8 ms·

Happy for the people that built it, with the idea of improving what the chat was. Sad for the internet, because we were better in the 1980s with an open standar

Happy for the people that built it, with the idea of improving what the chat was. Sad for the internet, because we were better in the 1980s with an open standard like IRC, and gradually the internet community lost the ability to adapt their old open protocols for the future.

avip 7y ago
Is it not an inevitable result of federation and decentralization as governance? A camel is a horse designed by a committee, as the saying has it.
- buboard 7y ago
  I dont think federation has anything to do with it. There were no incentives to bring it to consumers though (in contrast e.g. to email), and by itself it is not easy to use for vast majority of end users.
  - ethbro 7y ago
    The email protocols pre-date commercial access to the internet. So incentives were very different when it was created.
    - buboard 7y ago
      so does IRC. I believe even if it adopted IRC as a protocol, slack would still be successful, it's all about the UI being dumb-proof, friendly and capable and seemingly in-vogue. Discord, even more.
      - ethbro 7y ago
        If Slack adopted the IRC protocol, it would be subject to the same issue Microsoft had with the early web -- either implementing proprietary extensions to the spec to enable features, kludging in new features by abusing existing functionality, or waiting for spec consensus before expanding. And furthermore, it'd be reimplemented almost instantly by Facebook / Apple / Microsoft / Google. So I can see why they decided to chart a different path.
        buboard 7y ago
        > it'd be reimplemented almost instantly by Facebook wait, how? It's not like there was/is a lot of ppl on IRC, just a handful, and it doesnt fit into their product (talking with strangers)
        ethbro 7y ago
        Clearly defined spec + order of magnitude funding difference + new market = ideal product cloning opportunity As has been mentioned here, Facebook is running out of strangers to connect: future growth will depend on adding new types of users.
      - fnord123 7y ago
        >it's all about the UI being dumb-proof Make something idiot-proof and the world will make a better idiot. And it looks like I'm the bigger idiot here because I don't understand the interface at all. I'm in two servers for two open source projects but my ID seems to be different for the two servers and not federated for some reason. Or is it? I don't really know. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
        buboard 7y ago
        Yeah because u re smart enough to understand the IRC so you naturally expect a single identity. Try to empathize with us mere mortals who still have not fully grasped the concept of the emoji.
  - Certhas 7y ago
    Federation prevents experimenting, iterating and developing the protocol forward. Yes there are all sort of workarounds like protocol extensions and what have you not, but then you add massive new friction to the system ("No sorry my client doesn't do OpenVideoCall2.0 it only does LibreAVConference0.3"). That type of friction isn't that hard to deal with if you have a bunch of tech savvy people with time on their hands. But it is no longer appropriate for todays web that is used by everyone. > Indeed, cannibalizing a federated application-layer protocol into a centralized service is almost a sure recipe for a successful consumer product today. It’s what Slack did with IRC, what Facebook did with email, and what WhatsApp has done with XMPP. In each case, the federated service is stuck in time, while the centralized service is able to iterate into the modern world and beyond. https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/
    - buboard 7y ago
      There s nothing wrong with extensions unless they break the entire system, but seems there was no One IRC company that would essentially dictate extensions to everyone else. Google has changed HTTP and HTML a lot, and email too. Slack could have done the same with IRC (maybe someone else will do in the future? ). Yes, walled gardens are a recipe for success , but despite massive walled gardens we still have not switched wholly to those gardens, because they come and go.
    - eeZah7Ux 7y ago
      > Federation prevents experimenting, iterating and developing the protocol forward. How so? Nothing prevent versioning a protocol and having experimental servers.
      - oblio 7y ago
        But you still have to support the old stuff, which at internet scale, is never upgraded. So you have to support a really long tail of old versions.
      - Certhas 7y ago
        I talk about that _literally_ in the sentence after the one you quoted.
Sahhaese 7y ago
The death of the protocol. People no longer release protocols, they release products. The open net, the open web has truly died. I wonder sometimes what we're missing because the conditions that let the web grow out of the internet have disappeared. What next leap are we missing?
- etaty 7y ago
  Not products, but platforms.
  - dexterdog 7y ago
    And in the past you could not be de-protocol-ed
    - bonesss 7y ago
      Not by mobs of angry students, but protocol managing entities like Microsoft, Novell, IBM, and others sure could make your interpretation of the protocol invalid. Particularly if you had some competing software out in the wild...
      - dexterdog 7y ago
        You can code around a protocol change. You can't do that with a de-platforming.
- jasode 7y ago
  >The death of the protocol. People no longer release protocols, they release products. The open net, the open web has truly died. People ascribe too much credit to a protocol. The real issue is the funding model to support spending money on that protocol. By focusing the lens on the funding, the web wasn't as "open" as people think. The so-called "open" web was a government project which wasn't fully open to the public until about ~1995. Before then, you had to work on government-funded projects (ARPANET & NSFNET). The "open" web was actually quite closed off to people that didn't belong to an institution to give them an ".edu" or ".mil" address. >I wonder sometimes what we're missing because the conditions that let the web grow out of the internet have disappeared. The "conditions" were government sponsorship to pay for protocols. - Vint Cerf developed the TCPIP protocol -- but he was funded by DARPA (USA government). Mr Cerf didn't have to go to venture capital firms on Sand Hill Rd and get funding to pay the salaries of his team to build a proof-of-concept or "MVP". He didn't have to worry about not making payroll if his TCPIP protocol project failed. - Tim Berners-Lee developed the http protocol and also HTML language -- but he was funded by CERN...which is one step removed from being funded by a consortium of governments[0]. Therefore, TBL didn't have to wear a "salesman" hat and pound the pavement begging enterprise customers to buy his "http protocol stack" so he could buy his expensive NeXT workstation[1] to help build and test the protocol. Those are prominent examples but it doesn't mean people can't create new protocols on their without government help. The SSL protocol was developed by Netscape -- a commercial business. I believe the the git protocol was developed by Linus without a government grant. (Also note that http v1 was funded by CERN (government sponsored) but http/2 & http/3 appears to be mostly funded by Google (non-government sponsored).) But notice what happens with "open protocols" like SSL and git: they eventually run into a wall where somebody has to spend money on it. The SSL protocol is free of royalties but the Certificate Authorities issuing certificates are not free of charge. The git protocol is free but enterprise accounts for Github are not. The ActivityPub protocol is also free but Mastodon servers are run by altruistic admins spending their own money or requesting Patreon donations. Somewhere, money has to be spent and that ultimately constrains what the "free web" will be. Releasing a "free to use protocol" is not enough. Therefore, it doesn't matter if the old IRC protocol is free of charge. People still have to spend money on auxiliary features outside the scope of the protocol. Slack spent money on those extra features (e.g. searchable history, etc) that nobody spent on IRC. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CERN#Member_states_and_budget https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CERN#Member_states_and_budget [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee#/media/File:First_Web_Server.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee#/media/File:Fi...
bouk 7y ago
IRC has terrible UX, and Slack beat it because the experience is better.
- dTal 7y ago
  That's not an intrinsic problem with IRC-the-protocol. The only technical issue with it is the lack of server-side channel history scrollback which makes it inconvenient for users who aren't connected 100% of the time. This could have been entirely solved with a single extra server command - "/fetch-channel-history". But I suppose no one was convinced of the need. If you wanted to make a modern, user-friendly chat application that relies on central servers, there's no reason not to base it on IRC.
  - chillacy 7y ago
    By the time slack published the RFC and got a few people on board someone else would have launched and taken all its customers
kashyapc 7y ago
I'm truly hoping the Matrix protocol takes off. (FWIW, /me has been using Matrix-based chat clients for group and individual chats at conferences. Quite happy with it.)
simonh 7y ago
I'm a big fan of Pythonista. When I do a search for a topic Google often takes me to a post on the user forums. There's also a Slack channel, but Google can't see it so anything useful in there is much harder to access hence I don't use it. I don't want to encourage content migrating to a proprietary silo. That's why I don't mind Reddit, for all it's faults it's at least still an actual web site.
Shorel 7y ago
I think Discord is more a replacement of IRC than Slack could ever be. Slack is enterprise and workflow-oriented, Discord is community oriented.
mlrtime 7y ago
Seems like there are 16 billion reasons NOT to choose IRC. From Slack's perspective (and you could argue most of it's users) this was a good choice. FWIW, I've been using IRC for over 20 years.
austenallred 7y ago
We still have IRC for those that choose to use it
bytematic 7y ago
Twitch.tv uses it
dredmorbius 7y ago
MLP's "On Port 80" hits on much of the "why": Firewalls increase friction of new protocol development. There's moe to it, but this is definitely a factor. https://medium.com/@maradydd/on-port-80-d8d6d3443d9a https://medium.com/@maradydd/on-port-80-d8d6d3443d9a

avip 7y ago

Is it not an inevitable result of federation and decentralization as governance? A camel is a horse designed by a committee, as the saying has it.

buboard 7y ago
I dont think federation has anything to do with it. There were no incentives to bring it to consumers though (in contrast e.g. to email), and by itself it is not easy to use for vast majority of end users.
- ethbro 7y ago
  The email protocols pre-date commercial access to the internet. So incentives were very different when it was created.
  - buboard 7y ago
    so does IRC. I believe even if it adopted IRC as a protocol, slack would still be successful, it's all about the UI being dumb-proof, friendly and capable and seemingly in-vogue. Discord, even more.
    - ethbro 7y ago
      If Slack adopted the IRC protocol, it would be subject to the same issue Microsoft had with the early web -- either implementing proprietary extensions to the spec to enable features, kludging in new features by abusing existing functionality, or waiting for spec consensus before expanding. And furthermore, it'd be reimplemented almost instantly by Facebook / Apple / Microsoft / Google. So I can see why they decided to chart a different path.
      - buboard 7y ago
        > it'd be reimplemented almost instantly by Facebook wait, how? It's not like there was/is a lot of ppl on IRC, just a handful, and it doesnt fit into their product (talking with strangers)
        ethbro 7y ago
        Clearly defined spec + order of magnitude funding difference + new market = ideal product cloning opportunity As has been mentioned here, Facebook is running out of strangers to connect: future growth will depend on adding new types of users.
    - fnord123 7y ago
      >it's all about the UI being dumb-proof Make something idiot-proof and the world will make a better idiot. And it looks like I'm the bigger idiot here because I don't understand the interface at all. I'm in two servers for two open source projects but my ID seems to be different for the two servers and not federated for some reason. Or is it? I don't really know. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
      - buboard 7y ago
        Yeah because u re smart enough to understand the IRC so you naturally expect a single identity. Try to empathize with us mere mortals who still have not fully grasped the concept of the emoji.
- Certhas 7y ago
  Federation prevents experimenting, iterating and developing the protocol forward. Yes there are all sort of workarounds like protocol extensions and what have you not, but then you add massive new friction to the system ("No sorry my client doesn't do OpenVideoCall2.0 it only does LibreAVConference0.3"). That type of friction isn't that hard to deal with if you have a bunch of tech savvy people with time on their hands. But it is no longer appropriate for todays web that is used by everyone. > Indeed, cannibalizing a federated application-layer protocol into a centralized service is almost a sure recipe for a successful consumer product today. It’s what Slack did with IRC, what Facebook did with email, and what WhatsApp has done with XMPP. In each case, the federated service is stuck in time, while the centralized service is able to iterate into the modern world and beyond. https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/
  - buboard 7y ago
    There s nothing wrong with extensions unless they break the entire system, but seems there was no One IRC company that would essentially dictate extensions to everyone else. Google has changed HTTP and HTML a lot, and email too. Slack could have done the same with IRC (maybe someone else will do in the future? ). Yes, walled gardens are a recipe for success , but despite massive walled gardens we still have not switched wholly to those gardens, because they come and go.
  - eeZah7Ux 7y ago
    > Federation prevents experimenting, iterating and developing the protocol forward. How so? Nothing prevent versioning a protocol and having experimental servers.
    - oblio 7y ago
      But you still have to support the old stuff, which at internet scale, is never upgraded. So you have to support a really long tail of old versions.
    - Certhas 7y ago
      I talk about that _literally_ in the sentence after the one you quoted.

Sahhaese 7y ago

The death of the protocol. People no longer release protocols, they release products. The open net, the open web has truly died. I wonder sometimes what we're missing because the conditions that let the web grow out of the internet have disappeared. What next leap are we missing?

etaty 7y ago
Not products, but platforms.
- dexterdog 7y ago
  And in the past you could not be de-protocol-ed
  - bonesss 7y ago
    Not by mobs of angry students, but protocol managing entities like Microsoft, Novell, IBM, and others sure could make your interpretation of the protocol invalid. Particularly if you had some competing software out in the wild...
    - dexterdog 7y ago
      You can code around a protocol change. You can't do that with a de-platforming.
jasode 7y ago
>The death of the protocol. People no longer release protocols, they release products. The open net, the open web has truly died. People ascribe too much credit to a protocol. The real issue is the funding model to support spending money on that protocol. By focusing the lens on the funding, the web wasn't as "open" as people think. The so-called "open" web was a government project which wasn't fully open to the public until about ~1995. Before then, you had to work on government-funded projects (ARPANET & NSFNET). The "open" web was actually quite closed off to people that didn't belong to an institution to give them an ".edu" or ".mil" address. >I wonder sometimes what we're missing because the conditions that let the web grow out of the internet have disappeared. The "conditions" were government sponsorship to pay for protocols. - Vint Cerf developed the TCPIP protocol -- but he was funded by DARPA (USA government). Mr Cerf didn't have to go to venture capital firms on Sand Hill Rd and get funding to pay the salaries of his team to build a proof-of-concept or "MVP". He didn't have to worry about not making payroll if his TCPIP protocol project failed. - Tim Berners-Lee developed the http protocol and also HTML language -- but he was funded by CERN...which is one step removed from being funded by a consortium of governments[0]. Therefore, TBL didn't have to wear a "salesman" hat and pound the pavement begging enterprise customers to buy his "http protocol stack" so he could buy his expensive NeXT workstation[1] to help build and test the protocol. Those are prominent examples but it doesn't mean people can't create new protocols on their without government help. The SSL protocol was developed by Netscape -- a commercial business. I believe the the git protocol was developed by Linus without a government grant. (Also note that http v1 was funded by CERN (government sponsored) but http/2 & http/3 appears to be mostly funded by Google (non-government sponsored).) But notice what happens with "open protocols" like SSL and git: they eventually run into a wall where somebody has to spend money on it. The SSL protocol is free of royalties but the Certificate Authorities issuing certificates are not free of charge. The git protocol is free but enterprise accounts for Github are not. The ActivityPub protocol is also free but Mastodon servers are run by altruistic admins spending their own money or requesting Patreon donations. Somewhere, money has to be spent and that ultimately constrains what the "free web" will be. Releasing a "free to use protocol" is not enough. Therefore, it doesn't matter if the old IRC protocol is free of charge. People still have to spend money on auxiliary features outside the scope of the protocol. Slack spent money on those extra features (e.g. searchable history, etc) that nobody spent on IRC. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CERN#Member_states_and_budget https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CERN#Member_states_and_budget [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee#/media/File:First_Web_Server.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee#/media/File:Fi...

bouk 7y ago

IRC has terrible UX, and Slack beat it because the experience is better.

dTal 7y ago
That's not an intrinsic problem with IRC-the-protocol. The only technical issue with it is the lack of server-side channel history scrollback which makes it inconvenient for users who aren't connected 100% of the time. This could have been entirely solved with a single extra server command - "/fetch-channel-history". But I suppose no one was convinced of the need. If you wanted to make a modern, user-friendly chat application that relies on central servers, there's no reason not to base it on IRC.
- chillacy 7y ago
  By the time slack published the RFC and got a few people on board someone else would have launched and taken all its customers

kashyapc 7y ago

I'm truly hoping the Matrix protocol takes off. (FWIW, /me has been using Matrix-based chat clients for group and individual chats at conferences. Quite happy with it.)

simonh 7y ago

I'm a big fan of Pythonista. When I do a search for a topic Google often takes me to a post on the user forums. There's also a Slack channel, but Google can't see it so anything useful in there is much harder to access hence I don't use it. I don't want to encourage content migrating to a proprietary silo. That's why I don't mind Reddit, for all it's faults it's at least still an actual web site.

Shorel 7y ago

I think Discord is more a replacement of IRC than Slack could ever be. Slack is enterprise and workflow-oriented, Discord is community oriented.

mlrtime 7y ago

Seems like there are 16 billion reasons NOT to choose IRC. From Slack's perspective (and you could argue most of it's users) this was a good choice. FWIW, I've been using IRC for over 20 years.

austenallred 7y ago

We still have IRC for those that choose to use it

bytematic 7y ago

Twitch.tv uses it

dredmorbius 7y ago

MLP's "On Port 80" hits on much of the "why": Firewalls increase friction of new protocol development. There's moe to it, but this is definitely a factor. https://medium.com/@maradydd/on-port-80-d8d6d3443d9a https://medium.com/@maradydd/on-port-80-d8d6d3443d9a