8 ms·

I think most of the points about IRC are solvable with the biggest pro of them all being that it's fast, omnipresent and low bandwidth, if you need to have hist

I think most of the points about IRC are solvable with the biggest pro of them all being that it's fast, omnipresent and low bandwidth, if you need to have history and other things, and can afford to have a raspberry always-on, then install a quassel server and keep it there, I have a dedicated server running my email and media server where I also put a `ghcr.io/linuxserver/quassel-core` docker container, and it doesn't consume anything

ivegotnoaccount 5y ago
I think you forgot "and never ever have internet or electricity issues" to your list. The big advantage of Slack/Discord is that once a message was sent, everyone will receive it. Maybe in some time if the user is not always up but it will be received. Not to forget, not everyone interested in this or that FOSS project is tech-savvy enough to setup what you said.
- lnxg33k1 5y ago
  Yeah I'm not sure if those are problems that happens often enough to be mentioned, I guess that depends on a user's perspective but you're right, I have a UPS at home, so I solve that easily, for internet I've had a lot of problems in the past, but now I have a FTTH so that never happens, I guess if you have frequent issues with electricity and internet you have bigger issues other than saving IRC channel history :D, but I guess those are solvable with UPS, 4G modem backup connection and there are also some websites that save IRC channels history
  - masklinn 5y ago
    > Yeah I'm not sure if those are problems that happens often enough to be mentioned, I guess that depends on a user's perspective It is, but the the average user's perspective is not that they'll set up an IRC bouncer (which odds are high they don't even know exists) so they can have message permanence and cross-device sharing. Instead they'll say that IRC has no history / offline support (which is, technically, true) and will use discord because it does.
    - gerikson 5y ago
      I bit the bullet and set up ZNC for my IRC connections this summer. Even by the standards of open source software, it was a chore, and the web interface is unbelievably clunky. I continued to use irssi in tmux instead. What we learned from the Freenode implosion is that for most IRC users the concept of different networks was entirely alien. IRC was Freenode for those people. It doesn't help that the authentication story for IRC is a bloody mess. In Discord, I have one account and can join any server^Wguild and have a different nick in each (and the nicks support unicode, and emoji). If I want to have different nicks on different channels on an IRC network I need 2 separate logins.
      - mxmilkiib 5y ago
        I tried ZNC a few years ago, but the replaying of chat history, that had already been received and seen, on every connection to the bouncer was frustrating and made it feel like a bad hack. Maybe I missed an option there, but I moved onto Quassel (and Quasseldroid), which was a game changer in ease of use, but I'm not personally a terminal IRC fan so I don't miss that aspect.
        lnxg33k1 5y ago
        It's the same for me, I've used ZNC for a while and I think it being an agnostic IRC bouncer not forcing you toward a protocol and being usable from any IRC client is very big pro, but it also means that it always requires a bit in order to change anything, while quassel might be a bit less portable, even if it has clients for any platform I use (so it's personal), but being able to easily configure the server from the client easily for me was enough to stick with it
        kuschku 5y ago
        As the lead quasseldroid dev, and a contributor to quassel, it’s awesome hearing these success stories, as over the past months I haven’t heard anything from users. I’m sorry that the new update for quassel and quasseldroid is taking so long :(
  - codetrotter 5y ago
    Also IRC net splits used to happen often enough to be a concern a few years ago when I last used IRC.
    - katbyte 5y ago
      And one big one just happened this year: https://ariadne.space/2021/06/14/the-end-of-freenode/ https://ariadne.space/2021/06/14/the-end-of-freenode/
      - chaosite 5y ago
        Freenode imploding was not a netsplit.
      - codetrotter 5y ago
        As sibling commenter said, that's not what I am talking about. Please see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netsplit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netsplit netsplit is a disconnection between two servers
  - ivegotnoaccount 5y ago
    Once again, the average user does not have all that. Discord has the advantage, for me as a user, of not having to pay hundreds of dollars simply not to loose messages because my connection go down ~5 minutes a day.
- noobermin 5y ago
  This is a very narrow and short-sided point of view. Push the logic of this argument a little bit further, why is the issue lnxg33k1's internet and electricity a problem? The reason is that of course Discord controls the servers and they pay for the infra, and they essentially own your ability to chat with your friends. That isn't a problem until it becomes a problem[0]. Until then it's buying time, hoping Discord doesn't get bought by Amazon or Meta and then daddy decides it's time to extract rent. Again, going to highlight it's such a short-sided POV, this sort of thinking "today it's free, it's better, and thus it is the right choice for the investment of my time, my community's time, even my project's time." Such short sided thinking in favor of convenience right now is way too common leads to a lot of problems (in society generally but that's another discussion). I really want people to have a longer term view of utility for the sake of longevity and stability of things as important as our channels of communication. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29711001 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29711001 this was just posted a few hours ago.
  - rwmj 5y ago
    That's a very genuine problem with Slack where my email address is somehow unable to register with their site, so I've never been able to use Slack. I don't even think I've been banned or blocked - since I never used the service - I think there's just something broken at their end and it's been impossible to find anyone who can fix it.
  - ivegotnoaccount 5y ago
    I haven't said that I wouldn't prefer a free alternative, only that trying to say IRC is the solution to all this is short-sighted too.
- kiklion 5y ago
  In short, using IRC for your free software/open source (FOSS) software project is a very bad idea. Ease of use matters — that’s why you’re writing code, after all. To make peoples lives easier. Using IRC partitions your community on either side of a walled garden, with one side that’s willing to use the complicated, archaic client, and one side that isn’t. It sets up users who are passionate about ease of use — i.e. your most self aware contributors or potential contributors — as second-class citizens.
  - buovjaga 5y ago
    I do mentoring for LibreOffice and this year I've interviewed over 100 people on IRC and had over 200 further mentoring chats. Most have never used IRC before and KiwiIRC web chat seems to work fine as the first client.
    - lnxg33k1 5y ago
      But there is also IRCCloud, like I think it stands to support my initial point about it being omnipresent, which now makes me wonder if one of the main issues of IRC for many people is not just about the presence of choices
  - smolder 5y ago
    Perhaps we should get rid of command lines in open source software, too. It's just so uninviting! I'm not against people choosing discord for some projects, but there's nothing so terrible or oppressive about choosing IRC. It doesn't deserve the "considered harmful" treatment. Hopping on IRC is a very low bar for a potential contributor to clear.
    - ivegotnoaccount 5y ago
      Using IRC is not oppressive, I agree, and it wouldn't come to my mind to complain on an IRC channel about it not being Discord, but the point of the article is to show you must not use Discord and you are bad for doing it.
- welterde 5y ago
  In my experience slack/discord are close to unusable when you have a really bad internet connection (for example on certain trains). They will pretend to send your message, but it will not actually go through (if you even manage to start slack/discord in the first place). Mosh is the only thing that actually works in those cases.
  - ivegotnoaccount 5y ago
    I agree that SDiscord too is far from perfect in this circumstances (Though usually, the Discord client explicitly shows me when it acjieved to send the message as is it shown in light gray before this point) But using Mosh means having a server, seting it up and so on. Yeah, Mosh+IRC is better from a FOSS perspective. But it comes with usability drawbacks too.
dmitriid 5y ago
> if you need to have history and other things, and can afford to have a raspberry always-on, then install a quassel server and keep it there I can't believe how delusional some people are. And sorry for being so rude. In 2021 everyone expects history and other things. You can't realisticaly expect everyone to "just have a fully set up always-on raspberry pi and install some server on it". That's why IRC and XMPP are mostly dead. > I have a dedicated server running my email and media server where I also put Good for you. The absolute vast majority of users, however, don't.
- lnxg33k1 5y ago
  I think there was a misunderstanding about my message, I wasn't forcing anyone to use IRC, I was offering a solution in case someone wants, I am quite happy if people want to use Slack or Discord, I use IRC, and a lot of people use IRC with or without a bouncer be it quassel or znc and talk every day, works for us and everyone is happy, but if other people is happy other ways so be it, was just mentioning that if those are issues, then there are solutions, so I didn't take the rudeness personally, as I don't feel that I have to convince people to use something or what people wants is my concern to be worried about?
- cycomanic 5y ago
  The irony being that discord is absolutely horrible for discoverable/searchable history. I would argue the main value of searchable history for FOSS projects is not that you yourself can go back and look at the chats you had, but that it gets indexed by search engines, so one can find the solutions when encountering problems. That's the big value of mailing lists over most of these chat solutions.
  - lnxg33k1 5y ago
    I think another value of mailing lists is asynchronicity of conversation and the time that can go in the thought process enriching the conversation, and I think that is unmatchable by any chat protocol/client
    - 5y ago
afarrell 5y ago
So my biggest problem with IRC in 2009 was that it lacked newlines. Is this now solvable? Okay. I have limited time & limited yak-shaving energy. In the choice between something whose problems are solvable and something whose problems are adequately solved, I am going to conserve my time/energy by choosing the latter 95% of the time.
- lnxg33k1 5y ago
  I think I've noticed this pattern about tech people today that for example is concerning for me, I am not sure how old are you or what is your background, but I feel that today people don't enjoy stuff as much as my cohort, I go at work, and then SQL is a waste of time, Regex are a waste of time, Linux is a waste of time, Email servers are a waste of time, setting up a bouncer that takes 30 seconds is a waste of time, I am not sure if everything has become a waste of time, but do you people have a passion for tech related stuff, not specifically related to your message but every now and then I wonder what is not a waste of time
  - dmitriid 5y ago
    > I've noticed this pattern about tech people today that for example is concerning for me Why should "I don't want to spend time on stuff that's not interesting to me" be concerning? > I feel that today people don't enjoy stuff as much as my cohort, I go at work, Your "cohort" is apparently hardcore computer people who are fine doing computer-related stuff both at work and in spare time. Well, tech people toda is a much bigger "cohort" than that. > but do you people have a passion for tech related stuff Yes. Yes we do. And tech-related stuff is often emphatically not fiddling with Raspberry Pis to set up obscure servers to maintain chat history.
  - luckylion 5y ago
    You're just stepping into the stack at some arbitrary level and figure "everyone should know how to do (and do) this at least". For you it's configuring email servers and compiling linux kernels. Why not dig trenches for power cables or build towers for wireless communications? If the answer is "but I don't care enough about those things, I just build on top of them", that's exactly what others think about compiling linux kernels, writing boot loader configs or configuring email servers.
phoe-krk 5y ago
> I think most of the points about IRC are solvable See - it's "solvable" versus "solved". People seek solutions, not possibilities.
oefrha 5y ago
> solvable Ask ten people and they’ll likely tell you ten different solutions (not to mention the feasibility of such solutions). Most people just want to set up a chat space for their project, or ask a question and get an answer; they don’t want to make a million choices about something they don’t understand before they are allowed to do what they set out to do.
lifthrasiir 5y ago
> I have a dedicated server running my email and media server where I also put a `ghcr.io/linuxserver/quassel-core` docker container, and it doesn't consume anything It's still consuming your time and energy and that's a running cost by itself. I'm also a long-time Quassel user in addition to be a long-time IRC user, but I have no more energy to manage my own Quassel server and my current instance has been long neglected.
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> if you need to have history and other things, and can afford to have a raspberry always-on, then install a quassel server and keep it there, I have a dedicated server running… Some people enjoy investing the time and energy into setting up something like this and maintaining it. I am one of those people. However, it’s just not realistic to propose these things as solutions for the average user or even average developer. Cloud services like Discord are popular because you don’t have to think about it or invest time into maintaining anything. Click a few buttons and you’re in. I think that fact is lost on a lot of devs who invested the days and days into setting up their own servers, learning things like Quassel, smoothing out all of the issues and so on. It’s easy to forget that every piece of that solution came with a lot of labor and learning spread out over years of time. On the other hand, I suspect a lot of the people who propose these as alternatives actually like the barrier to entry that it all represents. If only the people dedicated enough to learn all of these steps and maintain their own infrastructure can fully participate, it represents a barrier to entry that makes the group feel more exclusive.
- lnxg33k1 5y ago
  I, for one, like the barrier entry, think I recently quit the company I was working for because asking for help was like the first thing in case of an issue instead of researching a solution, and I couldn't deal it with a paid job, imagine how could I deal with it by staying on a discord channel where people (I have the impression) think that documentation is lava ^^
- Ekaros 5y ago
  Also in general just because you have your history doesn't mean everyone else can easily get it. Which is part of the need. If we had working search engine, one could just browse through the history of chat and try to find existing conversations. Even if they are not part of the community and do not see need to be.
- crtasm 5y ago
  https://thelounge.chat/ https://thelounge.chat/ seems a pretty good solution, but of course the average person would still need to know someone running an instance and trust them with their chat history.
Ekaros 5y ago
Having to run server or access to one where you can run your own client has always been worst thing about IRC in my mind. Made sense back then and make sense for what IRC is. But really these days we should have something better.

ivegotnoaccount 5y ago

I think you forgot "and never ever have internet or electricity issues" to your list. The big advantage of Slack/Discord is that once a message was sent, everyone will receive it. Maybe in some time if the user is not always up but it will be received. Not to forget, not everyone interested in this or that FOSS project is tech-savvy enough to setup what you said.

lnxg33k1 5y ago
Yeah I'm not sure if those are problems that happens often enough to be mentioned, I guess that depends on a user's perspective but you're right, I have a UPS at home, so I solve that easily, for internet I've had a lot of problems in the past, but now I have a FTTH so that never happens, I guess if you have frequent issues with electricity and internet you have bigger issues other than saving IRC channel history :D, but I guess those are solvable with UPS, 4G modem backup connection and there are also some websites that save IRC channels history
- masklinn 5y ago
  > Yeah I'm not sure if those are problems that happens often enough to be mentioned, I guess that depends on a user's perspective It is, but the the average user's perspective is not that they'll set up an IRC bouncer (which odds are high they don't even know exists) so they can have message permanence and cross-device sharing. Instead they'll say that IRC has no history / offline support (which is, technically, true) and will use discord because it does.
  - gerikson 5y ago
    I bit the bullet and set up ZNC for my IRC connections this summer. Even by the standards of open source software, it was a chore, and the web interface is unbelievably clunky. I continued to use irssi in tmux instead. What we learned from the Freenode implosion is that for most IRC users the concept of different networks was entirely alien. IRC was Freenode for those people. It doesn't help that the authentication story for IRC is a bloody mess. In Discord, I have one account and can join any server^Wguild and have a different nick in each (and the nicks support unicode, and emoji). If I want to have different nicks on different channels on an IRC network I need 2 separate logins.
    - mxmilkiib 5y ago
      I tried ZNC a few years ago, but the replaying of chat history, that had already been received and seen, on every connection to the bouncer was frustrating and made it feel like a bad hack. Maybe I missed an option there, but I moved onto Quassel (and Quasseldroid), which was a game changer in ease of use, but I'm not personally a terminal IRC fan so I don't miss that aspect.
      - lnxg33k1 5y ago
        It's the same for me, I've used ZNC for a while and I think it being an agnostic IRC bouncer not forcing you toward a protocol and being usable from any IRC client is very big pro, but it also means that it always requires a bit in order to change anything, while quassel might be a bit less portable, even if it has clients for any platform I use (so it's personal), but being able to easily configure the server from the client easily for me was enough to stick with it
        kuschku 5y ago
        As the lead quasseldroid dev, and a contributor to quassel, it’s awesome hearing these success stories, as over the past months I haven’t heard anything from users. I’m sorry that the new update for quassel and quasseldroid is taking so long :(
- codetrotter 5y ago
  Also IRC net splits used to happen often enough to be a concern a few years ago when I last used IRC.
  - katbyte 5y ago
    And one big one just happened this year: https://ariadne.space/2021/06/14/the-end-of-freenode/ https://ariadne.space/2021/06/14/the-end-of-freenode/
    - chaosite 5y ago
      Freenode imploding was not a netsplit.
    - codetrotter 5y ago
      As sibling commenter said, that's not what I am talking about. Please see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netsplit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netsplit netsplit is a disconnection between two servers
- ivegotnoaccount 5y ago
  Once again, the average user does not have all that. Discord has the advantage, for me as a user, of not having to pay hundreds of dollars simply not to loose messages because my connection go down ~5 minutes a day.
noobermin 5y ago
This is a very narrow and short-sided point of view. Push the logic of this argument a little bit further, why is the issue lnxg33k1's internet and electricity a problem? The reason is that of course Discord controls the servers and they pay for the infra, and they essentially own your ability to chat with your friends. That isn't a problem until it becomes a problem[0]. Until then it's buying time, hoping Discord doesn't get bought by Amazon or Meta and then daddy decides it's time to extract rent. Again, going to highlight it's such a short-sided POV, this sort of thinking "today it's free, it's better, and thus it is the right choice for the investment of my time, my community's time, even my project's time." Such short sided thinking in favor of convenience right now is way too common leads to a lot of problems (in society generally but that's another discussion). I really want people to have a longer term view of utility for the sake of longevity and stability of things as important as our channels of communication. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29711001 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29711001 this was just posted a few hours ago.
- rwmj 5y ago
  That's a very genuine problem with Slack where my email address is somehow unable to register with their site, so I've never been able to use Slack. I don't even think I've been banned or blocked - since I never used the service - I think there's just something broken at their end and it's been impossible to find anyone who can fix it.
- ivegotnoaccount 5y ago
  I haven't said that I wouldn't prefer a free alternative, only that trying to say IRC is the solution to all this is short-sighted too.
kiklion 5y ago
In short, using IRC for your free software/open source (FOSS) software project is a very bad idea. Ease of use matters — that’s why you’re writing code, after all. To make peoples lives easier. Using IRC partitions your community on either side of a walled garden, with one side that’s willing to use the complicated, archaic client, and one side that isn’t. It sets up users who are passionate about ease of use — i.e. your most self aware contributors or potential contributors — as second-class citizens.
- buovjaga 5y ago
  I do mentoring for LibreOffice and this year I've interviewed over 100 people on IRC and had over 200 further mentoring chats. Most have never used IRC before and KiwiIRC web chat seems to work fine as the first client.
  - lnxg33k1 5y ago
    But there is also IRCCloud, like I think it stands to support my initial point about it being omnipresent, which now makes me wonder if one of the main issues of IRC for many people is not just about the presence of choices
- smolder 5y ago
  Perhaps we should get rid of command lines in open source software, too. It's just so uninviting! I'm not against people choosing discord for some projects, but there's nothing so terrible or oppressive about choosing IRC. It doesn't deserve the "considered harmful" treatment. Hopping on IRC is a very low bar for a potential contributor to clear.
  - ivegotnoaccount 5y ago
    Using IRC is not oppressive, I agree, and it wouldn't come to my mind to complain on an IRC channel about it not being Discord, but the point of the article is to show you must not use Discord and you are bad for doing it.
welterde 5y ago
In my experience slack/discord are close to unusable when you have a really bad internet connection (for example on certain trains). They will pretend to send your message, but it will not actually go through (if you even manage to start slack/discord in the first place). Mosh is the only thing that actually works in those cases.
- ivegotnoaccount 5y ago
  I agree that SDiscord too is far from perfect in this circumstances (Though usually, the Discord client explicitly shows me when it acjieved to send the message as is it shown in light gray before this point) But using Mosh means having a server, seting it up and so on. Yeah, Mosh+IRC is better from a FOSS perspective. But it comes with usability drawbacks too.

dmitriid 5y ago

> if you need to have history and other things, and can afford to have a raspberry always-on, then install a quassel server and keep it there I can't believe how delusional some people are. And sorry for being so rude. In 2021 everyone expects history and other things. You can't realisticaly expect everyone to "just have a fully set up always-on raspberry pi and install some server on it". That's why IRC and XMPP are mostly dead. > I have a dedicated server running my email and media server where I also put Good for you. The absolute vast majority of users, however, don't.

lnxg33k1 5y ago
I think there was a misunderstanding about my message, I wasn't forcing anyone to use IRC, I was offering a solution in case someone wants, I am quite happy if people want to use Slack or Discord, I use IRC, and a lot of people use IRC with or without a bouncer be it quassel or znc and talk every day, works for us and everyone is happy, but if other people is happy other ways so be it, was just mentioning that if those are issues, then there are solutions, so I didn't take the rudeness personally, as I don't feel that I have to convince people to use something or what people wants is my concern to be worried about?
cycomanic 5y ago
The irony being that discord is absolutely horrible for discoverable/searchable history. I would argue the main value of searchable history for FOSS projects is not that you yourself can go back and look at the chats you had, but that it gets indexed by search engines, so one can find the solutions when encountering problems. That's the big value of mailing lists over most of these chat solutions.
- lnxg33k1 5y ago
  I think another value of mailing lists is asynchronicity of conversation and the time that can go in the thought process enriching the conversation, and I think that is unmatchable by any chat protocol/client
  - 5y ago

afarrell 5y ago

So my biggest problem with IRC in 2009 was that it lacked newlines. Is this now solvable? Okay. I have limited time & limited yak-shaving energy. In the choice between something whose problems are solvable and something whose problems are adequately solved, I am going to conserve my time/energy by choosing the latter 95% of the time.

lnxg33k1 5y ago
I think I've noticed this pattern about tech people today that for example is concerning for me, I am not sure how old are you or what is your background, but I feel that today people don't enjoy stuff as much as my cohort, I go at work, and then SQL is a waste of time, Regex are a waste of time, Linux is a waste of time, Email servers are a waste of time, setting up a bouncer that takes 30 seconds is a waste of time, I am not sure if everything has become a waste of time, but do you people have a passion for tech related stuff, not specifically related to your message but every now and then I wonder what is not a waste of time
- dmitriid 5y ago
  > I've noticed this pattern about tech people today that for example is concerning for me Why should "I don't want to spend time on stuff that's not interesting to me" be concerning? > I feel that today people don't enjoy stuff as much as my cohort, I go at work, Your "cohort" is apparently hardcore computer people who are fine doing computer-related stuff both at work and in spare time. Well, tech people toda is a much bigger "cohort" than that. > but do you people have a passion for tech related stuff Yes. Yes we do. And tech-related stuff is often emphatically not fiddling with Raspberry Pis to set up obscure servers to maintain chat history.
- luckylion 5y ago
  You're just stepping into the stack at some arbitrary level and figure "everyone should know how to do (and do) this at least". For you it's configuring email servers and compiling linux kernels. Why not dig trenches for power cables or build towers for wireless communications? If the answer is "but I don't care enough about those things, I just build on top of them", that's exactly what others think about compiling linux kernels, writing boot loader configs or configuring email servers.

phoe-krk 5y ago

> I think most of the points about IRC are solvable See - it's "solvable" versus "solved". People seek solutions, not possibilities.

oefrha 5y ago

> solvable Ask ten people and they’ll likely tell you ten different solutions (not to mention the feasibility of such solutions). Most people just want to set up a chat space for their project, or ask a question and get an answer; they don’t want to make a million choices about something they don’t understand before they are allowed to do what they set out to do.

lifthrasiir 5y ago

> I have a dedicated server running my email and media server where I also put a `ghcr.io/linuxserver/quassel-core` docker container, and it doesn't consume anything It's still consuming your time and energy and that's a running cost by itself. I'm also a long-time Quassel user in addition to be a long-time IRC user, but I have no more energy to manage my own Quassel server and my current instance has been long neglected.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

> if you need to have history and other things, and can afford to have a raspberry always-on, then install a quassel server and keep it there, I have a dedicated server running… Some people enjoy investing the time and energy into setting up something like this and maintaining it. I am one of those people. However, it’s just not realistic to propose these things as solutions for the average user or even average developer. Cloud services like Discord are popular because you don’t have to think about it or invest time into maintaining anything. Click a few buttons and you’re in. I think that fact is lost on a lot of devs who invested the days and days into setting up their own servers, learning things like Quassel, smoothing out all of the issues and so on. It’s easy to forget that every piece of that solution came with a lot of labor and learning spread out over years of time. On the other hand, I suspect a lot of the people who propose these as alternatives actually like the barrier to entry that it all represents. If only the people dedicated enough to learn all of these steps and maintain their own infrastructure can fully participate, it represents a barrier to entry that makes the group feel more exclusive.

lnxg33k1 5y ago
I, for one, like the barrier entry, think I recently quit the company I was working for because asking for help was like the first thing in case of an issue instead of researching a solution, and I couldn't deal it with a paid job, imagine how could I deal with it by staying on a discord channel where people (I have the impression) think that documentation is lava ^^
Ekaros 5y ago
Also in general just because you have your history doesn't mean everyone else can easily get it. Which is part of the need. If we had working search engine, one could just browse through the history of chat and try to find existing conversations. Even if they are not part of the community and do not see need to be.
crtasm 5y ago
https://thelounge.chat/ https://thelounge.chat/ seems a pretty good solution, but of course the average person would still need to know someone running an instance and trust them with their chat history.

Ekaros 5y ago

Having to run server or access to one where you can run your own client has always been worst thing about IRC in my mind. Made sense back then and make sense for what IRC is. But really these days we should have something better.