4 ms·

There are nice IRC clients out there. I don't use them and I haven't used them in a group, because even in programming language communities many have moved to D

There are nice IRC clients out there. I don't use them and I haven't used them in a group, because even in programming language communities many have moved to Discord/Slack, but I would prefer working with multiple simple tools than a monolith, different tools for different uses, and glue them together when needed (it doesn't need to be complicated, and if it is, than some additional effort is justified)

hiptobecubic 5y ago
If you look at these communities, there is basically only one feature of Discord/Slack that they use that IRC does not easily provide and that's ephemeral/mobile. If I go offline for an hour in IRC, I lose a bunch of messages unless I've done some backflips to set up some kind of archiving/replay in a separate failure domain (e.g. znc running on gcp). With chat services, the service is essentially znc for free. The rest of the shift is explained by discord being popular for other use cases (e.g. as a twitch companion), overwhelmingly dominated by younger users. IRC isn't getting new users and over time, this means the community will migrate due to turnover. Thank god we at least have things like matrix bridges, but discord is a lost cause.
- lambdaba 5y ago
  I think the latter argument is 90% of the reason. Too bad this new generation doesn't have an opensource base of software to work with, or rather somehow didn't get acculturated to the existing one. Actually, that's probably because there were those few "killer features" such as offline messages that the existing systems didn't have.
- LinuxBender 5y ago
  There are web front-ends to IRC that can mitigate message loss without having to run bouncers. Convos [1] and TheLounge [2] come to mind but there are others [3] [1] - https://convos.chat/ https://convos.chat/ [2] - https://thelounge.chat/ https://thelounge.chat/ [3] - https://www.ilmarilauhakangas.fi/irc_technology_news_from_the_second_half_of_2021/ https://www.ilmarilauhakangas.fi/irc_technology_news_from_th...

hiptobecubic 5y ago

If you look at these communities, there is basically only one feature of Discord/Slack that they use that IRC does not easily provide and that's ephemeral/mobile. If I go offline for an hour in IRC, I lose a bunch of messages unless I've done some backflips to set up some kind of archiving/replay in a separate failure domain (e.g. znc running on gcp). With chat services, the service is essentially znc for free. The rest of the shift is explained by discord being popular for other use cases (e.g. as a twitch companion), overwhelmingly dominated by younger users. IRC isn't getting new users and over time, this means the community will migrate due to turnover. Thank god we at least have things like matrix bridges, but discord is a lost cause.

lambdaba 5y ago
I think the latter argument is 90% of the reason. Too bad this new generation doesn't have an opensource base of software to work with, or rather somehow didn't get acculturated to the existing one. Actually, that's probably because there were those few "killer features" such as offline messages that the existing systems didn't have.
LinuxBender 5y ago
There are web front-ends to IRC that can mitigate message loss without having to run bouncers. Convos [1] and TheLounge [2] come to mind but there are others [3] [1] - https://convos.chat/ https://convos.chat/ [2] - https://thelounge.chat/ https://thelounge.chat/ [3] - https://www.ilmarilauhakangas.fi/irc_technology_news_from_the_second_half_of_2021/ https://www.ilmarilauhakangas.fi/irc_technology_news_from_th...