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I can understand not wanting to use a proprietary platform for communications about a FOSS project, but why does it have to be IRC? The world is moving on. I li

I can understand not wanting to use a proprietary platform for communications about a FOSS project, but why does it have to be IRC? The world is moving on. I like being able to paste code into chat and have it syntax highlighted. I like being able to ping people so that they get a notification on their phone, and likewise, I like people to be able to ping me. Occasionally, I like to send a GIF. I imagine IRC people will just call all of these distractions. They are in a shrinking minority of people.

tsujp 4y ago
> I like being able to paste code into chat and have it syntax highlighted. Use a pastebin, there are plenty out there. See: https://paste.sr.ht/ https://paste.sr.ht/ or http://ix.io/ http://ix.io/ or https://paste.rs/ https://paste.rs/ or https://bpa.st/ https://bpa.st/ or https://gist.github.com/ https://gist.github.com/ or https://paste.ubuntu.com/ https://paste.ubuntu.com/ and many, many more. Regardless of there being a better tool for syntax highlighting and holding small linkable snippets of code (so that logic doesn't need to be more to download when opening your chat) it also keeps it _out_ of the chat so it's not polluted. People not being able to instantly insert 20 lines of text is a _good_ thing. So, link to the resource don't embed it. > I like being able to ping people so that they get a notification on their phone, and likewise, I like people to be able to ping me In the article you're responding to Drew directly mentions their suggestions for Push Notifications. I don't mean to sound facetious but, did you read this (article) in it's entirety? > Occasionally, I like to send a GIF See above: link to the resource, don't embed it.
- proto_lambda 4y ago
  > Use a pastebin That's not a solution, that's a bad and inconvenient workaround. Having to use an external service just to share a couple lines of code is horrible for usability. Funnily enough, its also exactly the thing that IRC users complain about when the matrix bridge converts multi-line messages to links.
  - Arnavion 4y ago
    >Funnily enough, its also exactly the thing that IRC users complain about when the matrix bridge converts multi-line messages to links. I assume you're trying to say this is hypocritical, but it isn't. The problem with multi-line messages becoming links is that the message is the context of the question. You have to reach for a browser just to read what the other person wanted to say. Things like images and pastebins are ancillary to the message. You read the text part, decide whether you want to engage with it further, and then if you do you reach for a browser to see the image or pastebin. Compare: <h> hey guys im trying to install blub on ubuntu but it keeps complaining that my splines aren't reticulated. full error here: https://paste.rs/id123 with: <h[m]> hey guys... (full message at https://matrix.org/_matrix/media/r0/download/matrix.org/id123) That last one is an actual example from an OFTC channel that's bridged to Matrix. It truncated at just two words because the original message had a newline after "guys".
    - proto_lambda 4y ago
      Oh yeah, that's indeed not great. For messages with up to ~5 lines, the bridge actually just sends several messages, but as soon as the message has more lines than that, it only shows the first line as a preview. I could've sworn it actually sends the first couple lines, then a "(full message at ...)" message, but apparently not (anymore) - would probably be worth opening an issue for :)
      - Arnavion 4y ago
        The full message was longer than five lines. There's nothing to file a bug about. The bridge does not (and can not without some AI or heuristics which are both fallible) know where the relevant part of the message ends and the log spew begins, so a message with a one-line description and fifty lines of logs is treated the same as a message with fifty-one lines.
- seanw444 4y ago
  Been using Sourcehut as my main repo host for like a year now, and didn't even know https://paste.sr.ht https://paste.sr.ht existed. Very handy. Thanks.
  - Tomte 4y ago
    "All sourcehut services" on the web site doesn't show all services, alas. I wonder what else is missing besides paste and chat there. Edit: but the manual does: https://man.sr.ht/ https://man.sr.ht/
- Macha 4y ago
  > People not being able to instantly insert 20 lines of text is a _good_ thing. Element (Matrix) and Slack will render something like this as 3-5 lines with the expansion option to see all of it. I'm sure discord will eventually do the same too. This is clearly preferable to using a different application entirely to view the snippet. It's only IRC where some naive clients expand this out into 20 something messages where this is a problem. And since it's not part of the protocol, you're at the whims of the sender's client for how it's handled, so it's not like you can install a sufficiently smart client to render it how you like in all cases. I'd also suggest your perspective of how much a problem even that 20 lines of text is is distorted by being in fast moving public chatrooms, like your typical Linux distro channel. In my small team or friends chat, it's perfectly fine The same also applies to the gif. If this one bothers you, most clients even have the options to disable inline images, so the sender gets to choose. Also it means you just get the image file, and not whatever cruft the popular image host of this 5 year period is doing to monetise. Image hosts and pastebins also seem more fragile than chat services. I've occasionally gone through old messages that link to pastie or similar and the context is gone.
  - encryptluks2 4y ago
    I think your expectations can easily be alleviated with the right IRC client. Most pastebins and image hosts use some form of markup so that if your IRC client was set to preview those links then it could, or even potentially cache those resources as well.
    - Macha 4y ago
      So what is this magical sufficiently smart client that can embed images from all major image hosts, code snippets from all major pastebins and also configures a bouncer for me and also lets me see messages on my phone without missing some as the phone OS killed it's network socket as it put the app to sleep? I'm no stranger to the IRC protocol (in fact one of my first submissions to this site 12 years ago in 2010 was an introduction to the protocol written as part of building an Android client that was my side project at the time), but I have no interest in putting in the time to make an IRC client with the experience I'd like in 2022, which is clearly a much lower bar on matrix when Element, nheko, Cinny, FluffyChat and Fractal have all managed it.
- JohnHaugeland 4y ago
  is it not weird that you're responding to people who obviously know how to use irc and say "this is why i don't use it anymore" by trying to teach them how to do what everyone already knows how to do? did you feel that you were offering solutions or something?
ddevault 4y ago
You might like pinging people so they get a notification on their phone, but they might not like being on the other end of your ping :) IRC has been around a lot longer than most of the projects which have sprung up in the same space, and IRC views their features with skepticism rather than being the eternal trend-follower. If IRC had followed every trendy chat feature for the past 34 years then it would be a hulking monstrosity by now. There is wisdom in moderation. A communication method can be effective without facilitating every style of communication -- often moreso. I'll note that you're unable to embed a GIF or highlight code or send an emoji reaction on your Hacker News comments, but we seem to be having this conversation in relative ease despite that. Different people value different things. Matrix is there if you want a more "modern" option.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- corobo 4y ago
  If IRC had followed every trendy chat feature it might not be 10x smaller than it was when I last used it too, in fairness Not even using comical exaggeration either, I'd say the user counts are pretty dead on 10x less now, give or take a few thou. Back then EFNet, Undernet, DALNet had like 100k users each. Barely getting over the 10k hump these days. > You might like pinging people so they get a notification on their phone, but they might not like being on the other end of your ping :) Notification settings aren't stuck in 1988 too, if you don't want to be pinged in 2022 that's on you :P
  - carapace 4y ago
    It's not humanly possible to talk to 100k or 10k people anyway, so what does it matter? It's not Twitter. If the hundred or ten people you want to talk to are there, that's enough, eh?
    - corobo 4y ago
      I'm not saying they were all in one channel lmao What does it matter? If you go on IRC now every channel is idle, no chat, just joins quits and parts, boring, dead. > If the hundred or ten people you want to talk to are there, They're not, and haven't been in 10 years. I'd love to get back into IRC but there's no IRC to go back to.
usrn 4y ago
If only I had a fraction of a Bitcoin for every time someone said "Why IRC and not Google talk? The world is moving on." The world is not moving on, IRC is very much here to stay. It works way too well for this sort of thing and people like being able to have their client set up exactly right. It's just heavy iPhone users that left and once Apple allows web push iPhone users will be back on IRC again.
- dijit 4y ago
  I think a large issue might be the fact that nobody runs their own bouncers, and the idea of paying a subscription for such a thing is not something people are comfortable with. I run ZNC+Palaver and get push notifications on my iPhone; but I also run ZNC on my own machine somewhere, which is a cost and a setup most people don't usually have to bother with. One solution for casuals is probably IRCCloud; since IRCCloud will give you the same experience as mine for free, but will disconnect you if you're inactive (unless you're paying). Irccloud also precludes all of the nice features you might get if you're running your own clients... so, YMMV.
  - TingPing 4y ago
    IRCCloud now acts as a regular bouncer for any client.
- EmilyHughes 4y ago
  I can guarantee you that the amount of people using an iPhone that are desperate to get on IRC are almost 0%
  - usrn 4y ago
    Yeah when I had an iPhone I was really annoyed I couldn't leave an IRC client in the background. I'm certain I wasn't alone.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
slightwinder 4y ago
> but why does it have to be IRC? Because IRC works. It's open, battle tested and has huge support by an endless amount of tools and documentation. There is not much reason to not use if all you wanna do is chat. > I like being able to paste code into chat and have it syntax highlighted > I like being able to ping people so that they get a notification on their phone > Occasionally, I like to send a GIF. That's the job of your client, not the communication-protocol.
- sdfhdhjdw3 4y ago
  > Because IRC works. It's open, battle tested and has huge support by an endless amount of tools and documentation. There is not much reason to not use if all you wanna do is chat. How about encryption?
  - dijit 4y ago
    TLS is accepted, since you implicitly trust the server when using chatrooms in most cases. for everything else there are plugins in your client for OMEMO (what signal is based on) and OTR (which is purely session based). Handling this as a third-party implementation for E2EE is probably the only true way to gain trust anyway. If your provider provides the infrastructure and the client then how can you really trust it?
    - sdfhdhjdw3 4y ago
      I'm not a security expert, but my humble view is that if you need plugins for really basic functionality, that's a red flag.
      - dijit 4y ago
        "E2EE" is not really basic functionality. I believe it is hard to get right, and only worthwhile on 1:1 communication, it doesn't work well at all on large chat rooms, which is what IRC is. Regardless, if you don't want E2EE to be handled by a plugin- it is possible to make a client with it baked in. There is no company that will stop you creating a third-party client unlike slack/discord which are extremely hostile to those endeavors by comparison. EDIT: If you downvote without replying I'm just going to assume you're ideologically opposed to open standards, because I'm not sure what else I can take from it.
Stampo00 4y ago
I think we need to separate IRC the client from IRC the protocol. Everything you just described is possible with a sufficiently advanced client without any changes to the protocol. In fact, some clients already do what you describe.
- eropple 4y ago
  "A client could do that" is true. It's also unhelpful. They don't all, or even most, do that. Consistency is valuable, and trying to coach people to switch IRC clients (assuming one exists that ticks the right boxes on their platform) is, to me, a pretty poor use of my limited time on this planet. I don't love Discord or Slack and there are a lot of things I miss about IRC, but the amount of sandpaper around getting people who are less than extremely forgiving of Computer Stuff to use it adroitly is one. Two chat platforms is already one too many for me, and IRC doesn't really make the cut for a third anymore because I too am becoming less forgiving of Computer Stuff as I get older, too.
  - welterde 4y ago
    Part of the problem is though that there people (like myself) that simply don't want any of those features. If everyone agreed that these features are worth having then there would be no problem, since then every client would get them eventually. People have different needs and expectations, so why shouldn't different clients for different people exist?
    - eropple 4y ago
      TBH? Because the expectation for a communications platform is that you want people to communicate with you, and imposing the need to keep a set of caps in my head for your client is grating and annoying. "I only accept text-based email" would be the closest equivalent I can think of, and I don't think I'd go out of my way to write a text-based email to you because you choose not to parse `<ul>`. I'm not saying somebody who only accepts text-based email is wrong, mind--do as thou wilt and all. I am saying that the more barriers you present to being communicated with, the less reasonable it is to expect people to communicate with you. IRC makes it too difficult to communicate in modes I've come to expect as normal, so I'm just not gonna do that these days.
carapace 4y ago
> They are in a shrinking minority of people. Another way to say that is IRC helps filter out the worst of Eternal Eternal September. (Meaning nothing against you personally! No disrespect intended.) (FWIW, it's a slowly growing minority.)
- ZeWaka 4y ago
  Never thought I'd see an Eternal September post these days.
- c7DJTLrn 4y ago
  "Growing". I doubt it. New developers are not jumping on IRC channels and mailing lists, they're going to Discord servers and Reddit, sorry to break it to you. Nobody below the age of thirty is using these old tools unless they're specifically working in spaces where they're used such as kernel dev or they want to be a hipster. I imagine the count of developers on Discord already outnumbers IRC 100:1. Say what you want about these services being privacy infringing and proprietary (trust me, I don't like them either) but let's not be deluded. Their predecessors will die.
  - Alekhine 4y ago
  - Shared404 4y ago
    > "Growing". I doubt it. New developers are not jumping on IRC channels and mailing lists, I am :) . I've found that the discussions I've had on IRC or read on mailing lists are typically higher quality, and more interesting than anywhere else.
shp0ngle 4y ago
Come on, it’s sourcehut. This is what they do. They think PRs and pull requests are a distraction and all should happen in mailing list. If you host on sourcehut, you want these things
nsv 4y ago
What is the replacement for IRC that the world is moving on to? Matrix? XMPP? Personally all the people I want to talk to still use IRC, so I'll use it to.
- c7DJTLrn 4y ago
  Element and Rocket Chat are decent.
- Macha 4y ago
  The people/projects that care about an open ecosystem but want more than IRC are moving to Matrix, and those that don't are moving to Discord. In particularly basically every gaming community that used to be on IRC seems to be a discord now.
stonogo 4y ago
The world has been "moving on" from IRC for approximately thirty years, just like it's been "moving on" from email and phone calls and so on. Somehow, all these tools remain.
- seoaeu 4y ago
  Roughly 5 billion people use phones. Roughly 4 billion use email. However only about 0.0004 billion people use IRC…
  - PostOnce 4y ago
    It may be that irc is used by 0.0001% of the general public, but approximately 90% of open source developers use it, me included.
    - Gigachad 4y ago
      It’s becoming increasingly rare for projects to use irc. These days both discord and matrix each seem more common.
_ktx2 4y ago
An IRC bouncer does what you're wanting in terms of offline notification, they're just hard to configure. The problem with IRC is largely it's structure. Huge networks don't really merge anymore, channel owners stay in their seats for very long periods of time, and the network operators largely run on a very libertarian ideology of non-interference. Discord solves that, and many people moved because of that before Discord had all the novel features it has. The people that stick around on IRC usually have gripes about the networks they're on, but the gripes are tolerable enough.
u801e 4y ago
> I like being able to paste code into chat and have it syntax highlighted. > Occasionally, I like to send a GIF. Some people don't like large blocks of text or images pushing other messages completely off screen.
- fouric 4y ago
  I can think of many situations where I'd rather have an image that explains something much more clearly than a wall of text on my screen, and other situations where it's perfectly possible to send large blocks of useless non-syntax-highlighted text over IRC. Don't try to solve social problems by removing useful technical features from tools.
  - welterde 4y ago
    IRC does support sending URLs just fine. The key point here is though, do I want those images to be displayed inline among the text or not. And there are IRC clients (such as thelounge) that will just display those images inline (which is what you would want) and some where you can just drag some image/file and will upload it to some file/image host and then just send the url in the chat. So options for people that have different usage patterns do exist.
    - fouric 4y ago
      That's my point - that that's a client side decision. u801e was either unaware of that, or advocating for the removal of images from the protocol.
    - rascul 4y ago
      > and some where you can just drag some image/file and will upload it to some file/image host and then just send the url in the chat. The Lounge can do that also. https://thelounge.chat/docs/configuration#fileupload https://thelounge.chat/docs/configuration#fileupload
    - mikewhy 4y ago
      Discord and Slack let you hide inline images, it's nice when users don't have to worry about changes to third-party image hosts

tsujp 4y ago

> I like being able to paste code into chat and have it syntax highlighted. Use a pastebin, there are plenty out there. See: https://paste.sr.ht/ https://paste.sr.ht/ or http://ix.io/ http://ix.io/ or https://paste.rs/ https://paste.rs/ or https://bpa.st/ https://bpa.st/ or https://gist.github.com/ https://gist.github.com/ or https://paste.ubuntu.com/ https://paste.ubuntu.com/ and many, many more. Regardless of there being a better tool for syntax highlighting and holding small linkable snippets of code (so that logic doesn't need to be more to download when opening your chat) it also keeps it _out_ of the chat so it's not polluted. People not being able to instantly insert 20 lines of text is a _good_ thing. So, link to the resource don't embed it. > I like being able to ping people so that they get a notification on their phone, and likewise, I like people to be able to ping me In the article you're responding to Drew directly mentions their suggestions for Push Notifications. I don't mean to sound facetious but, did you read this (article) in it's entirety? > Occasionally, I like to send a GIF See above: link to the resource, don't embed it.

proto_lambda 4y ago
> Use a pastebin That's not a solution, that's a bad and inconvenient workaround. Having to use an external service just to share a couple lines of code is horrible for usability. Funnily enough, its also exactly the thing that IRC users complain about when the matrix bridge converts multi-line messages to links.
- Arnavion 4y ago
  >Funnily enough, its also exactly the thing that IRC users complain about when the matrix bridge converts multi-line messages to links. I assume you're trying to say this is hypocritical, but it isn't. The problem with multi-line messages becoming links is that the message is the context of the question. You have to reach for a browser just to read what the other person wanted to say. Things like images and pastebins are ancillary to the message. You read the text part, decide whether you want to engage with it further, and then if you do you reach for a browser to see the image or pastebin. Compare: <h> hey guys im trying to install blub on ubuntu but it keeps complaining that my splines aren't reticulated. full error here: https://paste.rs/id123 with: <h[m]> hey guys... (full message at https://matrix.org/_matrix/media/r0/download/matrix.org/id123) That last one is an actual example from an OFTC channel that's bridged to Matrix. It truncated at just two words because the original message had a newline after "guys".
  - proto_lambda 4y ago
    Oh yeah, that's indeed not great. For messages with up to ~5 lines, the bridge actually just sends several messages, but as soon as the message has more lines than that, it only shows the first line as a preview. I could've sworn it actually sends the first couple lines, then a "(full message at ...)" message, but apparently not (anymore) - would probably be worth opening an issue for :)
    - Arnavion 4y ago
      The full message was longer than five lines. There's nothing to file a bug about. The bridge does not (and can not without some AI or heuristics which are both fallible) know where the relevant part of the message ends and the log spew begins, so a message with a one-line description and fifty lines of logs is treated the same as a message with fifty-one lines.
seanw444 4y ago
Been using Sourcehut as my main repo host for like a year now, and didn't even know https://paste.sr.ht https://paste.sr.ht existed. Very handy. Thanks.
- Tomte 4y ago
  "All sourcehut services" on the web site doesn't show all services, alas. I wonder what else is missing besides paste and chat there. Edit: but the manual does: https://man.sr.ht/ https://man.sr.ht/
Macha 4y ago
> People not being able to instantly insert 20 lines of text is a _good_ thing. Element (Matrix) and Slack will render something like this as 3-5 lines with the expansion option to see all of it. I'm sure discord will eventually do the same too. This is clearly preferable to using a different application entirely to view the snippet. It's only IRC where some naive clients expand this out into 20 something messages where this is a problem. And since it's not part of the protocol, you're at the whims of the sender's client for how it's handled, so it's not like you can install a sufficiently smart client to render it how you like in all cases. I'd also suggest your perspective of how much a problem even that 20 lines of text is is distorted by being in fast moving public chatrooms, like your typical Linux distro channel. In my small team or friends chat, it's perfectly fine The same also applies to the gif. If this one bothers you, most clients even have the options to disable inline images, so the sender gets to choose. Also it means you just get the image file, and not whatever cruft the popular image host of this 5 year period is doing to monetise. Image hosts and pastebins also seem more fragile than chat services. I've occasionally gone through old messages that link to pastie or similar and the context is gone.
- encryptluks2 4y ago
  I think your expectations can easily be alleviated with the right IRC client. Most pastebins and image hosts use some form of markup so that if your IRC client was set to preview those links then it could, or even potentially cache those resources as well.
  - Macha 4y ago
    So what is this magical sufficiently smart client that can embed images from all major image hosts, code snippets from all major pastebins and also configures a bouncer for me and also lets me see messages on my phone without missing some as the phone OS killed it's network socket as it put the app to sleep? I'm no stranger to the IRC protocol (in fact one of my first submissions to this site 12 years ago in 2010 was an introduction to the protocol written as part of building an Android client that was my side project at the time), but I have no interest in putting in the time to make an IRC client with the experience I'd like in 2022, which is clearly a much lower bar on matrix when Element, nheko, Cinny, FluffyChat and Fractal have all managed it.
JohnHaugeland 4y ago
is it not weird that you're responding to people who obviously know how to use irc and say "this is why i don't use it anymore" by trying to teach them how to do what everyone already knows how to do? did you feel that you were offering solutions or something?

ddevault 4y ago

You might like pinging people so they get a notification on their phone, but they might not like being on the other end of your ping :) IRC has been around a lot longer than most of the projects which have sprung up in the same space, and IRC views their features with skepticism rather than being the eternal trend-follower. If IRC had followed every trendy chat feature for the past 34 years then it would be a hulking monstrosity by now. There is wisdom in moderation. A communication method can be effective without facilitating every style of communication -- often moreso. I'll note that you're unable to embed a GIF or highlight code or send an emoji reaction on your Hacker News comments, but we seem to be having this conversation in relative ease despite that. Different people value different things. Matrix is there if you want a more "modern" option.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
corobo 4y ago
If IRC had followed every trendy chat feature it might not be 10x smaller than it was when I last used it too, in fairness Not even using comical exaggeration either, I'd say the user counts are pretty dead on 10x less now, give or take a few thou. Back then EFNet, Undernet, DALNet had like 100k users each. Barely getting over the 10k hump these days. > You might like pinging people so they get a notification on their phone, but they might not like being on the other end of your ping :) Notification settings aren't stuck in 1988 too, if you don't want to be pinged in 2022 that's on you :P
- carapace 4y ago
  It's not humanly possible to talk to 100k or 10k people anyway, so what does it matter? It's not Twitter. If the hundred or ten people you want to talk to are there, that's enough, eh?
  - corobo 4y ago
    I'm not saying they were all in one channel lmao What does it matter? If you go on IRC now every channel is idle, no chat, just joins quits and parts, boring, dead. > If the hundred or ten people you want to talk to are there, They're not, and haven't been in 10 years. I'd love to get back into IRC but there's no IRC to go back to.

usrn 4y ago

If only I had a fraction of a Bitcoin for every time someone said "Why IRC and not Google talk? The world is moving on." The world is not moving on, IRC is very much here to stay. It works way too well for this sort of thing and people like being able to have their client set up exactly right. It's just heavy iPhone users that left and once Apple allows web push iPhone users will be back on IRC again.

dijit 4y ago
I think a large issue might be the fact that nobody runs their own bouncers, and the idea of paying a subscription for such a thing is not something people are comfortable with. I run ZNC+Palaver and get push notifications on my iPhone; but I also run ZNC on my own machine somewhere, which is a cost and a setup most people don't usually have to bother with. One solution for casuals is probably IRCCloud; since IRCCloud will give you the same experience as mine for free, but will disconnect you if you're inactive (unless you're paying). Irccloud also precludes all of the nice features you might get if you're running your own clients... so, YMMV.
- TingPing 4y ago
  IRCCloud now acts as a regular bouncer for any client.
EmilyHughes 4y ago
I can guarantee you that the amount of people using an iPhone that are desperate to get on IRC are almost 0%
- usrn 4y ago
  Yeah when I had an iPhone I was really annoyed I couldn't leave an IRC client in the background. I'm certain I wasn't alone.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]

slightwinder 4y ago

> but why does it have to be IRC? Because IRC works. It's open, battle tested and has huge support by an endless amount of tools and documentation. There is not much reason to not use if all you wanna do is chat. > I like being able to paste code into chat and have it syntax highlighted > I like being able to ping people so that they get a notification on their phone > Occasionally, I like to send a GIF. That's the job of your client, not the communication-protocol.

sdfhdhjdw3 4y ago
> Because IRC works. It's open, battle tested and has huge support by an endless amount of tools and documentation. There is not much reason to not use if all you wanna do is chat. How about encryption?
- dijit 4y ago
  TLS is accepted, since you implicitly trust the server when using chatrooms in most cases. for everything else there are plugins in your client for OMEMO (what signal is based on) and OTR (which is purely session based). Handling this as a third-party implementation for E2EE is probably the only true way to gain trust anyway. If your provider provides the infrastructure and the client then how can you really trust it?
  - sdfhdhjdw3 4y ago
    I'm not a security expert, but my humble view is that if you need plugins for really basic functionality, that's a red flag.
    - dijit 4y ago
      "E2EE" is not really basic functionality. I believe it is hard to get right, and only worthwhile on 1:1 communication, it doesn't work well at all on large chat rooms, which is what IRC is. Regardless, if you don't want E2EE to be handled by a plugin- it is possible to make a client with it baked in. There is no company that will stop you creating a third-party client unlike slack/discord which are extremely hostile to those endeavors by comparison. EDIT: If you downvote without replying I'm just going to assume you're ideologically opposed to open standards, because I'm not sure what else I can take from it.

Stampo00 4y ago

I think we need to separate IRC the client from IRC the protocol. Everything you just described is possible with a sufficiently advanced client without any changes to the protocol. In fact, some clients already do what you describe.

eropple 4y ago
"A client could do that" is true. It's also unhelpful. They don't all, or even most, do that. Consistency is valuable, and trying to coach people to switch IRC clients (assuming one exists that ticks the right boxes on their platform) is, to me, a pretty poor use of my limited time on this planet. I don't love Discord or Slack and there are a lot of things I miss about IRC, but the amount of sandpaper around getting people who are less than extremely forgiving of Computer Stuff to use it adroitly is one. Two chat platforms is already one too many for me, and IRC doesn't really make the cut for a third anymore because I too am becoming less forgiving of Computer Stuff as I get older, too.
- welterde 4y ago
  Part of the problem is though that there people (like myself) that simply don't want any of those features. If everyone agreed that these features are worth having then there would be no problem, since then every client would get them eventually. People have different needs and expectations, so why shouldn't different clients for different people exist?
  - eropple 4y ago
    TBH? Because the expectation for a communications platform is that you want people to communicate with you, and imposing the need to keep a set of caps in my head for your client is grating and annoying. "I only accept text-based email" would be the closest equivalent I can think of, and I don't think I'd go out of my way to write a text-based email to you because you choose not to parse `<ul>`. I'm not saying somebody who only accepts text-based email is wrong, mind--do as thou wilt and all. I am saying that the more barriers you present to being communicated with, the less reasonable it is to expect people to communicate with you. IRC makes it too difficult to communicate in modes I've come to expect as normal, so I'm just not gonna do that these days.

carapace 4y ago

> They are in a shrinking minority of people. Another way to say that is IRC helps filter out the worst of Eternal Eternal September. (Meaning nothing against you personally! No disrespect intended.) (FWIW, it's a slowly growing minority.)

ZeWaka 4y ago
Never thought I'd see an Eternal September post these days.
c7DJTLrn 4y ago
"Growing". I doubt it. New developers are not jumping on IRC channels and mailing lists, they're going to Discord servers and Reddit, sorry to break it to you. Nobody below the age of thirty is using these old tools unless they're specifically working in spaces where they're used such as kernel dev or they want to be a hipster. I imagine the count of developers on Discord already outnumbers IRC 100:1. Say what you want about these services being privacy infringing and proprietary (trust me, I don't like them either) but let's not be deluded. Their predecessors will die.
- Alekhine 4y ago
- Shared404 4y ago
  > "Growing". I doubt it. New developers are not jumping on IRC channels and mailing lists, I am :) . I've found that the discussions I've had on IRC or read on mailing lists are typically higher quality, and more interesting than anywhere else.

shp0ngle 4y ago

Come on, it’s sourcehut. This is what they do. They think PRs and pull requests are a distraction and all should happen in mailing list. If you host on sourcehut, you want these things

nsv 4y ago

What is the replacement for IRC that the world is moving on to? Matrix? XMPP? Personally all the people I want to talk to still use IRC, so I'll use it to.

c7DJTLrn 4y ago
Element and Rocket Chat are decent.
Macha 4y ago
The people/projects that care about an open ecosystem but want more than IRC are moving to Matrix, and those that don't are moving to Discord. In particularly basically every gaming community that used to be on IRC seems to be a discord now.

stonogo 4y ago

The world has been "moving on" from IRC for approximately thirty years, just like it's been "moving on" from email and phone calls and so on. Somehow, all these tools remain.

seoaeu 4y ago
Roughly 5 billion people use phones. Roughly 4 billion use email. However only about 0.0004 billion people use IRC…
- PostOnce 4y ago
  It may be that irc is used by 0.0001% of the general public, but approximately 90% of open source developers use it, me included.
  - Gigachad 4y ago
    It’s becoming increasingly rare for projects to use irc. These days both discord and matrix each seem more common.

_ktx2 4y ago

An IRC bouncer does what you're wanting in terms of offline notification, they're just hard to configure. The problem with IRC is largely it's structure. Huge networks don't really merge anymore, channel owners stay in their seats for very long periods of time, and the network operators largely run on a very libertarian ideology of non-interference. Discord solves that, and many people moved because of that before Discord had all the novel features it has. The people that stick around on IRC usually have gripes about the networks they're on, but the gripes are tolerable enough.

u801e 4y ago

> I like being able to paste code into chat and have it syntax highlighted. > Occasionally, I like to send a GIF. Some people don't like large blocks of text or images pushing other messages completely off screen.

fouric 4y ago
I can think of many situations where I'd rather have an image that explains something much more clearly than a wall of text on my screen, and other situations where it's perfectly possible to send large blocks of useless non-syntax-highlighted text over IRC. Don't try to solve social problems by removing useful technical features from tools.
- welterde 4y ago
  IRC does support sending URLs just fine. The key point here is though, do I want those images to be displayed inline among the text or not. And there are IRC clients (such as thelounge) that will just display those images inline (which is what you would want) and some where you can just drag some image/file and will upload it to some file/image host and then just send the url in the chat. So options for people that have different usage patterns do exist.
  - fouric 4y ago
    That's my point - that that's a client side decision. u801e was either unaware of that, or advocating for the removal of images from the protocol.
  - rascul 4y ago
    > and some where you can just drag some image/file and will upload it to some file/image host and then just send the url in the chat. The Lounge can do that also. https://thelounge.chat/docs/configuration#fileupload https://thelounge.chat/docs/configuration#fileupload
  - mikewhy 4y ago
    Discord and Slack let you hide inline images, it's nice when users don't have to worry about changes to third-party image hosts