22 ms·

Simplicity of IRC

364 points by susam 5y ago

stjohnswarts 5y ago
Whenever IRC comes up I never miss a chance to recommend my favorite extensible (in several languages) IRC client weechat. I believe there have been some forks to handle discord and matrix as well.
hoyd 5y ago
Nice article, thanks :-) I grew up with IRC and realize that it isn't the same any longer. It isn't the place where everyone is, which some social networks seem to be today. The local communities on IRC, a channel for a town used to be the place to be and meet others.
- prox 5y ago
  I think Discord took over the role of IRC. It has a lot of same functions and terminology.
  - mnd999 5y ago
    Discord is internet relay meme.
- erk__ 5y ago
  IRC is probably used by more people now than ever before, though in a very different way than before. The whole of Twitch's chat infrastructure is running on it and it have hundreds of thousands of concurrent users. Though for most people it is running though a websocket instead of a raw socket, but the commands are the same a long way
  - Jasper_ 5y ago
    The IRC protocol is for the bot API only. The chat on the website uses a custom protocol, and the IRC daemon has always been a custom implementation with weird quirks.
    - erk__ 5y ago
      It is a custom protocol that follows IRC very closely, they just have a lot of extensions on it to add support for the things on twitch. to start a connection you send PASS, NICK, USER and then JOIN, over the websocket so I would not really call it a custom protocol. The url it uses is wss://irc-ws.chat.twitch.tv/ as well.
stavros 5y ago
Same with SMTP and POP, I would routinely send or get email via telnet when I wanted to debug or delete some messages. They're all very simple protocols.
- apples_oranges 5y ago
  In my experience, email protocols are anything but simple as soon as some security or authentication comes into play.
  - fulafel 5y ago
    Depends on the auth mechanisms in use, the simplest ones are still still pretty straightforward. Nowadays you just use the TLS equivalent of telnet (openssl s_client). POP3: 1. run openssl s_client -connect myserver.example.com:995 2. enter two commands: "user myusername" "pass mypassword" 3. profit SMTP & AUTH PLAIN is only slightly more complicated but similarly just an additional protocol command, connecting with s_client. (You need to generate the auth string in another shell window with: echo -ne "\0username\0password"|openssl base64)
- anthk 5y ago
  Usenet too. Getting news and discuss stuff "offline" and fetching/sending the messages once a week it's magical and resting.
  - mrweasel 5y ago
    The fall of Usenet more and more looks like a mistake. I’d love to have hyper-localized newsgroups, in place of Facebook. Often local stuff like: “Why does is smell like somethings on fire”, “Has the water been turned of” or is “Is soccer cancelled this week?” is only posted on Facebook. So if you don’t have Facebook, you can’t get those information. Then again the Facebook algorithm will hide it for three weeks before deciding that you need to know that the hot water will be turned of for quarter of the town at three o’clock. I feel that Usenet would be ideal for this.
iqanq 5y ago
>I often remark how simple the Internet Relay Chat (IRC) protocol is and how that has fostered creativity in the lives of young programmers growing up in the late 90s and early 2000s. For many of us who were introduced to the Internet during that time, writing an IRC bot turned out to be our first non-trivial hobby programming project that involved network sockets, did something meaningful, and served actual users. While that is true, most of those who wrote bots did not meaningfully interact with the protocol because they used abstractions (eggdrops, mirc scripts, etc). The simplicity of the protocol was unrelated, as a well abstracted library for any other protocol or even service (such as twitter) can be as simple.
- FemmeAndroid 5y ago
  Is this true? It’s not my experience. My first meaningful programs were raw socket IRC clients as a teenager explicitly because they were simpler to figure out than using things like egg drop. That isn’t to say that most fully featured tools were written from scratch — I can’t speak to that one way or another. But I know a lot of people who were learning about internet protocols by using telnet to interact directly with IRC servers then transferring that knowledge into a socket-level reimplementation of the protocol. RFC1459 certainly proved to me that RFCs can be simple and worth reading. And the whole experience taught me early that a simple enough, well documented protocol could be easier to use than a wrapper library in a foreign language. I certainly use a lot of libraries these days, but those lessons have served me extremely well.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - anthk 5y ago
    With ii you can write a bot today with any language reading and writting to files. Even with sh.
- corobo 5y ago
  Admittedly my first bot was indeed in mIRCScript and its abstractions but it wasn't long before I had a !spawn command that was a function that connected sub-bots directly to IRC as a protocol because why not I guess Also wrote a script that sent email directly for tinkering purposes, later used that protocol knowledge to get my first tech job haha "how does email work?" "how in-depth do you want?"
bullen 5y ago
If you want an even simpler and more scalable chat you can use my multiplayer online system: http://github.com/tinspin/fuse http://github.com/tinspin/fuse The HTTP server is written in Java with a custom JSON database and it has clients in C++, C# and HTML5.
dan-robertson 5y ago
It’s a real shame how difficult programming is. I don’t mean that it is difficult to write difficult things, but that it is difficult to write simple things. Once upon a time, one could download visual studio, click about to make a new project in (e.g.) Visual Basic, draw a gui in the gui editor, and click the run button. One could then start adding simple functionality (e.g. working through a book). Or even longer ago when a computer might dump you practically straight into BASIC when you turned it on or you might get access to a mainframe/minicomputer with programming tools already set up. Nowadays, an ‘easy’ introduction could involve the horrific process of installing and setting up python on windows (where it is hard to do things other than input/output text) or editing some html/JavaScript files where there are more easily possible interactive things but lots of things are difficult like ‘just drawing things’ or anything that requires a server side. P.S. if you, like me, were wondering what Libera Chat is, it’s the moral successor of Freenode with Freenode now being a shell of its former self.
- anthk 5y ago
  TCL/TK >>>>>> VB. By a huge margin. VB would work great under Windows, but TCL/TK kits would work everywhere.
  - denton-scratch 5y ago
    I liked VB6 when I first tried it. You drew a UI, then you double-clicked the components to get a menu of stub code-blocks. It was good for making UIs. Then suddenly there were masses of weird, undocumented APIs, including APIs from any application installed on the machine. Unfortunately I was making my living from VB6 at the time, so I had to learn it all. (And then MS withdrew support for VB6, forcing me to learn a new trade, which is only one driver of my animus against MS) Long ago I owned a Sinclair QL. That toy had a rather nice BASIC editor. I think their dialect was called QBasic. You selected a function in the left pane, and it appeared for editing in the right pane. (I also loved that it used a 68K processor; that chip had a sweet instruction set)
  - rahen 5y ago
    Indeed, just like VB6, tcl/tk is a great reminder of the late 90s. Tcl was such an expressive yet minimalist language. Probably the only fast and easy way back then to create GUI applications on *nix systems. I guess Python + QT has killed it now, but with a massively larger footprint and resource usage obviously.
mycodepedia 5y ago
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mycodepedia 5y ago
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h2odragon 5y ago
Prior to IRC becoming an accepted protocol, the "talker BBS systems" tried to avoid the need for a user to have a "client application." I'd say it was AOL that put an interface on chat and sold (a) the idea of a chat client and (b) the idea of online chat to less technical users.
c0l0 5y ago
A number of moons ago, I switched from a company that used IRC for its internal, real-time, ephemeral communication needs to an enterprise shop that used Microsoft Teams to do that (and of course other communication stuff, as the boundaries for what was better kept in Sharepoint, Confluence, Email/Exchange, the legacy Wiki, and/or Teams were never quite clear :)) there. In the old shop, we eventually had all kinds of important subsystems hooked up to our internal IRC server: Monitoring and alerting. Source control and Wiki activity. The deployment pipeline. Ticket activity reports. All these services were pretty much effortlessly set up to provide useful, real-time status information broadcast to topic-specific channels users could idle in. Everyone could stay informed on topics of their interest, in real time, with no barrier to entry. It was really good, and the implementation completed in a few hours total, for all use-cases, due to irc's incredible simplicity. Due to the benefits I had reaped from that setup before, I tried to implement parts of it on/for the MS Teams platform at the then-new job. Getting the Teams Python SDK to implement a bot-like entity running alone proved to be a days-long ordeal, and whatever followed wasn't much more pleasant. In the end, we let someone set up two email-to-teams-channel-forwards which kinda worked, but suffered from obnoxious, multi-minute relay delays. As a consequence of the tedious bringup and the latency shortcoming, the "effortless notification" initiative never really got traction. Not only because of this particular experience I am a firm believer that software/system simplicity is a virtue that can neither be overstated in importance, nor substituted by anything else.
- alufers 5y ago
  I once needed to create a bot that sent notification and I just used the webhook feature in a Team channel. Not defending Teams though, it is a horrendous piece of software.
  - c0l0 5y ago
    Maybe that wasn't possible/enabled for our particular deployment (that was in the IT dept. of a big European bank), as we had what I've been told was a strange bastardization of O365 and other MSFT services - a mix of on-prem and cloud services unlikely to be found elsewhere. At any rate, for the IRC server at the shop I was at previously, I had "webhook" support/a http(s)->irc gateway implemented on my own in much less than an hour via CGI ;)
yetihehe 5y ago
In the beginning was the command line. Then work of bright people of Xerox PARC was used to hide from users the reality that underneath their beloved GUI, computers are just passing around strings of text. Now we yearn for a time when you were just one INT and several MOV away from putting a pixel on a screen, instead of downloading multi-GB IDE to fiddle for a weekend before you can show a simple window.
- davisr 5y ago
  You don't understand what happened at Xerox PARC or what their "GUI" was. Smalltalk wasn't a language, it wasn't a GUI, it was an _environment_, and its whole point was that it didn't hide anything! It was a completely different paradigm to how computers and their programs are architected today. A Smalltalk system was always meant to be so simple that one could understand, and change, everything about it.
  - yetihehe 5y ago
    That's why I've said that their work was used, not that they did it.
tiffanyh 5y ago
Speaking of ‘simplicity’, this blog has a fantastic design. The CSS is only ~30 lines and is largely just applying spacing/padding. No JS, no custom font, etc. https://susam.net/css/main.css https://susam.net/css/main.css
- lambdaba 5y ago
  It's pretty nice indeed. I like the use of keywords for sizes "thin", "large", and the shorthand hex for colors, and the fact that there's zero boilerplate and only styling what's actually used.
  - hiptobecubic 5y ago
    Agreed, but I hate this: a:link, a:visited { color: #00e; } Why do this?
    - lambdaba 5y ago
      Oh, yeah, that should be illegal.
      - Mezzie 5y ago
        Right to jail. Also to a mandatory review of WCAG standards.
    - janc_ 5y ago
      Fortunately that’s easy to override with some custom CSS, but I also don’t understand the reasoning behind that…
    - susam 5y ago
      Thank you for pointing this out. I have fixed it now. You should no longer see this issue after a hard refresh.
nine_k 5y ago
I'd say it's in the same general box as the simplicity of 8-bit computers booting into Basic interpreter, and the simplicity of Legos. It's wonderful when you can have your toys in a sandbox where you use and develop them mostly for fun, and for scratching your own itch, away from well-moneyed interests. No need to carefully identify participants. No need to encrypt, or otherwise complicate the implementation. No need to efficiently serve millions of users. No need to add bling to attract more of those who barely cares. (The latter is not the case with Legos lately, though.) This is why I think that a lot of innovation starts in the fringe, and looks like mostly useless toys, until one of these toys proves very useful for "real world" needs.
lambdaba 5y ago
Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface. ; basically. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy)
- alkonaut 5y ago
  While some of those guidelines offer some value still, end-user programs dealing with text just aren’t ever going to be a thing. People expect to be able to paste a photo or screenshot just as easily as they post a sentence. Requiring a second app to do it (posting a link) isn’t nearly as good a UX as simply pasting in pictures.
  - lambdaba 5y ago
    Well, in practice you can have binary input, as many programs do, but human-readable free-form text is the simplest interface there is. We just need more modern terminals that can handle that.
    - alkonaut 5y ago
      > We just need more modern terminals Yeah like smartphone apps , webapps, and desktop guis…
      - lambdaba 5y ago
        Those are apps, I mean a glue / universal interface layer that's 100% owned by the user
  - yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
    Then have the chat client automatically upload to a service and generate a link behind the scenes.
    - alkonaut 5y ago
epalm 5y ago
As an aside, can I just say how refreshing this website is? It's 100% content, just text. Now view the html source, and be amazed. I daresay the author actually wrote the html by hand. I suppose it could be a very conservative and conscientious site generator that even respects line length, but I'd be surprised. Short css file for minimal style tweaks, and readable markup. Fitting that the article is about simplicity. When I first learned html (late 90s) this is what it looked like. Very nice.
- Iv 5y ago
  Possibly a pandoc generated html from markdown. My favorite way of doing things.
- Jorengarenar 5y ago
  Source code [0] is available on GitHub; looks like they wrote their own simple site generator. I've been thinking about something similar (maybe even simpler) for my blog too. [0]: https://github.com/susam/susam.net https://github.com/susam/susam.net
  - susam 5y ago
    Thank you for sharing the link to the source code. My simple site generator is based on my wife's project makesite.py[1]. In fact, I used her site generator for a few years. Later I reimplemented makesite.py in Common Lisp. As a result, it inherits the design, layout, minimalism, and simplicity of makesite.py. [1] https://github.com/sunainapai/makesite/ https://github.com/sunainapai/makesite/
- Zababa 5y ago
  It seems like the CSS used is shared under the MIT license by the author here: https://github.com/susam/spcss https://github.com/susam/spcss.
- signal11 5y ago
  It does appear to be handcrafted HTML, generated using [1]. > This is a static website generated using a Common Lisp program. See github.com/susam/maze for the source code of this website[2] > Just like the original website, every line of HTML and CSS that appears in the website is handcrafted.[3] [1] https://github.com/susam/maze/blob/main/site.lisp https://github.com/susam/maze/blob/main/site.lisp [2] https://susam.net/maze/about.html https://susam.net/maze/about.html [3] https://github.com/susam/maze https://github.com/susam/maze
evilhackerdude 5y ago
Are netsplits still a thing in modern IRC network deployments?
TekMol 5y ago
IRC is great! I like the interface way more than Discord. And it seems to attract more knowledgeable people. If you are into startups, check out #startups on Libera!
DogLover_ 5y ago
I used IRC for gaming around 2004 - fond memories! I recently tried Discord to find programming communities but I just don't get it. When you join a server you are automatically subscribed to all the channels. And apparently you can't leave them, you can only 'silence' them by manually doing that for each channel. After a few days I just gave up as I could not keep up with all the notifications.
- cout 5y ago
  An IRC network can have thousands of channels; a discord server typically has dozens. Think of a discord channel as a permanent thread or a topic and a discord server like an irc channel. I find discord's model more manageable than irc for a large number of users; irc channels become a mess around 50-100 active users. Dividing the conversations into topics helps a lot. (I have been using irc since around 1994 and am still somewhat active.)
  - LinuxBender 5y ago
    I would imagine one could tweak the web frontends like Convos or TheLounge to make IRC look and behave like Discord at least in terms of text chat and channel/user visibility. I theorize that's what they are doing behind the scenes.
- akpa1 5y ago
  Discord does allow you to set notifications across an entire community to "all messages" (which is the default), "only mentions" or "nothing" if you right-click on the community icon.
  - DogLover_ 5y ago
    I was not precise when I said notifications. I already set it to "only mentions". My problem was that each channel will "light-up" when anyone is commenting in them. I have to mute each channel or mark all as read for the whole server to avoid this. On IRC you opt in to channels.
- grishka 5y ago
open-source-ux 5y ago
IRC might be designed around a simple protocol, but it is not simple in operation. The plethora of command line options explains why IRC is only loved by (some) developers and nobody else. I suspect some IRC users like the high barrier to entry (but would never admit to it): it keeps out all those clueless 'non-technical' users.
- janc_ 5y ago
  There are GUI clients for IRC that don’t need any “command line options” (some don’t even support them). And there are (and certainly were) plenty of people on IRC who aren’t very technical. Seriously, around 20 years ago it was often used as a "dating app" by regular users, or for radio listeners & DJs to chat, etc.
Blikkentrekker 5y ago
The simplicity also comes with problems, such as nickname registration in practice being implemented with bots that have administrative rights, which can lead to social engineering exploits and poor standardization of their interfaces, or the fact that the protocol does not seem to support sending an encoding so it relies on the gentleman's agreement that everyone use UTF-8, which works until that one user using latin-1 enters and starts sending characters that appear strange to everyone else. It could be a little bit more complex in my opinion. Perhaps it is time for servers to start supporting an i.r.c. 2.0 protocol but otherwise allow 1.0 and 2.0 users to still communicate with each other to facilitate the migration.
- janc_ 5y ago
  You mean IRCv3? It’s not all ready/implemented yet, but some of it is already in daily use. https://ircv3.net/ https://ircv3.net/ For example a server can tell the client that it only accepts UTF-8: https://ircv3.net/specs/extensions/utf8-only https://ircv3.net/specs/extensions/utf8-only
  - Blikkentrekker 5y ago
    Well I am still sometimes seeing this user that is sending latin-1, confusing everyone else. I also wish that nicknames would not be handled via the hack of bots, as this sysem allows one to take a nickname one does not own, at least for a short while, but simply no identify it and ignore that message, and thus impersonate another user.
jokoon 5y ago
I love IRC, unfortunately it doesn't work properly with smartphones because they have a "loose" connectivity (4G towers data etc). I'm not sure IRC apps can deal with this already. It would be nice to have some update to the IRC RFC. If it was well supported for smartphones, I'm still wondering if it would cause some bandwidth costs to servers. EDIT: I know about bouncers, but I would prefer to do without.
- YetAnotherNick 5y ago
  You can use IRC bouncer for that. e.g. https://wiki.znc.in/ZNC https://wiki.znc.in/ZNC
  - jokoon 5y ago
    It's not free, and it add hardware and software and bandwidth.
- tenebrisalietum 5y ago
  If you are into self-hosting, thelounge is a great web-based IRC client that works well on my iPhone. It does its magic by staying connected to servers on the backend, similar to a bouncer.
- petschge 5y ago
  It works well for me by using screen and irssi on a server and then using mosh on the smartphone to connect there, as well as irssi-notifier for notifications. Has worked well around the work, including traveling in africa, from high speed trains in Europa and airplanes above the Atlantic. And before you say "but that needs a server". Yes it does. A little VM as a shell host that is cheaper be month than the cheapest nitro package on Discord. Not even one coffee per month. If you don't think it's worth to have control over your communication for that price, I can't help you.
- superkuh 5y ago
  It'd be nice if as a society we stopped making all software worse in order to make up for smartphone's many limitations.
_8j50 5y ago
I am if the opinion that IRCv3 is horrid and has taken the email route of (forgive the language) "polishing turd". You cannot have a secure irc that is backwards compatible, you can have separate default ports and uri schemes like http vs https, but you can't connect to http and opportunistically redirect 301 to https and call that an improvement of securiry because it is actually worsening security by introducing false assurances of securiry. I also believe it is possible to have a protocol that has proper E2EE and simple enough to where you can use netcant and one other tool to use IRC. Trust-on-first-use authentication (like signal or ssh) is also terrible in practice on its own. Keep it simple. Let the servers handle public key distribution and certification so that compromise of the server/mesaaging infrastructure is required to mount identity attacks, then do the normal TOFU authentication so users won't have to trust middleware. Have a commandline tool that "connects" to the other user (like ssh or sendmail) and opens a socket/fd you can use with a proper frontend or just echo/netcat to it.
thenerdhead 5y ago
I miss IRC. The simplicity in design is one thing. I think the other part I miss is the pseudonyms and having an identity not be directly attached is another. I remember joining so many IRC channels to learn about everything in college. You'd get help and be humbled by the many regular names in each channel. There was more of a human element to it as most people simply acted as extensions of themselves. You think about Slack, Discord, and Teams today and there's a whole corporate or personal identity attached behind each name. You can't always act like you would in IRC. You can't always be blunt and to the point. You can't call someone an idiot or to RTFM in the most sincere way possible. When things were simple with a single pseudonym and a message, things were great. Now things are much more complex. Threads, DMs, notifications of mentions, bots, gifs, etc. It's definitely been changing quickly, but it was nice when everyone's attention was in one place instead of fragmented in each of these new apps that are just glorified IRC.
- jjulius 5y ago
  Totally agree! Just one ever-so-minor nitpick... >When things were simple with a single pseudonym and a message, things were great. Now things are much more complex. Threads, DMs... IRC has DMs too, /msg
- gaws 5y ago
  > You can't always act like you would in IRC. You can't always be blunt and to the point. You can't call someone an idiot or to RTFM in the most sincere way possible. You can absolutely still do that in IRC. Tens of thousands of people still use it to communicate.
almogbaku 5y ago
tenebrisalietum 5y ago
IRC, the protocol, is really simple. It's so simple it's almost the most minimal chat protocol you could possibly layer on top of TCP - it's literally a live message routing protocol with the least support for the notion of persistent users possible. There was a joke on bash.org that IRC is basically multiplayer Telnet and ... they aren't really too far off. This has good and bad things about it: Good: it's extremely flexible. Good: it's extremely efficient - your major IRC servers at there peak were probably one machine, possibly single core, and handled 20,000+ active connections. Protocol is extremely proxyable and tunnelable. Good: It works well over dialup. If you can get .002Mbit/sec between you and the server you can use IRC. Bad: no real concept of identity - everything is based on IP addresses and current connections. Connection drops, you're gone. Things have arisen to address this (NickServ, etc.) and using a bouncer has always been a thing. Good: no real concept of identity - if your IP is cloaked or you're not accessing from your home IP, you're very anonymous. Bad: First user on a channel is it's op and it's owner and can control the channel. If all ops connections drop, someone can take it over. DoSes/DDoSes to disrupt channels have been a thing. Things have arisen to address this on modern IRC (ChanServ) but before then, any really serious channel had to have a network of bots with out-of-band coordination to protect it (eggdrop). Bad: Doesn't support file transfer directly. This is done with another protocol DCC which is hard to work with over firewalls, etc. Bad: Media and link support is up to clients and requires non-IRC protocols to be effective. You're not posting pictures in IRC channels unless you are using a client that supports it such as thelounge, and even then what thelounge does is upload your pictures to a local server. Good: Mature IRC clients give you a lot of control. Bad: Mature IRC clients are complicated. Bad: IRC is one of those protocols that arose before encryption was considered a basic need. Modern IRC supports SSL but all it takes is one client connecting non-SSL to ruin it like email, unless the server is SSL only. Bad: Mature IRC servers tend to be from the age where the Internet was ruled by universities. So, DNS is relied on for security and identity far more than it should be. Configuration of mature IRC server daemons I find somewhat complex and difficult.
beanjuiceII 5y ago
I've finally migrated away from the last of my irc channels the last remaining people except for one holdout agreed it's time to move on. Things have been way better since the switch..I wouldn't go back, a new bar has been set
- Rendello 5y ago
  Preferred chat notwithstanding, at least the holdout didn't go the xkcd route: https://xkcd.com/1782/ https://xkcd.com/1782/
  - beanjuiceII 5y ago
    LOL thanks for that I never saw that one
- gaws 5y ago
  Switch to what?
andrewmcwatters 5y ago
I never used IRC growing up, to my knowledge, though I'm sure I used it by proxy in software that used it under the hood. Instead, I grew up with AOL Instant Messenger, and then MSN Messenger which later became Windows Live Messenger, then Skype, Xfire, Pidgin and Trillian as clients, then back to Skype again, and now Discord, which is where I still reside most of the time today. When I thought about existing chat protocols I wanted to use in game engines and websites that would allow one to connect through existing clients without having to join the game or navigate to the website in question directly, I thought about IRC. But it seems like people use Matrix now, and it just hasn't caught on to my circle of friends. If I'm not mistaken, it almost seems like FOSS Discord. I was recently introduced to it by a member of a community of very friendly Quake Mappers. I wonder if there is primarily first a cultural barrier to these technologies and not a technical one. As usually I find more technical people on IRC than on Discord.
agumonkey 5y ago
I still have discord somewhere.. but I don't use it. I think the technical simplicity of IRC also leads to chiller chans (and I know there are toxic people on IRC but it feels like an open garden unlike tiny realms with a lot of efforts put in setting up servers and rules by the original team)
pkulak 5y ago
I've never really played around with IRC, but I've definitely had the experience the author talks about with Matrix. The server (like mentioned about IRC) is complicated, but interfacing with it as a user or a bot is mostly a few REST endpoints. I've started using Matrix as my go-to interface for new projects. You get IO for free, plus auth, user accounts, and multi-device; leaving just the fun stuff.
Stampo00 5y ago
I've been forced to use Slack for the past 5 or 6 years in my professional life and I despise it. It gives me absolutely no ability to customize or automate my workflow without my employer giving me the keys to the kingdom, which they rightly won't do. Slack's service is where the value is. The client is only a means to an end. And yet they guard it with such zeal, threatening those who develop augments or alternatives. I have the skills. Just let me automate my own machine without making me have to fight you tooth and nail!
remram 5y ago
I don't know if a snippet of IRC shows it being simple. The colons are quite mysterious, especially to anyone who's seen HTTP/POP/SMTP. They look out of place with whitespace before rather than after, and are used for two separate things...
Ntrails 5y ago
Could someone with more insight summarise how this compares to xmpp as an open chat protocol?
locusofself 5y ago
IRC was fun. I do miss that period of time (and being a teenager who could learn things very quickly). I'm not particularly nostalgic about the protocol or the user experience though. Maybe we will find a good middle ground some day, fast native clients with media rich experience and great searchability. I use Teams every day and find it to be just fine for most things.
pmarreck 5y ago
Somehow I never heard of Matrix until now. I'm now running Element with a bridge to the Libera IRC network. Thanks!
userbinator 5y ago
Everyone should write an IRC client as an exercise in network programming due to its simplicity. The other IM protocol for which I've written a client is early MSNP, which is also text-based and not immensely more complicated than IRC. IMHO all the newer web-based stuff is a horrible mess of abstraction bloat. TCP, and TLS if you want encryption, should be a sufficient base to build upon.
hammyhavoc 5y ago
I use Matrix and bridge in IRC, and third-party platforms whenever necessary. So much less cognitive load having it all in one place.
bitwize 5y ago
Have we learned nothing from the iPod and Dropbox? Simplicity doesn't matter. What matters are: 1) How easy is it to use? 2) What features does it offer me? 3) How well does it integrate into my lifestyle? 4) Do my family and friends use it? Can I get them to? Slack and Discord win on ALL FOUR of the above points vs. IRC. IRC is a dead horse... stop beating it, please. "The only thing that matters in software is the experience of the user." --Ryan Dahl

364 points by susam 5y ago

Whenever IRC comes up I never miss a chance to recommend my favorite extensible (in several languages) IRC client weechat. I believe there have been some forks to handle discord and matrix as well.

hoyd 5y ago

Nice article, thanks :-) I grew up with IRC and realize that it isn't the same any longer. It isn't the place where everyone is, which some social networks seem to be today. The local communities on IRC, a channel for a town used to be the place to be and meet others.

prox 5y ago
I think Discord took over the role of IRC. It has a lot of same functions and terminology.
- mnd999 5y ago
  Discord is internet relay meme.
erk__ 5y ago
IRC is probably used by more people now than ever before, though in a very different way than before. The whole of Twitch's chat infrastructure is running on it and it have hundreds of thousands of concurrent users. Though for most people it is running though a websocket instead of a raw socket, but the commands are the same a long way
- Jasper_ 5y ago
  The IRC protocol is for the bot API only. The chat on the website uses a custom protocol, and the IRC daemon has always been a custom implementation with weird quirks.
  - erk__ 5y ago
    It is a custom protocol that follows IRC very closely, they just have a lot of extensions on it to add support for the things on twitch. to start a connection you send PASS, NICK, USER and then JOIN, over the websocket so I would not really call it a custom protocol. The url it uses is wss://irc-ws.chat.twitch.tv/ as well.

stavros 5y ago

Same with SMTP and POP, I would routinely send or get email via telnet when I wanted to debug or delete some messages. They're all very simple protocols.

apples_oranges 5y ago
In my experience, email protocols are anything but simple as soon as some security or authentication comes into play.
- fulafel 5y ago
  Depends on the auth mechanisms in use, the simplest ones are still still pretty straightforward. Nowadays you just use the TLS equivalent of telnet (openssl s_client). POP3: 1. run openssl s_client -connect myserver.example.com:995 2. enter two commands: "user myusername" "pass mypassword" 3. profit SMTP & AUTH PLAIN is only slightly more complicated but similarly just an additional protocol command, connecting with s_client. (You need to generate the auth string in another shell window with: echo -ne "\0username\0password"|openssl base64)
anthk 5y ago
Usenet too. Getting news and discuss stuff "offline" and fetching/sending the messages once a week it's magical and resting.
- mrweasel 5y ago
  The fall of Usenet more and more looks like a mistake. I’d love to have hyper-localized newsgroups, in place of Facebook. Often local stuff like: “Why does is smell like somethings on fire”, “Has the water been turned of” or is “Is soccer cancelled this week?” is only posted on Facebook. So if you don’t have Facebook, you can’t get those information. Then again the Facebook algorithm will hide it for three weeks before deciding that you need to know that the hot water will be turned of for quarter of the town at three o’clock. I feel that Usenet would be ideal for this.

iqanq 5y ago

>I often remark how simple the Internet Relay Chat (IRC) protocol is and how that has fostered creativity in the lives of young programmers growing up in the late 90s and early 2000s. For many of us who were introduced to the Internet during that time, writing an IRC bot turned out to be our first non-trivial hobby programming project that involved network sockets, did something meaningful, and served actual users. While that is true, most of those who wrote bots did not meaningfully interact with the protocol because they used abstractions (eggdrops, mirc scripts, etc). The simplicity of the protocol was unrelated, as a well abstracted library for any other protocol or even service (such as twitter) can be as simple.

FemmeAndroid 5y ago
Is this true? It’s not my experience. My first meaningful programs were raw socket IRC clients as a teenager explicitly because they were simpler to figure out than using things like egg drop. That isn’t to say that most fully featured tools were written from scratch — I can’t speak to that one way or another. But I know a lot of people who were learning about internet protocols by using telnet to interact directly with IRC servers then transferring that knowledge into a socket-level reimplementation of the protocol. RFC1459 certainly proved to me that RFCs can be simple and worth reading. And the whole experience taught me early that a simple enough, well documented protocol could be easier to use than a wrapper library in a foreign language. I certainly use a lot of libraries these days, but those lessons have served me extremely well.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- anthk 5y ago
  With ii you can write a bot today with any language reading and writting to files. Even with sh.
corobo 5y ago
Admittedly my first bot was indeed in mIRCScript and its abstractions but it wasn't long before I had a !spawn command that was a function that connected sub-bots directly to IRC as a protocol because why not I guess Also wrote a script that sent email directly for tinkering purposes, later used that protocol knowledge to get my first tech job haha "how does email work?" "how in-depth do you want?"

bullen 5y ago

If you want an even simpler and more scalable chat you can use my multiplayer online system: http://github.com/tinspin/fuse http://github.com/tinspin/fuse The HTTP server is written in Java with a custom JSON database and it has clients in C++, C# and HTML5.

dan-robertson 5y ago

It’s a real shame how difficult programming is. I don’t mean that it is difficult to write difficult things, but that it is difficult to write simple things. Once upon a time, one could download visual studio, click about to make a new project in (e.g.) Visual Basic, draw a gui in the gui editor, and click the run button. One could then start adding simple functionality (e.g. working through a book). Or even longer ago when a computer might dump you practically straight into BASIC when you turned it on or you might get access to a mainframe/minicomputer with programming tools already set up. Nowadays, an ‘easy’ introduction could involve the horrific process of installing and setting up python on windows (where it is hard to do things other than input/output text) or editing some html/JavaScript files where there are more easily possible interactive things but lots of things are difficult like ‘just drawing things’ or anything that requires a server side. P.S. if you, like me, were wondering what Libera Chat is, it’s the moral successor of Freenode with Freenode now being a shell of its former self.

anthk 5y ago
TCL/TK >>>>>> VB. By a huge margin. VB would work great under Windows, but TCL/TK kits would work everywhere.
- denton-scratch 5y ago
  I liked VB6 when I first tried it. You drew a UI, then you double-clicked the components to get a menu of stub code-blocks. It was good for making UIs. Then suddenly there were masses of weird, undocumented APIs, including APIs from any application installed on the machine. Unfortunately I was making my living from VB6 at the time, so I had to learn it all. (And then MS withdrew support for VB6, forcing me to learn a new trade, which is only one driver of my animus against MS) Long ago I owned a Sinclair QL. That toy had a rather nice BASIC editor. I think their dialect was called QBasic. You selected a function in the left pane, and it appeared for editing in the right pane. (I also loved that it used a 68K processor; that chip had a sweet instruction set)
- rahen 5y ago
  Indeed, just like VB6, tcl/tk is a great reminder of the late 90s. Tcl was such an expressive yet minimalist language. Probably the only fast and easy way back then to create GUI applications on *nix systems. I guess Python + QT has killed it now, but with a massively larger footprint and resource usage obviously.

mycodepedia 5y ago

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mycodepedia 5y ago

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h2odragon 5y ago

Prior to IRC becoming an accepted protocol, the "talker BBS systems" tried to avoid the need for a user to have a "client application." I'd say it was AOL that put an interface on chat and sold (a) the idea of a chat client and (b) the idea of online chat to less technical users.

c0l0 5y ago

A number of moons ago, I switched from a company that used IRC for its internal, real-time, ephemeral communication needs to an enterprise shop that used Microsoft Teams to do that (and of course other communication stuff, as the boundaries for what was better kept in Sharepoint, Confluence, Email/Exchange, the legacy Wiki, and/or Teams were never quite clear :)) there. In the old shop, we eventually had all kinds of important subsystems hooked up to our internal IRC server: Monitoring and alerting. Source control and Wiki activity. The deployment pipeline. Ticket activity reports. All these services were pretty much effortlessly set up to provide useful, real-time status information broadcast to topic-specific channels users could idle in. Everyone could stay informed on topics of their interest, in real time, with no barrier to entry. It was really good, and the implementation completed in a few hours total, for all use-cases, due to irc's incredible simplicity. Due to the benefits I had reaped from that setup before, I tried to implement parts of it on/for the MS Teams platform at the then-new job. Getting the Teams Python SDK to implement a bot-like entity running alone proved to be a days-long ordeal, and whatever followed wasn't much more pleasant. In the end, we let someone set up two email-to-teams-channel-forwards which kinda worked, but suffered from obnoxious, multi-minute relay delays. As a consequence of the tedious bringup and the latency shortcoming, the "effortless notification" initiative never really got traction. Not only because of this particular experience I am a firm believer that software/system simplicity is a virtue that can neither be overstated in importance, nor substituted by anything else.

alufers 5y ago
I once needed to create a bot that sent notification and I just used the webhook feature in a Team channel. Not defending Teams though, it is a horrendous piece of software.
- c0l0 5y ago
  Maybe that wasn't possible/enabled for our particular deployment (that was in the IT dept. of a big European bank), as we had what I've been told was a strange bastardization of O365 and other MSFT services - a mix of on-prem and cloud services unlikely to be found elsewhere. At any rate, for the IRC server at the shop I was at previously, I had "webhook" support/a http(s)->irc gateway implemented on my own in much less than an hour via CGI ;)

yetihehe 5y ago

In the beginning was the command line. Then work of bright people of Xerox PARC was used to hide from users the reality that underneath their beloved GUI, computers are just passing around strings of text. Now we yearn for a time when you were just one INT and several MOV away from putting a pixel on a screen, instead of downloading multi-GB IDE to fiddle for a weekend before you can show a simple window.

davisr 5y ago
You don't understand what happened at Xerox PARC or what their "GUI" was. Smalltalk wasn't a language, it wasn't a GUI, it was an _environment_, and its whole point was that it didn't hide anything! It was a completely different paradigm to how computers and their programs are architected today. A Smalltalk system was always meant to be so simple that one could understand, and change, everything about it.
- yetihehe 5y ago
  That's why I've said that their work was used, not that they did it.

tiffanyh 5y ago

Speaking of ‘simplicity’, this blog has a fantastic design. The CSS is only ~30 lines and is largely just applying spacing/padding. No JS, no custom font, etc. https://susam.net/css/main.css https://susam.net/css/main.css

lambdaba 5y ago
It's pretty nice indeed. I like the use of keywords for sizes "thin", "large", and the shorthand hex for colors, and the fact that there's zero boilerplate and only styling what's actually used.
- hiptobecubic 5y ago
  Agreed, but I hate this: a:link, a:visited { color: #00e; } Why do this?
  - lambdaba 5y ago
    Oh, yeah, that should be illegal.
    - Mezzie 5y ago
      Right to jail. Also to a mandatory review of WCAG standards.
  - janc_ 5y ago
    Fortunately that’s easy to override with some custom CSS, but I also don’t understand the reasoning behind that…
  - susam 5y ago
    Thank you for pointing this out. I have fixed it now. You should no longer see this issue after a hard refresh.

nine_k 5y ago

I'd say it's in the same general box as the simplicity of 8-bit computers booting into Basic interpreter, and the simplicity of Legos. It's wonderful when you can have your toys in a sandbox where you use and develop them mostly for fun, and for scratching your own itch, away from well-moneyed interests. No need to carefully identify participants. No need to encrypt, or otherwise complicate the implementation. No need to efficiently serve millions of users. No need to add bling to attract more of those who barely cares. (The latter is not the case with Legos lately, though.) This is why I think that a lot of innovation starts in the fringe, and looks like mostly useless toys, until one of these toys proves very useful for "real world" needs.

lambdaba 5y ago

Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface. ; basically. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy)

alkonaut 5y ago
While some of those guidelines offer some value still, end-user programs dealing with text just aren’t ever going to be a thing. People expect to be able to paste a photo or screenshot just as easily as they post a sentence. Requiring a second app to do it (posting a link) isn’t nearly as good a UX as simply pasting in pictures.
- lambdaba 5y ago
  Well, in practice you can have binary input, as many programs do, but human-readable free-form text is the simplest interface there is. We just need more modern terminals that can handle that.
  - alkonaut 5y ago
    > We just need more modern terminals Yeah like smartphone apps , webapps, and desktop guis…
    - lambdaba 5y ago
      Those are apps, I mean a glue / universal interface layer that's 100% owned by the user
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago
  Then have the chat client automatically upload to a service and generate a link behind the scenes.
  - alkonaut 5y ago

epalm 5y ago

As an aside, can I just say how refreshing this website is? It's 100% content, just text. Now view the html source, and be amazed. I daresay the author actually wrote the html by hand. I suppose it could be a very conservative and conscientious site generator that even respects line length, but I'd be surprised. Short css file for minimal style tweaks, and readable markup. Fitting that the article is about simplicity. When I first learned html (late 90s) this is what it looked like. Very nice.

Iv 5y ago
Possibly a pandoc generated html from markdown. My favorite way of doing things.
Jorengarenar 5y ago
Source code [0] is available on GitHub; looks like they wrote their own simple site generator. I've been thinking about something similar (maybe even simpler) for my blog too. [0]: https://github.com/susam/susam.net https://github.com/susam/susam.net
- susam 5y ago
  Thank you for sharing the link to the source code. My simple site generator is based on my wife's project makesite.py[1]. In fact, I used her site generator for a few years. Later I reimplemented makesite.py in Common Lisp. As a result, it inherits the design, layout, minimalism, and simplicity of makesite.py. [1] https://github.com/sunainapai/makesite/ https://github.com/sunainapai/makesite/
Zababa 5y ago
It seems like the CSS used is shared under the MIT license by the author here: https://github.com/susam/spcss https://github.com/susam/spcss.
signal11 5y ago
It does appear to be handcrafted HTML, generated using [1]. > This is a static website generated using a Common Lisp program. See github.com/susam/maze for the source code of this website[2] > Just like the original website, every line of HTML and CSS that appears in the website is handcrafted.[3] [1] https://github.com/susam/maze/blob/main/site.lisp https://github.com/susam/maze/blob/main/site.lisp [2] https://susam.net/maze/about.html https://susam.net/maze/about.html [3] https://github.com/susam/maze https://github.com/susam/maze

evilhackerdude 5y ago

Are netsplits still a thing in modern IRC network deployments?

TekMol 5y ago

IRC is great! I like the interface way more than Discord. And it seems to attract more knowledgeable people. If you are into startups, check out #startups on Libera!

DogLover_ 5y ago

I used IRC for gaming around 2004 - fond memories! I recently tried Discord to find programming communities but I just don't get it. When you join a server you are automatically subscribed to all the channels. And apparently you can't leave them, you can only 'silence' them by manually doing that for each channel. After a few days I just gave up as I could not keep up with all the notifications.

cout 5y ago
An IRC network can have thousands of channels; a discord server typically has dozens. Think of a discord channel as a permanent thread or a topic and a discord server like an irc channel. I find discord's model more manageable than irc for a large number of users; irc channels become a mess around 50-100 active users. Dividing the conversations into topics helps a lot. (I have been using irc since around 1994 and am still somewhat active.)
- LinuxBender 5y ago
  I would imagine one could tweak the web frontends like Convos or TheLounge to make IRC look and behave like Discord at least in terms of text chat and channel/user visibility. I theorize that's what they are doing behind the scenes.
akpa1 5y ago
Discord does allow you to set notifications across an entire community to "all messages" (which is the default), "only mentions" or "nothing" if you right-click on the community icon.
- DogLover_ 5y ago
  I was not precise when I said notifications. I already set it to "only mentions". My problem was that each channel will "light-up" when anyone is commenting in them. I have to mute each channel or mark all as read for the whole server to avoid this. On IRC you opt in to channels.
grishka 5y ago

open-source-ux 5y ago

IRC might be designed around a simple protocol, but it is not simple in operation. The plethora of command line options explains why IRC is only loved by (some) developers and nobody else. I suspect some IRC users like the high barrier to entry (but would never admit to it): it keeps out all those clueless 'non-technical' users.

janc_ 5y ago
There are GUI clients for IRC that don’t need any “command line options” (some don’t even support them). And there are (and certainly were) plenty of people on IRC who aren’t very technical. Seriously, around 20 years ago it was often used as a "dating app" by regular users, or for radio listeners & DJs to chat, etc.

Blikkentrekker 5y ago

The simplicity also comes with problems, such as nickname registration in practice being implemented with bots that have administrative rights, which can lead to social engineering exploits and poor standardization of their interfaces, or the fact that the protocol does not seem to support sending an encoding so it relies on the gentleman's agreement that everyone use UTF-8, which works until that one user using latin-1 enters and starts sending characters that appear strange to everyone else. It could be a little bit more complex in my opinion. Perhaps it is time for servers to start supporting an i.r.c. 2.0 protocol but otherwise allow 1.0 and 2.0 users to still communicate with each other to facilitate the migration.

janc_ 5y ago
You mean IRCv3? It’s not all ready/implemented yet, but some of it is already in daily use. https://ircv3.net/ https://ircv3.net/ For example a server can tell the client that it only accepts UTF-8: https://ircv3.net/specs/extensions/utf8-only https://ircv3.net/specs/extensions/utf8-only
- Blikkentrekker 5y ago
  Well I am still sometimes seeing this user that is sending latin-1, confusing everyone else. I also wish that nicknames would not be handled via the hack of bots, as this sysem allows one to take a nickname one does not own, at least for a short while, but simply no identify it and ignore that message, and thus impersonate another user.

jokoon 5y ago

I love IRC, unfortunately it doesn't work properly with smartphones because they have a "loose" connectivity (4G towers data etc). I'm not sure IRC apps can deal with this already. It would be nice to have some update to the IRC RFC. If it was well supported for smartphones, I'm still wondering if it would cause some bandwidth costs to servers. EDIT: I know about bouncers, but I would prefer to do without.

YetAnotherNick 5y ago
You can use IRC bouncer for that. e.g. https://wiki.znc.in/ZNC https://wiki.znc.in/ZNC
- jokoon 5y ago
  It's not free, and it add hardware and software and bandwidth.
tenebrisalietum 5y ago
If you are into self-hosting, thelounge is a great web-based IRC client that works well on my iPhone. It does its magic by staying connected to servers on the backend, similar to a bouncer.
petschge 5y ago
It works well for me by using screen and irssi on a server and then using mosh on the smartphone to connect there, as well as irssi-notifier for notifications. Has worked well around the work, including traveling in africa, from high speed trains in Europa and airplanes above the Atlantic. And before you say "but that needs a server". Yes it does. A little VM as a shell host that is cheaper be month than the cheapest nitro package on Discord. Not even one coffee per month. If you don't think it's worth to have control over your communication for that price, I can't help you.
superkuh 5y ago
It'd be nice if as a society we stopped making all software worse in order to make up for smartphone's many limitations.

_8j50 5y ago

I am if the opinion that IRCv3 is horrid and has taken the email route of (forgive the language) "polishing turd". You cannot have a secure irc that is backwards compatible, you can have separate default ports and uri schemes like http vs https, but you can't connect to http and opportunistically redirect 301 to https and call that an improvement of securiry because it is actually worsening security by introducing false assurances of securiry. I also believe it is possible to have a protocol that has proper E2EE and simple enough to where you can use netcant and one other tool to use IRC. Trust-on-first-use authentication (like signal or ssh) is also terrible in practice on its own. Keep it simple. Let the servers handle public key distribution and certification so that compromise of the server/mesaaging infrastructure is required to mount identity attacks, then do the normal TOFU authentication so users won't have to trust middleware. Have a commandline tool that "connects" to the other user (like ssh or sendmail) and opens a socket/fd you can use with a proper frontend or just echo/netcat to it.

thenerdhead 5y ago

I miss IRC. The simplicity in design is one thing. I think the other part I miss is the pseudonyms and having an identity not be directly attached is another. I remember joining so many IRC channels to learn about everything in college. You'd get help and be humbled by the many regular names in each channel. There was more of a human element to it as most people simply acted as extensions of themselves. You think about Slack, Discord, and Teams today and there's a whole corporate or personal identity attached behind each name. You can't always act like you would in IRC. You can't always be blunt and to the point. You can't call someone an idiot or to RTFM in the most sincere way possible. When things were simple with a single pseudonym and a message, things were great. Now things are much more complex. Threads, DMs, notifications of mentions, bots, gifs, etc. It's definitely been changing quickly, but it was nice when everyone's attention was in one place instead of fragmented in each of these new apps that are just glorified IRC.

jjulius 5y ago
Totally agree! Just one ever-so-minor nitpick... >When things were simple with a single pseudonym and a message, things were great. Now things are much more complex. Threads, DMs... IRC has DMs too, /msg
gaws 5y ago
> You can't always act like you would in IRC. You can't always be blunt and to the point. You can't call someone an idiot or to RTFM in the most sincere way possible. You can absolutely still do that in IRC. Tens of thousands of people still use it to communicate.

almogbaku 5y ago

tenebrisalietum 5y ago

IRC, the protocol, is really simple. It's so simple it's almost the most minimal chat protocol you could possibly layer on top of TCP - it's literally a live message routing protocol with the least support for the notion of persistent users possible. There was a joke on bash.org that IRC is basically multiplayer Telnet and ... they aren't really too far off. This has good and bad things about it: Good: it's extremely flexible. Good: it's extremely efficient - your major IRC servers at there peak were probably one machine, possibly single core, and handled 20,000+ active connections. Protocol is extremely proxyable and tunnelable. Good: It works well over dialup. If you can get .002Mbit/sec between you and the server you can use IRC. Bad: no real concept of identity - everything is based on IP addresses and current connections. Connection drops, you're gone. Things have arisen to address this (NickServ, etc.) and using a bouncer has always been a thing. Good: no real concept of identity - if your IP is cloaked or you're not accessing from your home IP, you're very anonymous. Bad: First user on a channel is it's op and it's owner and can control the channel. If all ops connections drop, someone can take it over. DoSes/DDoSes to disrupt channels have been a thing. Things have arisen to address this on modern IRC (ChanServ) but before then, any really serious channel had to have a network of bots with out-of-band coordination to protect it (eggdrop). Bad: Doesn't support file transfer directly. This is done with another protocol DCC which is hard to work with over firewalls, etc. Bad: Media and link support is up to clients and requires non-IRC protocols to be effective. You're not posting pictures in IRC channels unless you are using a client that supports it such as thelounge, and even then what thelounge does is upload your pictures to a local server. Good: Mature IRC clients give you a lot of control. Bad: Mature IRC clients are complicated. Bad: IRC is one of those protocols that arose before encryption was considered a basic need. Modern IRC supports SSL but all it takes is one client connecting non-SSL to ruin it like email, unless the server is SSL only. Bad: Mature IRC servers tend to be from the age where the Internet was ruled by universities. So, DNS is relied on for security and identity far more than it should be. Configuration of mature IRC server daemons I find somewhat complex and difficult.

beanjuiceII 5y ago

I've finally migrated away from the last of my irc channels the last remaining people except for one holdout agreed it's time to move on. Things have been way better since the switch..I wouldn't go back, a new bar has been set

Rendello 5y ago
Preferred chat notwithstanding, at least the holdout didn't go the xkcd route: https://xkcd.com/1782/ https://xkcd.com/1782/
- beanjuiceII 5y ago
  LOL thanks for that I never saw that one
gaws 5y ago
Switch to what?

andrewmcwatters 5y ago

I never used IRC growing up, to my knowledge, though I'm sure I used it by proxy in software that used it under the hood. Instead, I grew up with AOL Instant Messenger, and then MSN Messenger which later became Windows Live Messenger, then Skype, Xfire, Pidgin and Trillian as clients, then back to Skype again, and now Discord, which is where I still reside most of the time today. When I thought about existing chat protocols I wanted to use in game engines and websites that would allow one to connect through existing clients without having to join the game or navigate to the website in question directly, I thought about IRC. But it seems like people use Matrix now, and it just hasn't caught on to my circle of friends. If I'm not mistaken, it almost seems like FOSS Discord. I was recently introduced to it by a member of a community of very friendly Quake Mappers. I wonder if there is primarily first a cultural barrier to these technologies and not a technical one. As usually I find more technical people on IRC than on Discord.

agumonkey 5y ago

I still have discord somewhere.. but I don't use it. I think the technical simplicity of IRC also leads to chiller chans (and I know there are toxic people on IRC but it feels like an open garden unlike tiny realms with a lot of efforts put in setting up servers and rules by the original team)

pkulak 5y ago

I've never really played around with IRC, but I've definitely had the experience the author talks about with Matrix. The server (like mentioned about IRC) is complicated, but interfacing with it as a user or a bot is mostly a few REST endpoints. I've started using Matrix as my go-to interface for new projects. You get IO for free, plus auth, user accounts, and multi-device; leaving just the fun stuff.

Stampo00 5y ago

I've been forced to use Slack for the past 5 or 6 years in my professional life and I despise it. It gives me absolutely no ability to customize or automate my workflow without my employer giving me the keys to the kingdom, which they rightly won't do. Slack's service is where the value is. The client is only a means to an end. And yet they guard it with such zeal, threatening those who develop augments or alternatives. I have the skills. Just let me automate my own machine without making me have to fight you tooth and nail!

remram 5y ago

I don't know if a snippet of IRC shows it being simple. The colons are quite mysterious, especially to anyone who's seen HTTP/POP/SMTP. They look out of place with whitespace before rather than after, and are used for two separate things...

Ntrails 5y ago

Could someone with more insight summarise how this compares to xmpp as an open chat protocol?

locusofself 5y ago

IRC was fun. I do miss that period of time (and being a teenager who could learn things very quickly). I'm not particularly nostalgic about the protocol or the user experience though. Maybe we will find a good middle ground some day, fast native clients with media rich experience and great searchability. I use Teams every day and find it to be just fine for most things.

pmarreck 5y ago

Somehow I never heard of Matrix until now. I'm now running Element with a bridge to the Libera IRC network. Thanks!

userbinator 5y ago

Everyone should write an IRC client as an exercise in network programming due to its simplicity. The other IM protocol for which I've written a client is early MSNP, which is also text-based and not immensely more complicated than IRC. IMHO all the newer web-based stuff is a horrible mess of abstraction bloat. TCP, and TLS if you want encryption, should be a sufficient base to build upon.

hammyhavoc 5y ago

I use Matrix and bridge in IRC, and third-party platforms whenever necessary. So much less cognitive load having it all in one place.

bitwize 5y ago

Have we learned nothing from the iPod and Dropbox? Simplicity doesn't matter. What matters are: 1) How easy is it to use? 2) What features does it offer me? 3) How well does it integrate into my lifestyle? 4) Do my family and friends use it? Can I get them to? Slack and Discord win on ALL FOUR of the above points vs. IRC. IRC is a dead horse... stop beating it, please. "The only thing that matters in software is the experience of the user." --Ryan Dahl