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I was forced to use IRC for about ~15 years due to being involved in a big OSS project that refused to use anything else, and .. man. I honestly have to say it

by Jetrel 6y ago

I was forced to use IRC for about ~15 years due to being involved in a big OSS project that refused to use anything else, and .. man. I honestly have to say it's my number-one most hated software program in my life. Exceeding even the sins of Adobe and Microsoft. It made most of the collaboration work I was trying to do "here, let's just send a file" that'd be trivial on AIM/MSN/etc, into an huge ordeal (oh, I guess we better use a pastebin - er, whoops, that's too big for the pastebin, better set up our own ftp to transfer stuff)... Just tons of things that were trivial matters on other platforms were serious work on IRC. And to top it all off - to add insult to injury, it had frequent, invisible quality-of-service errors. It wouldn't have been so bad if they were obvious, but they were completely silent "failures to send messages". Only much later, when I had some bouncers and was logged into a server on multiple accounts, did I realize how bad the QoS was - entire chunks of conversations would just fail to get sent in some cases, leading to spectacular miscommunications, and just honestly screwing up some basic human<->human conversational expectations (often making many people seem really rude). That's the thing that just boggles me - it wouldn't be so bad to have a really awful, rudimentary UI if the underlying service was reliable - if there was any tradeoff making it worth it - but it wasn't a "you get this bad part in exchange for this other thing being better". It was just all bad - terrible reliability, terrible UI, broken features, etc etc. --- The worst part was getting gaslit by other project members desperately trying to pretend it was anything but garbage. If we want open-source software to be great, then the very first "step one" we need to buy into is doing an honest take on what we've already got, and not trying to pretend a Trabant is a Tesla just because it's on the open-source team and it's all we've got. That is: we must not evince loyalty to a terrible program simply because it's the only OSS/Decentralized/etc entrant into a field. If it's trash, acknowledge it's trash and get to work building something great that fits the ideology. Because otherwise something like Discord will win, decisively, and adherents to [xyz_progressive_software_ideology] will lose, and lose really badly because they'll be decades behind the curve, rather than neck-and-neck, or even, ahead (as firefox was for a while back in the IE days). That attitude is the achilles heel of OSS. It's why we can't have nice things.

branon 6y ago
Not to try and invalidate your experiences, but "IRC" doesn't refer to any specific software program. I'd be interested to know which of the dozens of IRC clients you were using that was so horrible. As for sending files, IRC has no real capacity for this. XDCC exists, but is an extension to IRC and isn't guaranteed to be supported by your network/server. So yes in this situation you must look to an alternative protocol like FTP (hopefully SFTP or at least FTPS). I do largely agree with most of your points aside from reliability. In my experience large IRC networks with many servers are essentially immune to downtime. The most that happens would be a netsplit, whereupon the two halves of the network continue to operate normally (though separately) before synchronizing. From your description, I would venture a guess that (at least some of) the reliability issues you experienced were also due to your IRC client. Anecdotally, I have certainly experienced far more outages of the centralized Discord service than I have of the IRC networks I frequent.
- Jetrel 6y ago
  > Not to try and invalidate your experiences, but "IRC" doesn't refer to any specific software program. I'd be interested to know which of the dozens of IRC clients you were using that was so horrible. We ... did try that. Of course. :( A failure of IRC's ecosystem is a failure of IRC. Ultimately it doesn't matter what part of the big chain of interconnected pieces is actually the culprit, unless you're the rare individual in a position of leverage to fix it. A failure of implementors to correctly adhere to the protocol, or ISPs to send it, or anything - is still a consequence of decisions made by the designer who released it into the wild. An analogy to draw is the web - the web isn't just browsers; it's webpages, it's servers, it's scripting languages, and all of these add up to an experience that can be judged as a whole. We've had many mistakes on the web - every time flash crashed on someone was a direct consequence of the quick-and-dirty netscape plugin api getting rushed to market. Decisions => consequences. But any time something's bad? It's "the web"'s fault as a whole. And if it gets bad enough, people look for alternatives for particular tasks. > I do largely agree with most of your points aside from reliability. In my experience large IRC networks with many servers are essentially immune to downtime. Fwiw, we weren't talking about downtime. These issues may have actually not been caused by network outages at all. To explain this for your benefit: Consider that this was invisible failure. It took quite a few years before I was able to realize that "awkward silences" in the conversation were actual failures-to-send-messages. Not netsplits. The messages never got through, rather than being delayed. Just, every day or two, chunks of conversations would completely fail to send - just a couple sentences here and there. No rhyme or reason. And so intermittently, we wouldn't notice it. It just felt like the other person was rudely not replying, so I figured they were afk, but when they came back, it was genuinely like they hadn't seen it. And once you're friends with someone and you really know their personality, you can tell that this just ... isn't like them at all to forget things like that. Or not read the backscroll. Finally I started to wonder. What tipped me off was a bouncer I had coming in from a different ISP. The bouncer got the messages, and my local never did, even days later. After that, I compared logs between myself and friends, and ... they were mostly ... similar. But not identical. There were holes. And this had been going on for a decade. And maybe the same thing happens to you - because really: How can you even tell?

by Jetrel 6y ago

branon 6y ago

Not to try and invalidate your experiences, but "IRC" doesn't refer to any specific software program. I'd be interested to know which of the dozens of IRC clients you were using that was so horrible. As for sending files, IRC has no real capacity for this. XDCC exists, but is an extension to IRC and isn't guaranteed to be supported by your network/server. So yes in this situation you must look to an alternative protocol like FTP (hopefully SFTP or at least FTPS). I do largely agree with most of your points aside from reliability. In my experience large IRC networks with many servers are essentially immune to downtime. The most that happens would be a netsplit, whereupon the two halves of the network continue to operate normally (though separately) before synchronizing. From your description, I would venture a guess that (at least some of) the reliability issues you experienced were also due to your IRC client. Anecdotally, I have certainly experienced far more outages of the centralized Discord service than I have of the IRC networks I frequent.

Jetrel 6y ago
> Not to try and invalidate your experiences, but "IRC" doesn't refer to any specific software program. I'd be interested to know which of the dozens of IRC clients you were using that was so horrible. We ... did try that. Of course. :( A failure of IRC's ecosystem is a failure of IRC. Ultimately it doesn't matter what part of the big chain of interconnected pieces is actually the culprit, unless you're the rare individual in a position of leverage to fix it. A failure of implementors to correctly adhere to the protocol, or ISPs to send it, or anything - is still a consequence of decisions made by the designer who released it into the wild. An analogy to draw is the web - the web isn't just browsers; it's webpages, it's servers, it's scripting languages, and all of these add up to an experience that can be judged as a whole. We've had many mistakes on the web - every time flash crashed on someone was a direct consequence of the quick-and-dirty netscape plugin api getting rushed to market. Decisions => consequences. But any time something's bad? It's "the web"'s fault as a whole. And if it gets bad enough, people look for alternatives for particular tasks. > I do largely agree with most of your points aside from reliability. In my experience large IRC networks with many servers are essentially immune to downtime. Fwiw, we weren't talking about downtime. These issues may have actually not been caused by network outages at all. To explain this for your benefit: Consider that this was invisible failure. It took quite a few years before I was able to realize that "awkward silences" in the conversation were actual failures-to-send-messages. Not netsplits. The messages never got through, rather than being delayed. Just, every day or two, chunks of conversations would completely fail to send - just a couple sentences here and there. No rhyme or reason. And so intermittently, we wouldn't notice it. It just felt like the other person was rudely not replying, so I figured they were afk, but when they came back, it was genuinely like they hadn't seen it. And once you're friends with someone and you really know their personality, you can tell that this just ... isn't like them at all to forget things like that. Or not read the backscroll. Finally I started to wonder. What tipped me off was a bouncer I had coming in from a different ISP. The bouncer got the messages, and my local never did, even days later. After that, I compared logs between myself and friends, and ... they were mostly ... similar. But not identical. There were holes. And this had been going on for a decade. And maybe the same thing happens to you - because really: How can you even tell?