one man team at work has got me looking for people of similar interests.

crtasm 8y ago
You can search Freenode's channel list at http://irc.netsplit.de/channels/?net=freenode http://irc.netsplit.de/channels/?net=freenode I've noticed a #reddit-sysadmin , likely there's a ##sysadmin too and probably others. The double # indicates a topic https://freenode.net/kb/answer/namespaces https://freenode.net/kb/answer/namespaces

rhlala 8y ago

My issue with irc is everyone can see your ip adress right? Is there any chanel of hackernewsers with the same spirit as HN?

Doxin 8y ago
That depends somewhat. Freenode for example allows you to request a "cloak" to hide your IP as long as you're a) registered, b) not using the web client.
- crtasm 8y ago
  And to their credit they still allow Tor connections, albeit to an existing registered account and authenticating with key-based SASL.

anfilt 8y ago

Long live IRC!

crtasm 8y ago

Smart filtering of join/part messages makes irc so much nicer to use, available in my preferred client Weechat as well as Hexchat and surely others. I only see a join/part if it happens within x minutes of someone speaking, and there's a shortcut to switch to unfiltered view when I want it.

mxuribe 8y ago

I remember back in 1992 (my freshmen year of college), my first exposure to this thing called the internet was via email AND irc. Ah, good ol' irc; what wonderful memories! Happy birthday irc!

Sir_Cmpwn 8y ago

Here's to the next thirty years! There's no better way to chat online than IRC. You'll have to tear it from our cold, dead hands.

fuzzyoneuk 8y ago

I've met some great people and fellow Devs on efnet back in the day, it used to be pretty much my only socialising back in the late 90s, some really disturbing toxic people too but a great experience all together. Still pop in every now and then.

triviatise 8y ago

I used IRC (a lot) in the early 90s. I built the first online texas holdem poker game hosted as an IRC bot around 1994. There were a few hundred players, many of them asked to play for real money. People created graphical clients and another guy extended the code to add tournament rules. Apparently poker pro chris ferguson first started playing poker on IRC. I definitely missed a huge opportunity to monetize it. IRC these days is a bit of a mess with custom authentication protocols that make it too hard to use. Slack is extremely easy to setup for an organization and just works.

lx3459683 8y ago

For anyone wondering where IRC users have migrated these days, the answer is Discord. There are several programming-themed servers with thousands of concurrent users, and many more high population servers for other interest groups.