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I was born in the 90s so I never used IRC outside work. I used it for work on a daily basis until a couple weeks ago, and I hate it with passion. The vpn drops

I was born in the 90s so I never used IRC outside work. I used it for work on a daily basis until a couple weeks ago, and I hate it with passion. The vpn drops and you miss messages. You are offline you miss messages, don't want to miss messages? set up a relay (seriously?!). Now I'm on a team which uses slack, and I miss how lightweight hexchat is, but in terms of being able to use it my phone and having something that just works without any additional effort it only has advantages.

ibotty 7y ago
You can use slack via weechat. It works pretty reliable. Better not use slack though but an open protocol.
- tbrock 7y ago
  It’s pretty bad, I tried but it was awful.
  - ibotty 7y ago
    I use it and it's ok.
chapium 7y ago
Many people use gnu screen to connect to a session and never log out.
- procinct 7y ago
  Until you turn your computer off I suppose. Could always set up a server running screen or tmux and ssh into it each time I suppose.
  - bjoli 7y ago
    I have a Raspberry pi 2 with an immutable SD card running weechat in a tmux session. Logging is done to a USB stick. On any occasional power failure it restarts everything and logs me back in. It has been running since whenever the rpi2 came out, and total downtime since has been under an hour.
- skywhopper 7y ago
  This assumes so many things which are the reason lots of us have happily moved on.
1337shadow 7y ago
It's funny for me to see some people are still advocating Slack's "convenience". I mean I get it, Internet Chat because accessible without actually learning what a client or server is. And I'm myself in at least 3 slack groups professionally out of a total of 20... But I just know nobody, from a variety of OSes, who doesn't experience the "bug where slack completely looses where you are in time" and then you have to scroll for a while because the "Jump to new messages" doesn't work well. I came to the point where I wonder if anybody here doesn't have that bug at all ... A bug that kills UX like that and that we can do nothing about, not even contribute a fix, and still it seems Slack is the best product people can find, meh, I run Mattermost in my company and we're all very happy with it and don't experience as much problems as we do with Slack. Never really been anywhere but in tech channels on IRC, I had a few years without going back but I'm back and I love it.
- Carpetsmoker 7y ago
  I'm not a big fan of Slack for a long list of reasons, but at least I don't have to muck about with finicky undocumented (or semi-documented at best) software just to get a basic usable connection which won't drop any messages. I think just that goes a long way. Mattermost might be good (never used it), but being self-hosted means it's a lot harder to set up than just subscribing to Slack. I talked about this before on HN[1]: I think providing a simple hosted SaaS should be a key part of the strategy to displace shitty closed-source products like Slack. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21592195 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21592195
claudiawerner 7y ago
>You are offline you miss messages, don't want to miss messages? set up a relay (seriously?!). ...Yeah. From installing znc from your favourite package manager to having it set up and running in your client is all of ten minutes, with SSL, auto-joins, channel history and all. Is it a barrier? Yeah. Is it so much of a barrier that it would push someone concerned about centralized services and proprietary software to just give up and use Slack? I don't think so.
- icebraining 7y ago
  Not all of us have a server in the closet running 24/7, and having to use someone else's computer feels like half the way to using a service like Slack.
- askafriend 7y ago
  I don't know what any of this "znc", "package manager", "SSL", "auto-join" mumbo jumbo is. I'm just going to use Slack and move on with my life. Actually I lied, I do know what all that mumbo jumbo is, but I hope you get my point.
atomi 7y ago
Took me all of 10 minutes to set up irssi on a free google cloud vps many years ago. It's still chugging along. ~ uptime 23:22:27 up 787 days, 15:10, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00 It's not that hard.
- Carpetsmoker 7y ago
  This is a lot of work (especially if you're not already familiar with these tools) compared to pretty much any other chat solution out there.
- comex 7y ago
  Not that hard, if you don't care about two things: - Typing latency - Access from mobile devices Many people don't care about those things; good for them. Unfortunately for me, I do. I can (and do) use a bouncer, which theoretically solves both problems: text entry is handled by my local IRC client rather than every keystroke going through a server, and I can run an IRC client on my phone. Unfortunately, bouncers are a rather poor approximation of true cross-device history/state synchronization; e.g. they don't sync unread messages. And they're generally slow and fiddly for various silly reasons. For example, most bouncers require you to make a separate connection for each IRC network, which is slower, and requires configuring each client device for each network, annoying if you have a lot of networks. Also, long backlogs can overload slow IRC clients, but typically the alternative to long backlogs is losing history, since there's no standard mechanism for clients to request history on demand. There are also some IRC clients that do "true" state synchronization, like Quassel or Weechat's relay mode, but none with a tolerable iPhone version, last I checked.
  - hprotagonist 7y ago
    mosh solves my latency and mobile access issues handily. tmux, irssi, and mosh on a VPS and i’ve had that setup for IRC for ... pushing a decade?
  - Wingy 7y ago
    I use The Lounge for IRC because I use iOS, Windows, and Linux.
bangboombang 7y ago
You still need a VPS or server of some kind, but if the "screen with irssi/weechat" concept sounds too much like 80s UNIX, there is quassel[1]. It's like a relay/proxy/bouncer but actually uses its own protocol between the GUI and core, so you get infinite backscroll, proper sync when running multiple GUI instances at the same time etc. Oh and there is a decent Android client called quasseldroid. [1] https://quassel-irc.org/ https://quassel-irc.org/

ibotty 7y ago

You can use slack via weechat. It works pretty reliable. Better not use slack though but an open protocol.

tbrock 7y ago
It’s pretty bad, I tried but it was awful.
- ibotty 7y ago
  I use it and it's ok.

chapium 7y ago

Many people use gnu screen to connect to a session and never log out.

procinct 7y ago
Until you turn your computer off I suppose. Could always set up a server running screen or tmux and ssh into it each time I suppose.
- bjoli 7y ago
  I have a Raspberry pi 2 with an immutable SD card running weechat in a tmux session. Logging is done to a USB stick. On any occasional power failure it restarts everything and logs me back in. It has been running since whenever the rpi2 came out, and total downtime since has been under an hour.
skywhopper 7y ago
This assumes so many things which are the reason lots of us have happily moved on.

1337shadow 7y ago

It's funny for me to see some people are still advocating Slack's "convenience". I mean I get it, Internet Chat because accessible without actually learning what a client or server is. And I'm myself in at least 3 slack groups professionally out of a total of 20... But I just know nobody, from a variety of OSes, who doesn't experience the "bug where slack completely looses where you are in time" and then you have to scroll for a while because the "Jump to new messages" doesn't work well. I came to the point where I wonder if anybody here doesn't have that bug at all ... A bug that kills UX like that and that we can do nothing about, not even contribute a fix, and still it seems Slack is the best product people can find, meh, I run Mattermost in my company and we're all very happy with it and don't experience as much problems as we do with Slack. Never really been anywhere but in tech channels on IRC, I had a few years without going back but I'm back and I love it.

Carpetsmoker 7y ago
I'm not a big fan of Slack for a long list of reasons, but at least I don't have to muck about with finicky undocumented (or semi-documented at best) software just to get a basic usable connection which won't drop any messages. I think just that goes a long way. Mattermost might be good (never used it), but being self-hosted means it's a lot harder to set up than just subscribing to Slack. I talked about this before on HN[1]: I think providing a simple hosted SaaS should be a key part of the strategy to displace shitty closed-source products like Slack. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21592195 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21592195

claudiawerner 7y ago

>You are offline you miss messages, don't want to miss messages? set up a relay (seriously?!). ...Yeah. From installing znc from your favourite package manager to having it set up and running in your client is all of ten minutes, with SSL, auto-joins, channel history and all. Is it a barrier? Yeah. Is it so much of a barrier that it would push someone concerned about centralized services and proprietary software to just give up and use Slack? I don't think so.

icebraining 7y ago
Not all of us have a server in the closet running 24/7, and having to use someone else's computer feels like half the way to using a service like Slack.
askafriend 7y ago
I don't know what any of this "znc", "package manager", "SSL", "auto-join" mumbo jumbo is. I'm just going to use Slack and move on with my life. Actually I lied, I do know what all that mumbo jumbo is, but I hope you get my point.

atomi 7y ago

Took me all of 10 minutes to set up irssi on a free google cloud vps many years ago. It's still chugging along. ~ uptime 23:22:27 up 787 days, 15:10, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00 It's not that hard.

Carpetsmoker 7y ago
This is a lot of work (especially if you're not already familiar with these tools) compared to pretty much any other chat solution out there.
comex 7y ago
Not that hard, if you don't care about two things: - Typing latency - Access from mobile devices Many people don't care about those things; good for them. Unfortunately for me, I do. I can (and do) use a bouncer, which theoretically solves both problems: text entry is handled by my local IRC client rather than every keystroke going through a server, and I can run an IRC client on my phone. Unfortunately, bouncers are a rather poor approximation of true cross-device history/state synchronization; e.g. they don't sync unread messages. And they're generally slow and fiddly for various silly reasons. For example, most bouncers require you to make a separate connection for each IRC network, which is slower, and requires configuring each client device for each network, annoying if you have a lot of networks. Also, long backlogs can overload slow IRC clients, but typically the alternative to long backlogs is losing history, since there's no standard mechanism for clients to request history on demand. There are also some IRC clients that do "true" state synchronization, like Quassel or Weechat's relay mode, but none with a tolerable iPhone version, last I checked.
- hprotagonist 7y ago
  mosh solves my latency and mobile access issues handily. tmux, irssi, and mosh on a VPS and i’ve had that setup for IRC for ... pushing a decade?
- Wingy 7y ago
  I use The Lounge for IRC because I use iOS, Windows, and Linux.

bangboombang 7y ago

You still need a VPS or server of some kind, but if the "screen with irssi/weechat" concept sounds too much like 80s UNIX, there is quassel[1]. It's like a relay/proxy/bouncer but actually uses its own protocol between the GUI and core, so you get infinite backscroll, proper sync when running multiple GUI instances at the same time etc. Oh and there is a decent Android client called quasseldroid. [1] https://quassel-irc.org/ https://quassel-irc.org/