> for the too many people that want to have fun while pretending to communicate
It's exactly this kind of flippant dismissal that is why IRC is dying, because there are too many people who equate modernity with frivolity. That is, unless our requirements strictly adhere to your arbitrarily-defined notions of that which has merit, our voices are left unheard.
And IRC's greatest defenders wonder why everybody jumps ship.
Whereas, for the rest of us, we just want the same features I've been using on other platforms not just since the rise of Slack, Discord and its ilk, but other platforms besides, both before and after the rise of Web 2.0 and social media.
I find it pretentious that anybody could consider the following features "having fun while pretending to communicate", showing their profound lack of understanding for what communication can, perhaps should, be:
- the ability to modify one's own messages
- the ability to delete one's own message, and have that deletion propagated
- the ability to delete other peoples' messages, and have that deletion propagated
- simple but flexible role-based permissions systems that can be defined on a per-community basis
- collections of text channels in one community/guild/server that can be ordered, and that ordering propagated and standardised for all participants in that community (for the sake of consistency)
- usernames and nicknames that don't collide, using a normally-hidden primary key for each user that is associated with an account rather than ever-changing hostmasks that can be hidden, making bans and ignores ineffectual
- automatically-created community-based moderation logs
- the ability to create private group discussions without needing to create a text channel
- the ability for all participants in the community to see messages in the same format, including code blocks with syntax highlighting, images, video links, and web embeds
- a contacts list that travels across sessions, regardless of client, sign-in location, etc., and associated direct message history
- the ability to read missed messages while offline without needing to set up a bouncer (either necessitating a home computer be left on all the time AND be accessible via the web, not always practical; or every individual user paying for a bouncer, something that should be considered vastly unnecessary)
- everything just working
Instead of thinking "everybody just wants to send silly emojis and video chat, what a waste of time", the IRC crowd would do well to listen to what people actually want, need, and have come to expect from online communication, rather than derisively and condescendingly covering their eyes and putting their fingers in their ears.
>the ability to modify one's own messages
>- the ability to delete one's own message, and have that deletion propagated
> - the ability to delete other peoples' messages, and have that deletion propagated
These 1) don’t work when you need them too and 2) are very much antifeatures
I’ve been in slack and discourd channels with important people who will post things that cause me to make some decision and then will go back and delete or edit their message. It’s gotten to the point where whenever these people post to slack I always take a screenshot. On discourd you can just use finch and all the edits show up as new messages.
I really liked how on IRC you just sent messages and that was the end of it.
>- everything just working
Hah, that would describe IRC better than discourd IMO. Slack “works” but good god is it slow.
I agree that it doesn't work and is antifeatures. I also like that on IRC you can just sent messages and there it is. You can have public logs, possibly server side logs (although as far as I know, implementations of this aren't common, but this is easily possible without altering the protocol or clients at all); private messages would not be logged though, so if you wish to remain private you should send the message private instead (the server administrator should not look at private messages either, unless the message is addressed to them). Messages that you do not like, you can filter out on the client side (if the operator can provide a default filter file for uses who do not want to see everything or to customize it, that could also do; however, (public) messages should probably still be stored except that you do not have unlimited disk space, so you will have to avoid some anyways).
> You can have public logs
You could equally have public logs in Discord and/or Slack. At least on Discord, this can be achieved through a bot — which, if logging is the aim, could be a very simple 20-line Python script.
> These 1) don't work when you need them too
They don't? They work perfectly fine for me and always have. Citation needed.
> 2) are very much antifeatures
According to whom?
People use and profit from these features all day, every day on Slack and Discord. Whether you put any stock into them doesn't make any difference: they are features for a vast number of people other than yourself, they are definitely features.
> I really liked how on IRC you just sent messages and that was the end of it
I did, until I realised I and other people didn't have to spam the text channel with minor corrections to spelling, grammar, and markdown formatting with further messages containing the edits — and those messages may themselves contain errors, necessitating further ex post facto editing with more new lines.
> that would describe IRC better than discourd IMO
The day I can log into any IRC client, web or otherwise, without having had to set up my own bouncer and leave it running at home exposed to the internet or pay for a server, and it negotiates my IRC capabilities, joins all my channels, re-opens my private messages, shows me my chat history, and gives me a scrollback of the messages I've missed since my last session, I might be inclined to agree.
Not to mention what happens if I typically connect to multiple servers.
Until I am no longer forced to use such ugly workarounds to what should be simple session management that practically every other chat service has figured out, even before Discord and Slack, I don't consider IRC to 'just work' except in the sense that, yes, a non-negligible number of people have managed to get their fragile IRC configurations working just-so, likely on only one machine — good for them, but I have higher standards.
> a contacts list that travels across sessions, regardless of client
Tell me exactly how use slack, directly (without bridges and stuff) without using the official client.
Get your session key that's embedded in the HTML body after you log in. Be careful with this key since it has no expiry and can impersonate you as if you were connected via the default client, including undocumented API access. Find some application that can connect to the Slack RTM API and provide a chat TUI, using the session key you extracted.
I know there are a few out there, but can't personally recommend one.
> - the ability to delete one's own message, and have that deletion propagated
> - the ability to delete other peoples' messages, and have that deletion propagated
That means you are asking for control over other people's computers and what information they are allowed to display, i.e. DRM. It is also a falsification of history.
> - the ability for all participants in the community to see messages in the same format, including code blocks with syntax highlighting, images, video links, and web embeds
That excludes people with text interfaces.
> I find it pretentious that anybody could consider the following features "having fun while pretending to communicate"
straw-man argument. Nobody considers these things to be frivolous. I would consider slack's annoying gifs and discord's extensive emoji to be frivolous.
> the ability to modify one's own messages
Please, no. People editing their own messages later on is possibly the most annoying thing about slack and discord. Say something and move on, or append a message if you made a mistake.
> the ability for all participants in the community to see messages in the same format, including code blocks with syntax highlighting, images, video links, and web embeds
no thanks. what if I want to disable images, video links, and especially web embeds?
all -I- want from a client is a superset of markdown, like gfm, and code highlighting for most languages. and the ability to add syntax highlighting for other languages really easily.
all that IRC really needs is a few quality of life fixes like the history you mentioned. "collections of text channels" already exist... that's how IRC works. there's no reason for every single community to repeat similar sub channels.
> everything just working
I don't think I've ever had an issue with a web client not working.
> straw-man argument
Not at all a strawman argument. As I stated, there are a plethora of features in Slack, Discord, and its ilk that are most assuredly not "having fun while pretending to communicate". The whole point of my post is that one cannot so off-handedly dismiss an entire class of application.
If GP meant to be dismissive of GIFs and emoji, they can easily have said so. (That said, one can post standard Unicode emoji to IRC, and will anybody call that frivolous?)
> People editing their own messages later on is possibly the most annoying thing about slack and discord
I'm willing to imagine that some rather high percentage, perhaps in the 80s or 90s, is just people fixing spelling, incorrectly-entered Markdown formatting, or other kinds of minor reformatting.
I'll take this over people spamming the text channel with further edits (that may still contain other faults, necessitating more edits in further lines to come).
> what if I want to disable images, video links, and especially web embeds?
You can in Discord.
> "collections of text channels" already exist
No, they don't. Channels have no groupings with others within one IRC server. You can't guarantee that a given set of channels on a similar topic have the same owner, same rules, etc. Joining a channel also doesn't automatically join you to another set of channels within that channel's group.
The flexibility of channel groups is not replicated in IRC.
> I don't think I've ever had an issue with a web client not working
So you can use any web client and, with only entering your username and nickserv password, any web client (A) knows what channels to connect you to, (B) what to set as your nickname, (C) how to handle a nickname collision, (D) set up your IRC capabilities all without any further configuration on your part?
'cos that's what people expect, that's what "just working" means. No config every time I encounter a new machine, no having to run a bouncer or screen session on some server in some godforsaken data centre and thus limit myself to terminal-based clients just to keep my connection details consistent across sessions, etc.
https://xkcd.com/1782/ https://xkcd.com/1782/