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I just wanted to take a moment and share with the HN community that IRC is definitely very alive and kicking! There are great channels for thousands of amazing
by rasengan 7y ago
I just wanted to take a moment and share with the HN community that IRC is definitely very alive and kicking! There are great channels for thousands of amazing projects, communities and teams spread across so many great IRC Networks, from Freenode [1] to OFTC [2], to Rizon [3], to DALnet [4], to tildeverse [5], Snoonet [6], Quakenet [7], EFnet [8], IRCnet [9] among other networks [10].
IRC is no longer difficult to use; there are great software applications across nearly every device that can be named which can work with and present the RFC1459 protocol splendidly, including weechat [11], KiwiIRC [12], Textual [13], Palaver [14], to mIRC [15], and AdiIRC [16], among others!
IRC has bots hosted by the community that can hook into github like bitbot [17] and supybot [18] among others.
You can also stay connected to IRC using an IRC bouncer like KiwiBNC [19], znc [20], IRCCloud [21], Quassel [22], Bitlbee [23] or shamlessplug jbnc [24].
[1] https://freenode.net https://freenode.net
[2] https://oftc.net https://oftc.net
[3] https://rizon.net https://rizon.net
[4] https://www.dal.net https://www.dal.net
[5] https://tildeverse.org https://tildeverse.org
[6] https://snoonet.org/ https://snoonet.org/
[7] https://quakenet.org/ https://quakenet.org/
[8] https://efnet.org https://efnet.org
[9] https://ircnet.com https://ircnet.com
[10] https://netsplit.de/networks/top100.php https://netsplit.de/networks/top100.php
[11] https://weechat.org/ https://weechat.org/
[12] https://kiwiirc.com https://kiwiirc.com
[13] https://codeux.com/textual https://codeux.com/textual
[14] https://palaverapp.com/ https://palaverapp.com/
[15] https://mirc.com/ https://mirc.com/
[16] https://adiirc.com/ https://adiirc.com/
[17] https://github.com/jesopo/bitbot https://github.com/jesopo/bitbot
[18] https://github.com/Supybot/Supybot https://github.com/Supybot/Supybot
[19] https://kiwiirc.com/ https://kiwiirc.com/
[20] https://znc.in https://znc.in
[21] https://irccloud.com/ https://irccloud.com/
[22] https://quassel-irc.org/ https://quassel-irc.org/
[23] https://www.bitlbee.org/ https://www.bitlbee.org/
[24] https://github.com/realrasengan/jbnc https://github.com/realrasengan/jbnc
Edit: Added a few that I accidentally left out. Thank you all! If I left anyone else out I apologize - IRC is so decentralized, spread out, and... alive... that it's hard to name all of the amazing projects, networks and implementations out there!
- Avamander 7y agoYou've missed the best IRC bouncer-client there is - Quassel.
- eloahx 7y agojbnc :D
- anthk 7y agoAdd Bitlbee to the list and you can do magic.
- toxik 7y agoHow can you not list QuakeNet?!
- _e 7y agoirc.mtv.com isn't on the list
- kick 7y agoWhat happened to irc.com? It seems like you had pretty big plans for it (especially with the letter you wrote on it), but it doesn't seem to have gone anywhere.
- rasengan 7y agoKeep an eye out! :)
- airstrike 7y agoIf only I could build weechat from source on windows! If anyone out there is willing to provide binaries I'd be glad to buy you coffee so I can switch over from irssi mIRC is what got me into programming, actually... I miss the good old days
- rasengan 7y agoAnother option is to try cygwin [1] as it has a weechat build [2]. Weechat also runs under WSL [3]. [1] https://cygwin.com/ https://cygwin.com/ [2] https://www.cygwin.com/packages/summary/weechat.html https://www.cygwin.com/packages/summary/weechat.html [3] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install-win10 https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install-win10
- Geeflow 7y agoMy first programming projects were scripts and modules for eggdrop. Every now and then I get a nostalgia flash. :) Surprisingly, some of those are still being used... 20 years after the last release.
- hkt 7y agoMine were mIRC scripts for banning spammers. Eventually we had a community of people writing bots in perl, PHP, and loads of other languages. I was introduced to Unix by means of wanting to run irssi in screen so I could collect messages even when I was offkyine. It is no exaggeration to say IRC is completely responsible for my career, far more so than education!
- graton 7y agoSeems like you can run it under Windows Subsystem for Linux.
- andarleen 7y agoIs Rizon still the crime haven it was?
- amyjess 7y agoFrom what I understand, most of the fansubbing community there has moved to Discord.
- buovjaga 7y agoThe awesome list: https://github.com/davisonio/awesome-irc https://github.com/davisonio/awesome-irc Supybot's successor is Limnoria: https://github.com/ProgVal/Limnoria https://github.com/ProgVal/Limnoria GitHub plugin: https://github.com/ProgVal/Supybot-plugins/tree/master/GitHub https://github.com/ProgVal/Supybot-plugins/tree/master/GitHu... Btw. on the topic of bouncers, Simon Ser is developing a new one in Go: https://git.sr.ht/~emersion/soju https://git.sr.ht/~emersion/soju
- efdee 7y agoNo IRCnet or EFnet mention? I don't want to be a part of this.
- admax88q 7y agowww.dal.net not dal.net
- matheusmoreira 7y agoCan IRC be used through Tor and with end-to-end encryption?
- hkt 7y agoIt depends on the network. Freenode has a tor ingress: https://freenode.net/news/tor-online https://freenode.net/news/tor-online You can connect with SSL and optionally SASL (as well as cloaking your IP) but this is encrypted to the server. Most of IRC is public anyway though so E2E doesn't make total sense.
- LinuxBender 7y agoYes, IRC servers can support or enforce TLS for the transport and end users can use OTR (Off The Record) with many IRC clients. IRC uses TCP which Tor supports. There are IRC servers on Tor. Here [1] is an example of WeeChat + OTR. OTR is E2E encryption. [1] - https://github.com/mmb/weechat-otr https://github.com/mmb/weechat-otr
- Polylactic_acid 7y agoIRC is still alive in the fact that people still use it, but its dying (less people use it over time) in a way that will never be overcome. IRC is lacking so many critical features that people consider the fundamentals of IM now. IRCv3 has been in development for forever and they still aren't done and even if they finished it it would never make it to all the irc servers and clients. At this point it makes sense to join most other open source projects in moving to Matrix which still has active development and the ability to actually push out new spec changes in the current decade.
- TylerE 7y agoThe mere fact that we always see several people jumping in to assert how IRC is alive and kicking is in fact a giveaway that it, if not actually dying, is at least starting to smell a bit funny. (And frankly I say - good riddance! It's a protocol that's at least a decade past it's sell-by date, modern options are so much better)
- tastroder 7y agoPeople often don't seem to use modern alternatives like matrix though. I often see people switching to whatever the popular walled garden of the year is instead. Personally I prefer an open ecosystem to animated GIFs, even if it might occasionally smell.
- wdutch 7y agoI think IRC will always have a place in certain communities. I drop into IRC whenever I need help with an Arduino project or want to catchup with old colleagues. From my own personal experience, all the open source communities I get involved with use IRC and I have never known one use Matrix, sometimes this is for personal reasons and sometimes for work. This probably depends on what techie circles you move in. I've also noticed IRC is more popular in certain countries. Anecdotally Brazil and Sweden seem to have fairly large communities of nontechnical people on IRC. Maybe for some people, IRC does what they want and they don't need any updated spec.
- tr33house 7y agoI also use mosh to maintain a constant connection to a remote server with an irc client
- em-bee 7y agothis list exemplifies the biggest issue i have with IRC. it's not federated. these are all islands, and i'd have to sign up on each one of them to join the community there. that said, none of the newer alternatives are any better unfortunately. it seems jabber really was the only federated system with any moderate success, and maybe matrix is getting there too with its ability to integrate different services.
- badsectoracula 7y agoFWIW you do not need to 'sign up' on IRC, just pick up an unused nickname and you're in. No registration or anything necessary.
- em-bee 7y agoi don't know if there are irc networks that require nick registratin, but there for sure are channels on freenode that you can't enter without a registered nick. but that's not the issue. the issue is that i can't maintain a global identity, and that i have to add each network into any configuration instead of just sending a message to anyone on any network without creating an identity on that network (even if it's just picking a nickname). some of this could be worked around in the client if the client has an uptodate list of irc networks so that sending a message to embee@freenode would automatically connect your client to freenode, make you pick a nickname and send the message. hmm, that's an interresting thought experiment. how could this be made seamless without inviting spam.
- bluedays 7y agoIRC is where you go to play the idle game, right?
- snvzz 7y agoOn DOS, there's mtcp's ircjr. On AmigaOS, amirc (which many clients cloned the UI of) and wookiechat. Even kolibriOS ships an irc client. It's a nice, simple protocol that's human readable and imposes very little overhead on the clients.
- anthk 7y agoI miss gopher support on kolibriOS, it's the brother "simple" protocol for hypermedia. No TLS support as IRC, but you can either: - use TOR over a gopher client. - use and promote Gemini in paralell. With Bitlbee and sacc(1) I can access even HN via Gopher and comment it on Telegram via sic(1). Magical and my setup could work even under a 286 with Minix2.
- snvzz 7y agoGopherus will run on dos on a 8086. I believe it will even work with less than 512KB.
- josteink 7y ago> I just wanted to take a moment and share with the HN community that IRC is definitely very alive and kicking! Yes IRC has an impressive list of servers, clients and networks built up over the last 3-4 decades. Outside the major hubs (freenode) and FOSS channels though, actual usage seems to be going down. IRC is no longer the “default” for chat, like it used to be. And I say that as someone heavily invested in IRC, operating an IRC-network for almost 2 decades.