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Why move away from IRC at all? If it ain't broken why "fix" it.
by bhhaskin 7y ago
Why move away from IRC at all? If it ain't broken why "fix" it.
- regnerba 7y agoFor a lot of people IRC is "broken" when compared to modern alternatives. I personally really dislike using IRC. I am in several IRC channels because some open source projects I use and upstream code to are on IRC. I dislike it very much.
- bityard 7y agoWhy?
- TylerE 7y agoNo persistent presence, no true source-of-truth logging, bad authentiation - I mean, there's really nothing good about IRC unless you have a fetish for late '90s tech.
- PeCaN 7y agoI would say a reasonable number of people consider the first two points to be features.
- icedchai 7y agoLate 90’s? More like late 80’s. I think my first IRC session was in 1991.
- fouc 7y agoIsn't the authentication fine now? SSL?
- lukeschlather 7y agoIt supports encryption but navigating what your client supports vs what the server supports is sufficiently finnicky that it can easily eat 5-10 minutes trying to set up, vs. plaintext which is easy. If someone non-technical had to get in, I'm not sure they could figure out enabling encryption on IRC in e.g. Pidgin which I've found to be a great client.
- t34543 7y agoEverything you dislike about IRC is precisely what I like.
- nomel 7y agoNothing like firing up google to search for where you might find the chat for the server you happened to connect to so you can see what you missed while you were away or disconnected while waiting for someone in a different timezone to respond.
- ndidi 7y agoIf you leave a room then you are no longer inside and you can't know what people inside were talking about while you weren't inside. As it should be.
- ZoomZoomZoom 7y agoThere should probably be a distinction between "conference" and "room", where one is logged and one is not, but it can be argued that logging is an expected feature and access is a matter of the room being private or not. IRC doesn't work like this and many users are not exactly happy, which is why so many run their clients just for logging.
- Dylan16807 7y agoThat makes tons of sense for rooms where you're in one or two at a time and have to be actively paying attention. When it's intentionally simple to sit in 50 rooms 95% of the time, it's pretty stupid for a disconnection to make you lose out on random chunks, or for you to miss events because you wanted to turn off your computer. When you intend to be always in a room, and the only roadblock is the inconveniences of modern tech, the logical state of "inside a room" should be decoupled from "has an active TCP connection". So sure you'd miss what people talk about if you left, but a disruption to your TCP connection would not trigger leaving.
- t34543 7y ago
- snazz 7y agoThere was lots of arguments about this in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20324675 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20324675
- Chlorus 7y agoBecause it's very not not broken, and here's the reasons why: http://exple.tive.org/blarg/2019/04/26/synchronous-text/ http://exple.tive.org/blarg/2019/04/26/synchronous-text/
- scrollaway 7y agoAt some point you have to stop saying IRC is not broken. You keep justifying it. If it weren't broken, you wouldn't spend all that time justifying it.
- recursive 7y agoAnd what point is that. I haven't even started saying it, but I guess I'll start now. IRC is not broken. I've never tried to justify it so I guess that proves it.
- labster 7y agoIRC is a perfectly functional, crank-started horseless carriage. You can still drive places and gas up easily enough, but I’d still rather drive a Tesla.
- radus 7y agoMy experiences as an infrequent IRC user over many years: - hmm, I have to download a client? maybe I can access a web interface? - okay, I have this connection string/url - how do I join a channel? - how do I set my nickname? is this persistent? - oh someone else is using my name? is this for the channel or the server?? - what's the etiquette of this particular channel? (I realize this is probably the case for any chat, but it seems like etiquette is much more vaunted in IRC) vs. zulip - enter url in browser - login with my github credentials .... that's it
- partialrecall 7y agoRequiring a browser and requiring social media credentials are both misfeatures in my book. Browsers are excellent tools.. for spying on users. And for as benign as github in particular may seem, we shouldn't be replacing standard internet protocols with products that promote and further normalize the expectation that people have a social media account.
- dpark 7y ago> Requiring a browser You realize we’re talking about Mozilla, right? > requiring social media They’re explicitly choosing between social media platforms...
- partialrecall 7y agoMy point is that any social media platform is not an acceptable IRC requirement, nor is requiring a social media account an acceptable requirement for any IRC requirement. And Mozilla, more than perhaps anybody else, should be aware that web browsers facilitate surveillance of users.
- dpark 7y agoIRC is a social media platform. The fact that it predates Github by two decades doesn’t mean it’s not social media. I don’t know know what you’re actually opposed to. A blanket disapproval of “social media” isn’t particularly meaningful, so there’s nothing of substance in your complaint to respond to. I have no idea why you think browsers are a tool to facilitate surveillance to a greater extent than dedicated clients. If a nation state or corporation can compromise your browser, they can realistically compromise your entire OS.
- partialrecall 7y agoIRC might be considered broken in a number of ways, but I find that every proposed replacement is broken in much more severe ways.
- fouc 7y agoLately I've been thinking about how amazingly successful IRC has been. I mean, it survived the "web" and smartphones as long as it did. Up until slack appeared on the scene. I was a heavy IRCer from '96 to '13, and then switched almost immediately to slack. Slack sucks in a lot of ways but it happens to hit the sweet point of convenience. It allows me to be a purely 'casual' chatter, I can close and open slack anytime. I don't have to keep irssi running in a screen in the background. I don't have to have a bouncer. Anyways I think that if a new version of IRC came out with extra convenience for the pure 'casual' user, then we'd all go back to IRC.
- Marsymars 7y ago> I don't have to have a bouncer. By some odd twist of fate, WSL is what enables my IRC use. My only 24/7 PC is my HTPC/Plex server, which I also run ZNC on via WSL.
- berti 7y ago> It allows me to be a purely 'casual' chatter, I can close and open slack anytime. I don't have to keep irssi running in a screen in the background. I don't have to have a bouncer. What's the barrier to a SaaS IRC solution like irccloud?
- voltagex_ 7y agoI paid for IRCCloud for 2 years (I think) * General instability - I got plenty of notifications that the connection to Freenode had been dropped * A couple of channels outright banned me for connecting from an IRCCloud host.
- dontbenebby 7y agoNot everyone Mozilla hires is from a super technical background (ex: even though I now am a pentester, I actually did a UX research internship, wasn't hired to do software engineering at all). I wish they'd kept it around though, let the community die a natural death: slowly bleeding out as zoomers share memes in signal groups.
- stjohnswarts 7y agoThe young peeps like their icons and colors and gifs. Old people are always dying off and young people who turn into old people tend to bring their toys along with them, so I forsee something like slack/discord but OSS taking over in the next 10 years, at least in programming circles.
- Avamander 7y agoPlease, having an usable, secure IRC setup is quite annoying, nothing to do with "icons and colors and gifs" (but difficulty at viewing that content in IRC clients could be counted as a negative). Also, some of the most active channels on a few IRC networks are primarily ~20-30yo people, maybe there are older-people channels but I suspect there's a few barriers at getting access to those.
- jillesvangurp 7y agoI think the reason they are moving is that it is broken for them. IRC is fine if you are over forty and have been using IRC for the last few decades. I.e. it is not fine for most developers who are around 30 and have probably never encountered it professionally. The demographics of software development are such that people over forty are out numbered by an order of magnitude by younger people. There just aren't a lot of them. I am over forty, I have used IRC professionally, and have not encountered it with any regularity in the last decade (that is to say exactly 0 times in the last six years). I can understand it's a non starter for younger developers as it is an unusable mess compared to other stuff they use. I suspect that part of the reason Mozilla is switching is that they realized people in their community were working around it already. The real thing people should be asking about IRC is why attempts to fix, improve, or modernize it consistently get rejected by IRC users. It has not kept up and it isn't for a lack of trying. There have been many attempts to keep it alive and they all keep failing. E.g. slack had an IRC gateway for a while and this proved so unpopular that removing it was barely noticed by anyone. It was there but mostly unloved by IRC users. People voted with their feet by not using it. Now it's gone because apparently it was an unimportant/redundant/irrelevant feature with no commercial value whatsoever for Slack.
- ryacko 7y agoPeople want interactive web forums that offer notifications and offer thread/channel history from an accessible front end. The statement I just made sounds like an absurd product but they exist. The weird part is everyone is trying to build it completely in javascript.
- opan 7y agoFor what it's worth, I'm in my 20s and love IRC. I do also use matrix and xmpp, but they aren't as fast and comfortable. I love how irc logs work. I have everything stored locally and can search it very quickly with grep. I'm always frustrated with the search of other things, both for being slow and for not finding what I know is there. Stuff like multi-line posts and markdown are nice, but none of that is worth all the good stuff you lose from irc.
- bregma 7y ago- not invented here - difficult to monetize - designed only as a communications medium, not a social medium - doesn't work like other phone apps - does not support multimedia or cat ears
- floatingatoll 7y agoThe previous post explains why IRC is ‘broken’, so to speak. http://exple.tive.org/blarg/2019/05/14/the-next-part-of-the-process/ http://exple.tive.org/blarg/2019/05/14/the-next-part-of-the-...