20 ms·

IRC is the only viable chat protocol (2022)

338 points by CHB0403085482 3y ago

schmoooo 3y ago
why not using an end2end encrypted p2p only chat lioe https://cabal.chat https://cabal.chat instead?
Y_Y 3y ago
I haven't used IRC in a long time, but I'd be open to it, especially if it gave that "old internet" feel that I haven't been able to get from the tildaverse. I dream of having my company use IRC for chat, and I used to fake it by using Slack through the awesome Emacs modes, but now that we're on Teams all hope is dead.
- spacecadet 3y ago
  I occasionally connect to IRC on an Apple SE over wifi using an original ethernet card and a raspberry pi. Fun project.
  - fzzzy 3y ago
    Which client do you use? Back in the day i first loved Homer and then ircle
    - spacecadet 3y ago
      Here :) https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1SHX3lRdVQS3U456yAJ9w2Hs_bDnqx-ex9_9lG4AokuI/edit https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1SHX3lRdVQS3U456yAJ9w... Edit, Homer was great.
madeofpalk 3y ago
> Even if you have full-on Stockholm syndrome in regard to advertisers data-mining your life to sell you garbage, who knows where else your data could be going? Considering the horrific epidemic of sexual abuse being abetted and covered up in the workplace, is it really too difficult to imagine malicious actors at Discord (or any other technology company) illegitimately accessing the data of their business' users and using it for stalking or other nefarious purposes? Maybe the author could write something based in fact, rather than their dogmatic authoritarian fan fiction? IRC isn't viable for the pretty simple and obvious reason - it lacks features users expect. It's telling that things like Signal and Telegram have built IRC-like services (large chat rooms) not on top of IRC.
- judge2020 3y ago
  The only threat to message data on Discord is third party bots like mee6 who are gateway connected to tons of public, private, and "small friend-group" servers, vacuuming up every message data to some data lake for later use. This is why Discord pushed Application Commands[0], which only receive data from Discord when the application is initialized by the user, and made Message Contents a privileged intent[1] that requires identity verification if your bot is in 100 or more servers. 0: https://discord.com/developers/docs/interactions/application-commands https://discord.com/developers/docs/interactions/application... 1: https://support-dev.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/4404772028055-Message-Content-Privileged-Intent-FAQ https://support-dev.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/4404772028...
  - Brybry 3y ago
    I don't think the idea of rogue Discord employees accessing uploaded images for nudes or searching logs for personal information is far fetched. Consider that a Ring employee was doing exactly that, with customer security cameras, and the only reason they were caught is another employee reported them (and Ring has no idea how many other employees were doing the same thing). [1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36146062 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36146062
    - madeofpalk 3y ago
      If we have rogue Discord employees accessing all server logs to steal nudes, why is IRC not suspectible to the same problem?
      - Brybry 3y ago
        Oh for sure, IRC has a similar problem (except there are no images hosted on IRC). But if the analog for a "private" Discord server is a private IRC server then in one you're trusting all the employees and in the other you're trusting yourself (or whatever admin). And there do exist IRC client plugins that allow for E2EE chat (but I've never met anyone who used them). IRC certainly has plenty of problems and Discord is very convenient but I think assuming privacy is assured on Discord is a bad bet.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
hengheng 3y ago
At its core, I agree that the bare-bones nature of IRC can be wonderful. But all of the modern services like Teams, Slack and Discord, have seamlessness between client devices as their first priority. People leave their laptop, go to the bathroom, get their phone out and go on typing. I used IRC for a brief period even after we began to have multiple devices. It was always through some kind of proxy, or basically an ssh connection through GNU screen, just so that basic functionality like asynchronous messaging worked, and so that my setup would carry over. The whole protocol you would have to build around IRC to achieve client agnosticity would arguably be more complex than IRC itself. To a point where any of the big players could introduce IRC-style channels as a fun retro feature. I'd bet more money on that feature becoming popular than on an IRC resurgence.
- s0ss 3y ago
  What you describe is basically this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BNC_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BNC_(software) Also, tangentially related to your first point; I am personally exploring more ways to disconnect. Even if it’s just briefly, like not bringing my phone to the bathroom as you describe. I realize now that I hate being always connected. Vanilla irc sounds like a dream compared to the nightmare of constant connection.
- iforgotpassword 3y ago
  > But all of the modern services like Teams, Slack and Discord, have seamlessness between client devices as their first priority. Can't speak for the others, but Teams is really hit-or-miss. Missed notifications, missed messages, out of order messages. Then it appears to be fixed for three months only to happen again. It mostly seems to happen on Android. In general, you're right, multi-device appeared to have been solved for IM - at least MSN messenger and Skype had it - right around the time when the smart phone came around, but then, because somehow those messengers couldn't successfully move to phones, we had the same problem again in the mobile world: WhatsApp and the likes was bound to one device again. They added web access later, but that was more of a hack than true multi-device support. The big problem the phone messaging apps solved was that their protocols didn't require a persistent connection. Theoretically, all the other protocols, MSN, ICQ, Skype, IRC could have been extended to support this too, but it's always faster to just build something new and be first to market. If you want to use IRC today and have that modern multi-device experience, IMO the most decent solution is Quassel[1] (and Quasseldroid for Android). It's like a bouncer, but uses a custom protocol between the bouncer (quassel-core) and the GUI (quassel-client), so that it can perfectly sync state across all devices, and work with flaky connections on mobile. It obviously requires you to run the core on some server so it's accessible from everywhere, so nothing for "normies" as TFA calls them, but to me it's what makes IRC usable in the modern world. I wouldn't want to use irssi in a screen via ssh in termux on my phone. The next best thing, if you're a Web 2.0 aficionado is probably The Lounge[2]. [1] https://quassel-irc.org/ https://quassel-irc.org/ [2] https://thelounge.chat/ https://thelounge.chat/
ginko 3y ago
> The reliability and lack of bloat that are inherent to IRC ultimately also means that there are a number of fancy modern features that Discord has that IRC lacks, a big one being the inability to view backlogs of conversations that transpired while one was not connected to an IRC server. Although IRC does not itself provide this functionality, the extremely simple nature of IRC allows for a couple of lightweight options for reliably remaining on IRC around the clock and not missing out on a word that anyone says. The article brushes over this, but IMO the lack of built-in backlog support is the main reason why IRC is essentially doomed. Logging isn't a "fancy" feature and telling people to just run an always-on logging service on top doesn't cut it. Especially when there are open, federated chat protocols that don't have this problem.
- ChainOfFools 3y ago
  Maybe my memory has decayed a little too much on this, but I thought this is was a solved problem in IRC a long time ago, with the Op running one of the numerous journaling bots available at the time that posted logs to a web page associated with the channel. I realize that bolting on a web server is going outside the IRC protocol itself, but does that matter in context?
- RomanAlexander 3y ago
  there's built in support for this https://www.unrealircd.org/docs/Channel_history https://www.unrealircd.org/docs/Channel_history
  - lucideer 3y ago
    The IRC3 chathistory extension is less than 5 years old and still an unstable "work in progress" spec. Absolutely fantastic that it was finally added but IRC is 34 years old, and this has been an essential feature of chat services for at least 20 of those years. I'd love to see it's introduction now save IRC but given the seeming resistance to adding it, one wonders how long any other improvements will take.
    - j45 3y ago
fnordpiglet 3y ago
A lot of the original ircd/ircII devs and I are on Signal these days, we had a private channel on efnet for about 25 years. Open e2e with history is pretty compelling, and decent mobile clients on top. But we still love irc.
coldblues 3y ago
One thing I miss about IRC is the lack of a typing indicator.
- HeckFeck 3y ago
  Read receipts plus typing indicators... too much information! It applies heavy pressure and behind that is the motive to monetise attention. Snapchat is the worst for this; it notifies your recipient once you start typing.
- jdjdjdhhd 3y ago
  I always disable that feature in chat software whenever I am allowed to... (prevent it from sending information about me)
- frumiousirc 3y ago
  IRCv3 has it. I've tried it. It truly brings modern levels of irritation to this age-old protocol.
gorgoiler 3y ago
We span up a Synapse instance the other day and connected to it with Element on a few different laptops. (This is the Matrix server and client btw — they really need a marketing / branding person!) It was both hellish and amazing. Hellish in that I had absolutely no idea how to use anything. Channels and rooms and stuff. All very complicated and weird. I just wanted a single, default place to hang out! It was also amazing because it all worked beautifully all the way from text chit chat up to in channel video calls. Snappy and fast and reliable. Bliss. LDAP integration out of the box (or near enough out of the box) too. Lovely. If it was just a little bit more seamless it would probably take over the world.
- iforgotpassword 3y ago
  I'd probably switch to Discord before using Matrix as my primary way of communication. It's a clusterfuck held together by duct-tape and ADHS. I try it every now and then and within a couple minutes, I manage to break something, that my Matrix-using friends just shrug off. As an example, just a few days ago I used the web client again and had a chat with a friend. Just for fun, he added a bazillion emoji reactions to one of my messages, and after that the client would always claim our conversation has unread messages, even after right-clicking and selecting "mark as read". But my favorite is how they broke the IRC bridge about 3 months ago: It randomly drops messages from IRC -> Matrix. There's an issue[1] for this with pretty much no reaction from the devs. Like, nobody cares. So on one hand, the Matrix folks always stress how it's the best chat protocol on the planet because of all the bridges that connect it to everything, but then in reality those brides are unreliable and apparently only there to tick a box, working as well as Microsoft's POSIX layer for Windows NT in the 90s. And apart from the complete lack of interest in getting this fixed, it also just boggles the mind how you can even break it in this way. IRC has a persistent connection and streams messages separated by CRLF. How do you end up parsing the protocol properly and then randomly ignore a received message? In its current form, the bridge does more harm than good, as you can't always keep in mind during a conversation that the bridge might just have dropped a message again, leading to frustrating misunderstandings every now and then. [1] https://github.com/matrix-org/libera-chat/issues/6 https://github.com/matrix-org/libera-chat/issues/6
nicoco 3y ago
IRC is great! I access through the excellent biboumi gateway, which offers bouncer-like functionality and let me choose between various clients. There are open instances available for everyone to use, although I couldn't give a list of them since I self-host. I like that it's very lightweight, making it a reasonable permacomputing approach to group chats. I wouldn't go as far as saying it's the only viable chat protocol, if you follow the link below you'll guess what I have in mind saying that. (it starts with an X and ends with two Ps) https://biboumi.louiz.org/ https://biboumi.louiz.org/
tester756 3y ago
Discord haters look, it is simple. Until Discord appeared we had Ventrilo, Mumble, TeamSpeak, Skype, etc, etc I've been using those for like 10 years almost everyday They had voice chat, some had viable text chat, etc, etc. And then Discord appeared which had: Voice Chat, Good text chat (images, code snippets, emojis, reactions, etc) Streaming Video (!!) File share Robust bot integration Lack of security problem unlike the self-hosted alternatives have. This one is important in gaming communities in e.g MMORPG games cuz there's nothing better than being DDoSd cuz you left team or because you talked to somebody on wrong TeamSpeak server 5 months ago :) Push2Talk - this is also important, I dont understand how e.g Teams dont have this shit. Imagine you're working on remote with kids in the background - having an ability to push button and talk is really useful! So you don't have constantly mute/unmute yourself! Gamers have been doing it for over 2 decades but with the parents in the background instead of kids One account between all servers with ability to customize your identity All of that in one solution. That won its market. Provide something as innovative and robust as Discord and people may consider switching. __________________ I know that IRC's simplicity may be beautiful for hacker's mind, but it doesn't solve my problems nor make my life easier, so I'm not going to use it over Discord.
- nottorp 3y ago
  Let's start with one account between all servers. And one censoring authority. Nope, not a good idea.
  - tester756 3y ago
    > Let's start with one account between all servers. Go ahead and create 1 account per 1 server, nothing prevents you. I've actually been doing it for some time - school (1 server) & private discord account (like 10 servers). >And one censoring authority. Sure, that's valid concern, I respect it. For me it's a trade off.
    - nottorp 3y ago
      > Go ahead and create 1 account per 1 server, nothing prevents you. You think? I still have to use the official client to log on to all of them so they can just ban all if their AI thinks I'm a communist pedophile terrorist.
the_gipsy 3y ago
Matrix is a very viable chat protocol: I have been using it now full-time for some months. I even bridged my whatsapp and telegram accounts so that I exclusively use the matrix clients on my phone and desktop without hiccups. I find that I can use it both for IRL friend groups á la whatsapp, and for online "rooms" á la IRC/discord/slack (but with history, which IRC is lacking).
- jacooper 3y ago
  How do you deal with the terrible element client? I use matrix, but I don't bridge my accounts because I can't trust element.
  - j45 3y ago
    What trust issues are there with elements if someone is self hosting?
    - jacooper 3y ago
      I didn't mean trust as in safety but as in reliability
      - j45 3y ago
        Oh, ok. Reliability as in uptime?
        jacooper 3y ago
        No the client is just too buggy
  - LorenDB 3y ago
    I'm not sure why you don't trust Element. It's open source, so you could just look at the code yourself to determine whether you can trust it. I personally use the nheko client since it is a native client and less bloat (in other words, no Electron stuff).
bhickey 3y ago
Why not matrix? Due to the creeping shitification of Discord my friends moved over to a self-hosted matrix server. It costs about $5/mo and does everything we need it to do.
- tiltowait 3y ago
  What’s Discord done to make itself worse?
  - bhickey 3y ago
    The username change seems like a harbinger.
doix 3y ago
My friends and I started a private IRC server when we were in university and still use it to this day (15ish years later). We also used to run a ventrilo server that quickly got replaced by mumble. I can't see us ever switching to discord. IRC was always a pretty big part of my life, it's where I got into organized quake/cs1.6/Dota matches. I'm not as involved in hardcore gaming now, but I suspect that's all been replaced by discord and automated match-making in games. I was also a great resource for learning about technical topics. Nowadays most open source communities point to discord/slack/gitter or something like that. I really wish IRC would make a comeback. All these new networks force you to use their client to connect, and I hate the modern design trends. mIRC (on windows) and irssi(on Linux) got the UX/UI pretty much perfect in my book. Everything since then just adds more whitespace and distractions from the actual important content (the chat).
- b112 3y ago
  Everything since then just adds more whitespace I always felt that UX people are self-loathing, and thus, view their best work as... nothingness! The more of nothing they add, the more space, the more emptiness, the more comfortable they are with their work! The less of them, the better they did! "Hi, I took this perfect thing, and added ... nothingness, and got paid for it!" Perhaps, a little voice in my head whispers, the nothingness matches their soul!
- nmz 3y ago
  ~~irssi~~ weechat
__david__ 3y ago
I don’t have anything against IRC, but to suggest it as an alternative to Discord shows such a fundamental lack of understanding of what Discord is good for that I’m kind of baffled. If you’re looking for self hosted alternatives then Matrix (especially with the latest video/voice chat rooms)is much closer to what Discord offers, but even that isn’t really a viable replacement for the core use case of Discord: voice chat while gaming + seamless video streaming of captured game footage with a UI so smooth that my 8 year old nephews figured it out on their own.
- fruitreunion1 3y ago
  Yeah, I think there's just a disconnect in culture. Making IRC more viable towards those who like Discord etc. would fundamentally change and ruin it for many who like IRC. And vice versa. So IRC will never resurrect and be used by the masses again.
  - Ekaros 3y ago
    I think it never was used by masses... Maybe teens and even then I never found it particularly ergonomic.
    - j45 3y ago
      Discord was definitely the school age crowd. Voice chat before cell phones with unlimited meant calling your friends
- nemetroid 3y ago
  I don't think these are the use cases that the article is against. There are plenty of text-only uses of Discord, see e.g.: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36746154 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36746154 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29712098 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29712098
HeckFeck 3y ago
Was IRC ever used privately and internally within the workplace? I'd like to know if anyone did. I only ever used it briefly with forum communities and some older OSS projects. At work, it has only ever been Slack. Some older employees recall using Skype for Business.
- fragmede 3y ago
  Absolutely. Most big tech companies had, at one point, or still have (Google's is alive and well - how do you talk to your coworkers over Google Meet to troubleshoot why Meet is down when Meet is down?) their own internal IRC server that the sysadmins setup because it was easy enough to stand one up and all the tech people were on IRC anyway, back in the day. IRC predates cloud and the virtual machine proliferation, nevermind Docker.
- pasc1878 3y ago
  Yes in Swiss Bank/UBS with logging and other extensions to make it effectively one server across regions. - This was either sold to Microsoft as MindAlign
- nottorp 3y ago
  Yes we had a private irc server for work in the 2000s.
- rascul 3y ago
  US Army did. Not sure if they still do.
- vq 3y ago
  Ericsson had an internal IRC server a long time ago.
- EdwardDiego 3y ago
  RH still has IRC, but it's rather deprecated.
- yborg 3y ago
  It's funny, still actively working in the tech space I usually don't really feel my age, but topics like this remind me that I've been around a long time. At one point I think you would have found most large *ix-using organizations running internal IRC servers or even networks. When Slack first came out, it had a first-party IRC bridge, partly for this reason. IRC is very much a first-generation distributed comm protocol, but by the time it was mature it had most of the capabilities of current systems, mostly provided by external services. As Jamie Zawinski once observed about email, team chat has a common set of functions that people will always want and any system used for that eventually implements all of them or is replaced; and if a system implements these functions better, it also replaces its predecessors. I mean, I'm old enough to have regularly used 'talk' at work, evolution is a good thing.
_xivi 3y ago
Not receiving a message unless you're online is really the deal breaker for most people
- NoNotTheDuo 3y ago
  That's a feature in many people's eyes
  - EdwardDiego 3y ago
    Define many.
- magsarion 3y ago
  Most IRC networks have a MemoServ, so that's not an issue.
- progval 3y ago
  This isn't inherent to IRC; some servers support sending history when you are back online: * https://github.com/ergochat/ergo/blob/master/docs/USERGUIDE.md#always-on https://github.com/ergochat/ergo/blob/master/docs/USERGUIDE.... * https://docs.inspircd.org/3/modules/chanhistory/ https://docs.inspircd.org/3/modules/chanhistory/ * https://www.unrealircd.org/docs/Channel_history https://www.unrealircd.org/docs/Channel_history
aykutcan 3y ago
Tell me what happened your freenode? Discord is IRC's next evolution. Next generation chat. Good voice, excellent interactivity. It has problems (bugs & weak beta phases) but after nearly 20 years of irc, i stopped my bnc (currently znc) instance last week. ~20 years of irc, countless bots, tons of good memories. it is time to say goodbye for now.
- benoliver999 3y ago
  Look how quick the transition libera.chat was. If Discord went away no one can just spin up a discord server.
- throw2022110401 3y ago
  > Tell me what happened your freenode? It shat the bed, just like Twitter and Reddit did recently. The huge difference is that with IRC we were able to painlessly hop over to libera.chat pretty much the same day while a lot of people are still struggling to leave the other two behind. I have learned my lesson, it's open services for anything important.
notpushkin 3y ago
TIL about Comic Chat. Looks like a novelty thing to me, but also I would probably use it today! I'm wondering if they do some sort of sentiment analysis on messages sent from other clients. Working at Microsoft surely must have been a lot more fun back then.
Razengan 3y ago
Why can't we "solve" instant messaging like we have solved email?
- QuackyTheDuck 3y ago
  How did we solve email?
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
rvz 3y ago
That ship has sailed. IRC lost to Discord years ago. Don't care about it being closed source. IRC also lost to the Matrix protocol as not only that is much better, it is also just as competitive with Element and they are making money, meaning that they can afford to add more features. IRC is prehistoric ancient history. It's time to evolve and leave that protocol in the dust and go with modern alternatives like Matrix.
- throw2022110401 3y ago
  > IRC lost to Discord years ago. A couple of years ago you'd have told me the exact same thing but with s/Discord/Slack/ IRC has "lost" many times before and yet it's still around while the previous "winners" are all gone or irrelevant. Even if Discord is tolerable today how long before it becomes terminally enshittified?
  - rcxdude 3y ago
    Last I checked Slack has many more users than IRC
    - snvzz 3y ago
      IRC will still be around after Slack is long gone.
      - int_19h 3y ago
        FidoNet is also still around, but...
  - rvz 3y ago
    > IRC has "lost" many times before and yet it's still around. IRC is no more relevant than the fossils that are still underneath the ground. > while the previous "winners" are all gone or irrelevant. So Matrix is gone and irrelevant? > Even if Discord is tolerable today how long before it becomes terminally enshittified? Even if that happens I can guarantee you that they won't be going back to IRC.
DogLover_ 3y ago
I am still perplexed that people accept the UX of Discord. It is just so horrible that I can not get myself to use it even if I am looking for a place to engage with communities. There are way too many channels which you cannot opt out of.
firesteelrain 3y ago
I use Discord for my CTF team going back four years. Our lead will sometimes say “to prepare for the next one, search Discord…” which kind of works. There are some software that uses Discord for tech support. Since Discord isn’t indexable by Google, all of that information is then locked up in Discord’s “knowledge base” forever. This is more against the migration of these “knowledge base” services to Discord chat than a knock against Discord itself.
scarygliders 3y ago
I've been on IRC since the 90's and was an Op for Undernet #Linux & #Japan for many years, used to run an IRC server for a small IRC network back in my London days, and also ran a server for the same little network in my Japan days... The article was excellent, however, it made no mention of Matrix. Matrix, like IRC, is decentralised. You can run your own homeserver - just like running an ircd. Connecting to a Matrix homeserver with a suitable client - I use Element - you get all the equivalent benefits of IRC (chat) but with the additional Discord-like benefits of being able to post images in-chat, text formatting. Another benefit is chat history (if configured for a room). Also, fully encrypted rooms. You can have voice and video rooms too. What I'm trying to say, I suppose, is that I'm a full convert now to Matrix. It's better than Discord in that Discord is a walled garden, whereas Matrix - like IRC - is completely decentralised, and I highly recommend using Matrix over IRC these days.
- smarx007 3y ago
  Same thought – I was surprised to see no mention of Matrix or XMPP.
  - j45 3y ago
    Big miss
  - thiht 3y ago
    XMPP is a monstrosity, just let it die… The X is why it failed, depending on the client used by participants, some features wouldn’t work as expected. I remember someone shitting me because the messages I sent were ugly in his client, maybe because of a bad font on one side or the other or something, don’t know, don’t care.
    - vilunov 3y ago
      This may sound true, until you realize that matrix is just as extensible, and it has the same problem with clients which don’t support the full set of features. This is not the problem. I’d say that XMPP is just as alive as Matrix, except it’s not so hip anymore. It definitely feels faster with more mature clients.
wsdookadr 3y ago
I'd say IRC and Matrix are the only viable protocols. The rest are just proprietary, centralized, corporate-owned. Here's a short list of those: Teams, Zoom, Discord, Whatsapp, Telegram, Skype, Ring.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
iamnotsure 3y ago
Chanel-less tag-only chat protocols are missing.
- timbit42 3y ago
  What are some examples of such protocols?
pard68 3y ago
Incase the website owner is checking HN and sees this: On mobile the links in your header are fiddly because the links clickable area overlap.
MildRant 3y ago
> The fundamental fact that Discord users refuse to see is that the platform isn't run on magic dust and fairy incantations, but actual human beings. Using Discord is no different from having a group of strangers sitting in your room with you, noting down every word you say to your friends and everything you run on your computer, and doing the devil knows what with it. Anyone making this argument doesn't understand why people use Discord. These articles about why Discord is bad crop up over time and they ALL miss the boat. If your argument is that "Discord isn't private" then you've already lost because no one who uses Discord cares about that and you've shown that you don't actually understand Discord.
- jowea 3y ago
  Well, in fairness, I believe the guy that got caught posting classified docs in a small private discord server would appreciate privacy, even if I myself and a lot of people almost exclusively use public servers and would prefer if they were even less private so internet search would work.
  - lolinder 3y ago
    His friends passed the documents along to their friends, and they eventually got the attention of the New York Times. At that point tracing the documents back to him would probably have happened regardless of whether he used IRC or anything else. Do you have any evidence that him using a centralized platform like Discord played a role in him getting caught?
    - mmercedes 3y ago
      Discord handing over his billing details certainly made it quicker at least https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattnovak/2023/04/14/fbi-used-discord-billing-records-to-identify-alleged-leaker-of-classified-military-documents-report/amp/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattnovak/2023/04/14/fbi-used-d...
      - MildRant 3y ago
Grom_PE 3y ago
No, I much prefer XMPP MUC to IRC. - Doesn't expose your IP address by default - No need to fiddle with automating responses to NickServ to log in - No need to register with that specific chat server, can simply use your XMPP account for any server - No annoying netsplits - Supports multiline text messages - Has avatar, away status, profile info support - Can show about 20 last messages when you join a chat so you have some context of the conversation - Nicknames can have spaces and Unicode - Can transparently join from multiple devices under a single nickname, no need to kill a "ghost" from time to time after a lost connection - Configurable with GUI instead of cryptic modes designated by a single character symbol that varies from server to server
naikrovek 3y ago
discord is great, ideal maybe, except for the closed nature. IRC as a protocol is extremely simple and that has value, and I feel that Discord's UI, search, built-in history, and finer-grained permissions (finer than anything IRC can do, anyway) are all plusses that IRC advocates should not discount. other great features that Discord has which are discounted by IRC afficionados: replies. inline image and short video support. reactions. very high quality video streaming and voice chat (though IRC can be forgiven here given the time period in which it arose.) these things almost all matter to modern day users. saying that no one needs them because you don't need them or want them is gatekeeping and is myopic and short-sighted.
NoboruWataya 3y ago
Discord vs IRC is just another extension of the "open, decentralised vs proprietary, centralised social media" debate. It baffles me that even people who are aware of, and opposed to, the ongoing enshittification of Twitter and Reddit would so happily choose Discord. That said, I think privacy is a weak argument against Discord (or, rather, a weak argument for IRC). I have used IRC for many years and I never assumed that anything I put on there was private. Everything you post can be seen and trivially recorded by other users as well as the server operator. To me it's more about not having your access to social media entirely at the whim of a corporation whose incentives are not aligned with yours and who, sooner or later, is going to come under significant pressure to monetise you. So I guess, in a word, control is the main advantage. This includes control over whether you can access the service, how you access it, what you can access and on what terms you can access it. IRC's simplicity is a definite plus in that regard. And then you have the "average user", who ruthlessly selects for ease of use and cost and doesn't care about any of this stuff. I think that is a short-sighted position, but ultimately people will make their choice and the average user's preference for walled gardens built by VC-backed corporations is so strong I think it unlikely to be reversed by any amount of blogs or HN comments. I think these services (or their successors) will always continue to exist and will probably always be far more popular than the open alternatives, but it is still worth maintaining and promoting those alternatives, which can provide a sustainable platform for those of us who care about such things.
- shrimp_emoji 3y ago
  I care about privacy and flexibility and the other things decentralization gets you, but I grew up with instant messengers (Yahoo, WLM, now Discord, which is the closest thing to WLM in feature completeness yet still not at parity since it's a thin client where every feature rent seeks). Not only could I barely figure out how to use IRC last time I tried, but it doesn't have things I've come to expect, like avatars, emoticons, file transfer with embedded previews, etc. D: That shit's in the Stone Age! I'm excited by projects like Element, which is Matrix protocol-powered Discord but open source, but, aside from network performance and feature parity, network effects rule social tech. You're doomed to use Discord if nobody uses Element.
INTPenis 3y ago
I dislike web chat for one reason, the overview is very limited. So Matrix, with a bitlbee plugin or a text client, would be amazing imho. I'm just so used to seeing many lines of text, and getting a good quick overview of what is going on that way. Sometimes I use /last in irssi, and very rarely I've searched through a channel's web archive. But mostly I just see whatever it is I need directl in the client. If it's a slow chat I see it the next day. It's not going anywhere.
toastal 3y ago
I like that Prosody MUCs default to just giving you the last 20 messages–enough to give you context of the current topic. Shipping the entire history like Matrix & others do is more that should be necessary for the communications best suited for chatrooms. If you needed something to be longer lived, it should have been on the forum and/or mailing list.
soldeace 3y ago
> Anyone who has ever used IRC knows that there is nothing even remotely complicated about using it, but the terminology and the steps required to use one are ostensibly terrifying enough to reliably keep the technically illiterate at bay. This remark, topped with the author's piece on "normiefication", is the kind of intellectual elitism that reliably keeps me away from IRC whenever I think of coming back to it.
- mplewis 3y ago
  This person’s view is so insular and so self-centered that they truly seem to believe that IRC is not complicated. This is an excellent illustration of how important it is to stay grounded and connected to your real-world user base.
  - Spivak 3y ago
    When the irreducible complexity of a problem is met with a simple implementation the complexity has to go somewhere else, usually the user.
- yborg 3y ago
  This is a silly statement. The technology doesn't embody any 'elitism', back in the day there were many channels/networks with non-technical users. Back when Shoutcast was a thing, servers often had an associated IRC channel where people would make requests, or just talk music, just as one example. This also makes the "keep technically illiterate users away" statement silly, I've seen middle school age kids connect to IRC channels without any apparent difficulty.
  - c-cube 3y ago
    I stopped being engaged when the author uses "normalcattle" in a unironic, disdainful tone. Then later on there's praise of RMS. I like the overall message, as a long time daily IRC user, but the contempt seeping from the whole article is a turn off.
donatj 3y ago
IRC had huge momentum like 5 years ago that just disappeared overnight. Freenode jumping the shark didn't help but I'm still surprised. I loved the days where I'd be in a couple IRC rooms and a couple slack rooms all in the same IRC client. Slack killing IRC support still bums me out.
sylware 3y ago
IRC is the perfect chat protocol for interoperabitily between Big Tech and small tech, ofc where it is reasonable. Namely, regulators should enforce the availability of an IRC bridge (with TLS where pertinent authentication is to be used). Twitch has been providing a non-TLS and public IRC bridge. Moreover, IRC chat can be extremely well extented, namely with bells and whistle features if the client supports them, and if not can be ignored and and then displays harmless garbage (you can encode A LOT in a short text string, and now with utf-8... you can encode MASSIVE load of things within a short text string). From a noscript/basic (x)html, just need a irc:// URL and were good. We can even have pre-authencitated irc connection using a transient TCP port opening with IP[46] locking (ok... you will need a pool of IP[46]s for significantly sized services). Ofc, the bad thing: most of the time the noscript/basic (x)html browser will fire up an irc client, then you get 2 windows. Or we could have an IRC client integrated into a noscript/basic (x)html browser which will open a "frame"/new tab, well... modularity, and this would still be cosmically less costly from a technical point of view than any Big Tech web engine. It is like some _LEAN_ p2p protocols (streaming, live or not) directly integrated into noscript/basic (x)html browsers with good and honest default (that's the hard part, it will be abused, and if it is too much, won't actually work). Well, a "private" tracker would do the "trick". Still, it could fire up an external p2p-enabled media player (via <video> with the p2p URL with the private tracker and video hash, or the private tracker infos could be part of a dash file). Ofc, you have to expect the worst from Big Tech: adamant lobbying against that, sabotage up to shadow-hire hacker teams, etc...
urwrong22 3y ago
No the only viable option is Messaging Layer Security (MLS)
kyrofa 3y ago
> The reliability and lack of bloat that are inherent to IRC [...] First off, I love IRC and always will. But boy, the author sure must have a stable internet connection. In my experience one blip means a lost message with no indication that it's been lost. That is not my definition of reliable.
- progval 3y ago
  IRC uses persistent TCP connections as a transport. You can't lose a message in the middle of a stream without the whole connection being closed, and your client would tell you about that.
  - kyrofa 3y ago
    > You can't lose a message in the middle of a stream without the whole connection being closed, and your client would tell you about that. I don't know what to tell you other than "that doesn't mesh up with the reality of my experience" shrug. Even if they did tell me about a connection issue (which they often didn't), those messages are still gone with no indication that I missed anything ("hey your connection blipped" != "here are the messages you missed while you were gone").
    - kaoD 3y ago
      Well, I don't know what to tell you other than "that doesn't mesh up with the reality of TCP".
    - progval 3y ago
      What client do you use? I can try looking for why it would hide it from you.
- kakwa_ 3y ago
  This was not a really issue... as long as you had access to a shell on a reliable server to screen+irssi (or tmux+weechat if you felt fancy).
  - 3y ago
deleted 3y ago
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_8j50 3y ago
The one thing I dislike about matrix is how it has to use http. IRC is an escape from the web. The matrix api is simple enough to use a couple of curl commands for basic chat though. A simple "everything is a json schema" protocol but over TCP/UDP would be cool.
backendanon 3y ago
I used to use PidGin for years. It has both IRC and XMPP. Thinking about using it again. I wonder also about the Freenode shenanigans in recent times and who was behind it. https://pidgin.im/posts/2021-06-irc-network-changes/ https://pidgin.im/posts/2021-06-irc-network-changes/
draw_down 3y ago
[dead]
jokoon 3y ago
Discord Server moderators will create too many channels, which completely fragment conversations, and many channels have zero conversation. Users cannot "bookmark" channels to only follow one or two channels per server, they have to view a server and then select a channel. Discord should limit the amount of channel and force people to pay to have more channels. Chatting "accelerates" conversations which considerably reduce their quality, which is cancelled by discord adding the "slow" mode. Online forums are slow which encourage people to make a better effort to write posts and answers. The UX is not that simple. I have to say discord "forums" are a bit better, but it adds more complexity and there already are threads. It's a lot of noise. Should I write in chat or start a forum post? Discords makes several things at once which will often confuse the user. Discord is mixing chat and forums in a single confusing thing. On top of this, discord is not federated, because communities are often redundant. For example if I just want to join a community to play a certain game, it's all spread across so many communities that those communities are just awful. Quantity over quality. You have some many battlefield or overwatch servers, it's pointless. Quakenet has one channel per game, and it worked well. The single thing that IRC needs is a good frontend interface. I just like minimal software. Discord bloated, and their carbon footprint must be quite high. Not to mention so few people use it for voice or visioconference.
johnea 3y ago
IRC Rulz! Those corps chats suck!
jimmychoozyx 3y ago
I've tried Slack and Discord. Of course, ICQ & MSN Messenger long ago. IRC is #1 in my book. I always come back to it. I like its simplicity and its community. It has been immensely valuable to me, to get guidance and answers to questions, from software engineers with tons of experience. Libera server all day!
zzo38computer 3y ago
IRC has some advantages. You can use with without specialized software (and I have done many times when not having a IRC client), or you can write your own IRC client or use one of many. There may also be web interface if you want them. Note that you can make IRC server which makes logs of channels and could provide a link to access the file in the MOTD or HELP file, if desired. It can also be done by clients and link in the TOPIC message, which is more common. IRC is good for fast communication with short messages, but for slow communication with long form messages is also sometimes more useful and for that, NNTP would be better, I think.
valianteffort 3y ago
IRC leaks your IP address, for that one reason I wouldn't use it. People can be insane and emboldened by anonymity on the internet, and one disagreement turns into some guy swatting your home and getting you killed. No thanks.
vmladenov 3y ago
I wonder why Mattermost hasn’t caught on more. It has most of what I expect from Slack/Discord but it’s open source.
leach 3y ago
I’d love to use open source solutions but my friends would never switch over to that because they are lazy and don’t care. I assume there are many such cases
verandaguy 3y ago
This kind of article occasionally pops up on HN and for lack of a better word, it's just kind of detached from reality. As a preface, I'm not telling you not to use IRC. If it works for you, if you like to use it and deal with its quirks and anachronisms, more power to you. There are loads of great communities out there on various servers. Having said that... I couldn't in good conscience recommend IRC to a hypothetical someone who's never used a chat program, under almost any circumstance. The feature set is truly beyond meagre by modern standard, with some, though not all of these shortcomings being resolved by standing up, and administering, a bouncer, and (if you're using something like irssi) a stew of Perl incantations. Which, again — I'm not bashing, necessarily, but Perl just isn't a language most people are learning these days, for a number of reasons. Following up, though: - Admining a bouncer, while not a full-time job in the long run, is something you need to keep on top of, from keeping the host up (both in terms of potentially paying bills if you're using commercial hosting and in terms of making sure resource usage is fine, nothing's crashing, and security updates). It's also nontrivial in the strict sense: I couldn't teach my parents to do this. - `tmux` or `screen` are _easier_ options, but man, it always feels dodgy to use them like this. I ran Python servers like this when I was an intern because I hadn't figured out how to create an init script and before Docker was the staple that it is now. - Multi-device support is rough. If you have a bouncer, you're better off, but without one, you're talking about either strictly logging out and back in, or having multiple `handles`, `_handles`, `__handles`, etc. - Other commenters have pointed out that Discord, Slack, etc., have occasional sync issues between devices -- but *at least they support multiple devices.* - Server federation/decentralization, while a feature for some, is more of an extra complication for most, I'd wager, especially without a reasonable central source of truth about identity. In Discord, there are server usernames as well as a global username (which is editable by the user), as well as a non-editable numeric identifier. - Search is functionally non-existent without a bouncer - Once again: this is a feature that's not prefect on other platforms, but at least it's *there.* - Bots in IRC have no concept of permissions outside of what the default handful of roles offer, because IRC doesn't really do granular permissions on its own (which sort of makes sense, that's application-level, not protocol-level. I'm not making the argument that Discord/Slack/whatever are universally better than IRC in every way. I'm trying to argue that their usability is top-tier compared to IRC, for most people. I also won't say that Discord "killed" IRC. IRC is an older-generation chat protocol/UX, and by that logic it's gonna keep getting killed with every new generation of chat client. First, it got killed by Teamspeak, then Slack, and now Discord, each using their feature sets and UXes to chip away at what's left of the IRC user base. This isn't even touching on the other features offered by these chat platforms that IRC just doesn't really touch -- mainly, reasonably reliable audio/video calls and screen sharing. And I gotta say, dealing with self-hosted live video streaming is surprisingly hard to get right for calls of more than 2-3 people, generally speaking. There's some argument to be made about data ownership, but honestly, the more time goes on the less I believe most people care about that very much for casual chats. If you're worried about the government or (much more likely,) advertisers coming after your private chats, IRC is absolutely not an inherent solution to this, and is by default probably about as bad as any centralized platform in this regard. Use whatever you want and what works for you. I genuinely don't care. But don't deal in absolutes like this; you'd have to be really full of yourself, or totally out of touch with reality and how users interact with software to make a claim like this article's title. Discord and Slack aren't perfect, and certainly, IRC power users who've been on that platform for years or decades may find it falls short in some ways, but for the average person, they're both likely better alternatives. It's also kinda weird to fanboy over this kind of thing, which is the impression I always get from these posts. "I use X because the communities/friend groups/features/tools I like or am part of are there" is an extremely valid subjective argument for preferring a platform. "I dislike Y because it has A, B, and C issues which break the user experience for me" is just as valid and more objective. "Everything that's not Z is bad because of $PERSONAL_MORAL_FRAMEWORK reasons, and if you wanna put the work into it, Z can be usable actually."

338 points by CHB0403085482 3y ago

why not using an end2end encrypted p2p only chat lioe https://cabal.chat https://cabal.chat instead?

Y_Y 3y ago

I haven't used IRC in a long time, but I'd be open to it, especially if it gave that "old internet" feel that I haven't been able to get from the tildaverse. I dream of having my company use IRC for chat, and I used to fake it by using Slack through the awesome Emacs modes, but now that we're on Teams all hope is dead.

spacecadet 3y ago
I occasionally connect to IRC on an Apple SE over wifi using an original ethernet card and a raspberry pi. Fun project.
- fzzzy 3y ago
  Which client do you use? Back in the day i first loved Homer and then ircle
  - spacecadet 3y ago
    Here :) https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1SHX3lRdVQS3U456yAJ9w2Hs_bDnqx-ex9_9lG4AokuI/edit https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1SHX3lRdVQS3U456yAJ9w... Edit, Homer was great.

madeofpalk 3y ago

> Even if you have full-on Stockholm syndrome in regard to advertisers data-mining your life to sell you garbage, who knows where else your data could be going? Considering the horrific epidemic of sexual abuse being abetted and covered up in the workplace, is it really too difficult to imagine malicious actors at Discord (or any other technology company) illegitimately accessing the data of their business' users and using it for stalking or other nefarious purposes? Maybe the author could write something based in fact, rather than their dogmatic authoritarian fan fiction? IRC isn't viable for the pretty simple and obvious reason - it lacks features users expect. It's telling that things like Signal and Telegram have built IRC-like services (large chat rooms) not on top of IRC.

judge2020 3y ago
The only threat to message data on Discord is third party bots like mee6 who are gateway connected to tons of public, private, and "small friend-group" servers, vacuuming up every message data to some data lake for later use. This is why Discord pushed Application Commands[0], which only receive data from Discord when the application is initialized by the user, and made Message Contents a privileged intent[1] that requires identity verification if your bot is in 100 or more servers. 0: https://discord.com/developers/docs/interactions/application-commands https://discord.com/developers/docs/interactions/application... 1: https://support-dev.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/4404772028055-Message-Content-Privileged-Intent-FAQ https://support-dev.discord.com/hc/en-us/articles/4404772028...
- Brybry 3y ago
  I don't think the idea of rogue Discord employees accessing uploaded images for nudes or searching logs for personal information is far fetched. Consider that a Ring employee was doing exactly that, with customer security cameras, and the only reason they were caught is another employee reported them (and Ring has no idea how many other employees were doing the same thing). [1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36146062 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36146062
  - madeofpalk 3y ago
    If we have rogue Discord employees accessing all server logs to steal nudes, why is IRC not suspectible to the same problem?
    - Brybry 3y ago
      Oh for sure, IRC has a similar problem (except there are no images hosted on IRC). But if the analog for a "private" Discord server is a private IRC server then in one you're trusting all the employees and in the other you're trusting yourself (or whatever admin). And there do exist IRC client plugins that allow for E2EE chat (but I've never met anyone who used them). IRC certainly has plenty of problems and Discord is very convenient but I think assuming privacy is assured on Discord is a bad bet.

deleted 3y ago

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hengheng 3y ago

At its core, I agree that the bare-bones nature of IRC can be wonderful. But all of the modern services like Teams, Slack and Discord, have seamlessness between client devices as their first priority. People leave their laptop, go to the bathroom, get their phone out and go on typing. I used IRC for a brief period even after we began to have multiple devices. It was always through some kind of proxy, or basically an ssh connection through GNU screen, just so that basic functionality like asynchronous messaging worked, and so that my setup would carry over. The whole protocol you would have to build around IRC to achieve client agnosticity would arguably be more complex than IRC itself. To a point where any of the big players could introduce IRC-style channels as a fun retro feature. I'd bet more money on that feature becoming popular than on an IRC resurgence.

s0ss 3y ago
What you describe is basically this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BNC_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BNC_(software) Also, tangentially related to your first point; I am personally exploring more ways to disconnect. Even if it’s just briefly, like not bringing my phone to the bathroom as you describe. I realize now that I hate being always connected. Vanilla irc sounds like a dream compared to the nightmare of constant connection.
iforgotpassword 3y ago
> But all of the modern services like Teams, Slack and Discord, have seamlessness between client devices as their first priority. Can't speak for the others, but Teams is really hit-or-miss. Missed notifications, missed messages, out of order messages. Then it appears to be fixed for three months only to happen again. It mostly seems to happen on Android. In general, you're right, multi-device appeared to have been solved for IM - at least MSN messenger and Skype had it - right around the time when the smart phone came around, but then, because somehow those messengers couldn't successfully move to phones, we had the same problem again in the mobile world: WhatsApp and the likes was bound to one device again. They added web access later, but that was more of a hack than true multi-device support. The big problem the phone messaging apps solved was that their protocols didn't require a persistent connection. Theoretically, all the other protocols, MSN, ICQ, Skype, IRC could have been extended to support this too, but it's always faster to just build something new and be first to market. If you want to use IRC today and have that modern multi-device experience, IMO the most decent solution is Quassel[1] (and Quasseldroid for Android). It's like a bouncer, but uses a custom protocol between the bouncer (quassel-core) and the GUI (quassel-client), so that it can perfectly sync state across all devices, and work with flaky connections on mobile. It obviously requires you to run the core on some server so it's accessible from everywhere, so nothing for "normies" as TFA calls them, but to me it's what makes IRC usable in the modern world. I wouldn't want to use irssi in a screen via ssh in termux on my phone. The next best thing, if you're a Web 2.0 aficionado is probably The Lounge[2]. [1] https://quassel-irc.org/ https://quassel-irc.org/ [2] https://thelounge.chat/ https://thelounge.chat/

ginko 3y ago

> The reliability and lack of bloat that are inherent to IRC ultimately also means that there are a number of fancy modern features that Discord has that IRC lacks, a big one being the inability to view backlogs of conversations that transpired while one was not connected to an IRC server. Although IRC does not itself provide this functionality, the extremely simple nature of IRC allows for a couple of lightweight options for reliably remaining on IRC around the clock and not missing out on a word that anyone says. The article brushes over this, but IMO the lack of built-in backlog support is the main reason why IRC is essentially doomed. Logging isn't a "fancy" feature and telling people to just run an always-on logging service on top doesn't cut it. Especially when there are open, federated chat protocols that don't have this problem.

ChainOfFools 3y ago
Maybe my memory has decayed a little too much on this, but I thought this is was a solved problem in IRC a long time ago, with the Op running one of the numerous journaling bots available at the time that posted logs to a web page associated with the channel. I realize that bolting on a web server is going outside the IRC protocol itself, but does that matter in context?
RomanAlexander 3y ago
there's built in support for this https://www.unrealircd.org/docs/Channel_history https://www.unrealircd.org/docs/Channel_history
- lucideer 3y ago
  The IRC3 chathistory extension is less than 5 years old and still an unstable "work in progress" spec. Absolutely fantastic that it was finally added but IRC is 34 years old, and this has been an essential feature of chat services for at least 20 of those years. I'd love to see it's introduction now save IRC but given the seeming resistance to adding it, one wonders how long any other improvements will take.
  - j45 3y ago

fnordpiglet 3y ago

A lot of the original ircd/ircII devs and I are on Signal these days, we had a private channel on efnet for about 25 years. Open e2e with history is pretty compelling, and decent mobile clients on top. But we still love irc.

coldblues 3y ago

One thing I miss about IRC is the lack of a typing indicator.

HeckFeck 3y ago
Read receipts plus typing indicators... too much information! It applies heavy pressure and behind that is the motive to monetise attention. Snapchat is the worst for this; it notifies your recipient once you start typing.
jdjdjdhhd 3y ago
I always disable that feature in chat software whenever I am allowed to... (prevent it from sending information about me)
frumiousirc 3y ago
IRCv3 has it. I've tried it. It truly brings modern levels of irritation to this age-old protocol.

gorgoiler 3y ago

We span up a Synapse instance the other day and connected to it with Element on a few different laptops. (This is the Matrix server and client btw — they really need a marketing / branding person!) It was both hellish and amazing. Hellish in that I had absolutely no idea how to use anything. Channels and rooms and stuff. All very complicated and weird. I just wanted a single, default place to hang out! It was also amazing because it all worked beautifully all the way from text chit chat up to in channel video calls. Snappy and fast and reliable. Bliss. LDAP integration out of the box (or near enough out of the box) too. Lovely. If it was just a little bit more seamless it would probably take over the world.

iforgotpassword 3y ago
I'd probably switch to Discord before using Matrix as my primary way of communication. It's a clusterfuck held together by duct-tape and ADHS. I try it every now and then and within a couple minutes, I manage to break something, that my Matrix-using friends just shrug off. As an example, just a few days ago I used the web client again and had a chat with a friend. Just for fun, he added a bazillion emoji reactions to one of my messages, and after that the client would always claim our conversation has unread messages, even after right-clicking and selecting "mark as read". But my favorite is how they broke the IRC bridge about 3 months ago: It randomly drops messages from IRC -> Matrix. There's an issue[1] for this with pretty much no reaction from the devs. Like, nobody cares. So on one hand, the Matrix folks always stress how it's the best chat protocol on the planet because of all the bridges that connect it to everything, but then in reality those brides are unreliable and apparently only there to tick a box, working as well as Microsoft's POSIX layer for Windows NT in the 90s. And apart from the complete lack of interest in getting this fixed, it also just boggles the mind how you can even break it in this way. IRC has a persistent connection and streams messages separated by CRLF. How do you end up parsing the protocol properly and then randomly ignore a received message? In its current form, the bridge does more harm than good, as you can't always keep in mind during a conversation that the bridge might just have dropped a message again, leading to frustrating misunderstandings every now and then. [1] https://github.com/matrix-org/libera-chat/issues/6 https://github.com/matrix-org/libera-chat/issues/6

nicoco 3y ago

IRC is great! I access through the excellent biboumi gateway, which offers bouncer-like functionality and let me choose between various clients. There are open instances available for everyone to use, although I couldn't give a list of them since I self-host. I like that it's very lightweight, making it a reasonable permacomputing approach to group chats. I wouldn't go as far as saying it's the only viable chat protocol, if you follow the link below you'll guess what I have in mind saying that. (it starts with an X and ends with two Ps) https://biboumi.louiz.org/ https://biboumi.louiz.org/

tester756 3y ago

Discord haters look, it is simple. Until Discord appeared we had Ventrilo, Mumble, TeamSpeak, Skype, etc, etc I've been using those for like 10 years almost everyday They had voice chat, some had viable text chat, etc, etc. And then Discord appeared which had: Voice Chat, Good text chat (images, code snippets, emojis, reactions, etc) Streaming Video (!!) File share Robust bot integration Lack of security problem unlike the self-hosted alternatives have. This one is important in gaming communities in e.g MMORPG games cuz there's nothing better than being DDoSd cuz you left team or because you talked to somebody on wrong TeamSpeak server 5 months ago :) Push2Talk - this is also important, I dont understand how e.g Teams dont have this shit. Imagine you're working on remote with kids in the background - having an ability to push button and talk is really useful! So you don't have constantly mute/unmute yourself! Gamers have been doing it for over 2 decades but with the parents in the background instead of kids One account between all servers with ability to customize your identity All of that in one solution. That won its market. Provide something as innovative and robust as Discord and people may consider switching. __________________ I know that IRC's simplicity may be beautiful for hacker's mind, but it doesn't solve my problems nor make my life easier, so I'm not going to use it over Discord.

nottorp 3y ago
Let's start with one account between all servers. And one censoring authority. Nope, not a good idea.
- tester756 3y ago
  > Let's start with one account between all servers. Go ahead and create 1 account per 1 server, nothing prevents you. I've actually been doing it for some time - school (1 server) & private discord account (like 10 servers). >And one censoring authority. Sure, that's valid concern, I respect it. For me it's a trade off.
  - nottorp 3y ago
    > Go ahead and create 1 account per 1 server, nothing prevents you. You think? I still have to use the official client to log on to all of them so they can just ban all if their AI thinks I'm a communist pedophile terrorist.

the_gipsy 3y ago

Matrix is a very viable chat protocol: I have been using it now full-time for some months. I even bridged my whatsapp and telegram accounts so that I exclusively use the matrix clients on my phone and desktop without hiccups. I find that I can use it both for IRL friend groups á la whatsapp, and for online "rooms" á la IRC/discord/slack (but with history, which IRC is lacking).

jacooper 3y ago
How do you deal with the terrible element client? I use matrix, but I don't bridge my accounts because I can't trust element.
- j45 3y ago
  What trust issues are there with elements if someone is self hosting?
  - jacooper 3y ago
    I didn't mean trust as in safety but as in reliability
    - j45 3y ago
      Oh, ok. Reliability as in uptime?
      - jacooper 3y ago
        No the client is just too buggy
- LorenDB 3y ago
  I'm not sure why you don't trust Element. It's open source, so you could just look at the code yourself to determine whether you can trust it. I personally use the nheko client since it is a native client and less bloat (in other words, no Electron stuff).

bhickey 3y ago

Why not matrix? Due to the creeping shitification of Discord my friends moved over to a self-hosted matrix server. It costs about $5/mo and does everything we need it to do.

tiltowait 3y ago
What’s Discord done to make itself worse?
- bhickey 3y ago
  The username change seems like a harbinger.

doix 3y ago

My friends and I started a private IRC server when we were in university and still use it to this day (15ish years later). We also used to run a ventrilo server that quickly got replaced by mumble. I can't see us ever switching to discord. IRC was always a pretty big part of my life, it's where I got into organized quake/cs1.6/Dota matches. I'm not as involved in hardcore gaming now, but I suspect that's all been replaced by discord and automated match-making in games. I was also a great resource for learning about technical topics. Nowadays most open source communities point to discord/slack/gitter or something like that. I really wish IRC would make a comeback. All these new networks force you to use their client to connect, and I hate the modern design trends. mIRC (on windows) and irssi(on Linux) got the UX/UI pretty much perfect in my book. Everything since then just adds more whitespace and distractions from the actual important content (the chat).

b112 3y ago
Everything since then just adds more whitespace I always felt that UX people are self-loathing, and thus, view their best work as... nothingness! The more of nothing they add, the more space, the more emptiness, the more comfortable they are with their work! The less of them, the better they did! "Hi, I took this perfect thing, and added ... nothingness, and got paid for it!" Perhaps, a little voice in my head whispers, the nothingness matches their soul!
nmz 3y ago
~~irssi~~ weechat

__david__ 3y ago

I don’t have anything against IRC, but to suggest it as an alternative to Discord shows such a fundamental lack of understanding of what Discord is good for that I’m kind of baffled. If you’re looking for self hosted alternatives then Matrix (especially with the latest video/voice chat rooms)is much closer to what Discord offers, but even that isn’t really a viable replacement for the core use case of Discord: voice chat while gaming + seamless video streaming of captured game footage with a UI so smooth that my 8 year old nephews figured it out on their own.

fruitreunion1 3y ago
Yeah, I think there's just a disconnect in culture. Making IRC more viable towards those who like Discord etc. would fundamentally change and ruin it for many who like IRC. And vice versa. So IRC will never resurrect and be used by the masses again.
- Ekaros 3y ago
  I think it never was used by masses... Maybe teens and even then I never found it particularly ergonomic.
  - j45 3y ago
    Discord was definitely the school age crowd. Voice chat before cell phones with unlimited meant calling your friends
nemetroid 3y ago
I don't think these are the use cases that the article is against. There are plenty of text-only uses of Discord, see e.g.: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36746154 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36746154 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29712098 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29712098

HeckFeck 3y ago

Was IRC ever used privately and internally within the workplace? I'd like to know if anyone did. I only ever used it briefly with forum communities and some older OSS projects. At work, it has only ever been Slack. Some older employees recall using Skype for Business.

fragmede 3y ago
Absolutely. Most big tech companies had, at one point, or still have (Google's is alive and well - how do you talk to your coworkers over Google Meet to troubleshoot why Meet is down when Meet is down?) their own internal IRC server that the sysadmins setup because it was easy enough to stand one up and all the tech people were on IRC anyway, back in the day. IRC predates cloud and the virtual machine proliferation, nevermind Docker.
pasc1878 3y ago
Yes in Swiss Bank/UBS with logging and other extensions to make it effectively one server across regions. - This was either sold to Microsoft as MindAlign
nottorp 3y ago
Yes we had a private irc server for work in the 2000s.
rascul 3y ago
US Army did. Not sure if they still do.
vq 3y ago
Ericsson had an internal IRC server a long time ago.
EdwardDiego 3y ago
RH still has IRC, but it's rather deprecated.
yborg 3y ago
It's funny, still actively working in the tech space I usually don't really feel my age, but topics like this remind me that I've been around a long time. At one point I think you would have found most large *ix-using organizations running internal IRC servers or even networks. When Slack first came out, it had a first-party IRC bridge, partly for this reason. IRC is very much a first-generation distributed comm protocol, but by the time it was mature it had most of the capabilities of current systems, mostly provided by external services. As Jamie Zawinski once observed about email, team chat has a common set of functions that people will always want and any system used for that eventually implements all of them or is replaced; and if a system implements these functions better, it also replaces its predecessors. I mean, I'm old enough to have regularly used 'talk' at work, evolution is a good thing.

_xivi 3y ago

Not receiving a message unless you're online is really the deal breaker for most people

NoNotTheDuo 3y ago
That's a feature in many people's eyes
- EdwardDiego 3y ago
  Define many.
magsarion 3y ago
Most IRC networks have a MemoServ, so that's not an issue.
progval 3y ago
This isn't inherent to IRC; some servers support sending history when you are back online: * https://github.com/ergochat/ergo/blob/master/docs/USERGUIDE.md#always-on https://github.com/ergochat/ergo/blob/master/docs/USERGUIDE.... * https://docs.inspircd.org/3/modules/chanhistory/ https://docs.inspircd.org/3/modules/chanhistory/ * https://www.unrealircd.org/docs/Channel_history https://www.unrealircd.org/docs/Channel_history

aykutcan 3y ago

Tell me what happened your freenode? Discord is IRC's next evolution. Next generation chat. Good voice, excellent interactivity. It has problems (bugs & weak beta phases) but after nearly 20 years of irc, i stopped my bnc (currently znc) instance last week. ~20 years of irc, countless bots, tons of good memories. it is time to say goodbye for now.

benoliver999 3y ago
Look how quick the transition libera.chat was. If Discord went away no one can just spin up a discord server.
throw2022110401 3y ago
> Tell me what happened your freenode? It shat the bed, just like Twitter and Reddit did recently. The huge difference is that with IRC we were able to painlessly hop over to libera.chat pretty much the same day while a lot of people are still struggling to leave the other two behind. I have learned my lesson, it's open services for anything important.

notpushkin 3y ago

TIL about Comic Chat. Looks like a novelty thing to me, but also I would probably use it today! I'm wondering if they do some sort of sentiment analysis on messages sent from other clients. Working at Microsoft surely must have been a lot more fun back then.

Razengan 3y ago

Why can't we "solve" instant messaging like we have solved email?

QuackyTheDuck 3y ago
How did we solve email?
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

rvz 3y ago

That ship has sailed. IRC lost to Discord years ago. Don't care about it being closed source. IRC also lost to the Matrix protocol as not only that is much better, it is also just as competitive with Element and they are making money, meaning that they can afford to add more features. IRC is prehistoric ancient history. It's time to evolve and leave that protocol in the dust and go with modern alternatives like Matrix.

throw2022110401 3y ago
> IRC lost to Discord years ago. A couple of years ago you'd have told me the exact same thing but with s/Discord/Slack/ IRC has "lost" many times before and yet it's still around while the previous "winners" are all gone or irrelevant. Even if Discord is tolerable today how long before it becomes terminally enshittified?
- rcxdude 3y ago
  Last I checked Slack has many more users than IRC
  - snvzz 3y ago
    IRC will still be around after Slack is long gone.
    - int_19h 3y ago
      FidoNet is also still around, but...
- rvz 3y ago
  > IRC has "lost" many times before and yet it's still around. IRC is no more relevant than the fossils that are still underneath the ground. > while the previous "winners" are all gone or irrelevant. So Matrix is gone and irrelevant? > Even if Discord is tolerable today how long before it becomes terminally enshittified? Even if that happens I can guarantee you that they won't be going back to IRC.

DogLover_ 3y ago

I am still perplexed that people accept the UX of Discord. It is just so horrible that I can not get myself to use it even if I am looking for a place to engage with communities. There are way too many channels which you cannot opt out of.

firesteelrain 3y ago

I use Discord for my CTF team going back four years. Our lead will sometimes say “to prepare for the next one, search Discord…” which kind of works. There are some software that uses Discord for tech support. Since Discord isn’t indexable by Google, all of that information is then locked up in Discord’s “knowledge base” forever. This is more against the migration of these “knowledge base” services to Discord chat than a knock against Discord itself.

scarygliders 3y ago

I've been on IRC since the 90's and was an Op for Undernet #Linux & #Japan for many years, used to run an IRC server for a small IRC network back in my London days, and also ran a server for the same little network in my Japan days... The article was excellent, however, it made no mention of Matrix. Matrix, like IRC, is decentralised. You can run your own homeserver - just like running an ircd. Connecting to a Matrix homeserver with a suitable client - I use Element - you get all the equivalent benefits of IRC (chat) but with the additional Discord-like benefits of being able to post images in-chat, text formatting. Another benefit is chat history (if configured for a room). Also, fully encrypted rooms. You can have voice and video rooms too. What I'm trying to say, I suppose, is that I'm a full convert now to Matrix. It's better than Discord in that Discord is a walled garden, whereas Matrix - like IRC - is completely decentralised, and I highly recommend using Matrix over IRC these days.

smarx007 3y ago
Same thought – I was surprised to see no mention of Matrix or XMPP.
- j45 3y ago
  Big miss
- thiht 3y ago
  XMPP is a monstrosity, just let it die… The X is why it failed, depending on the client used by participants, some features wouldn’t work as expected. I remember someone shitting me because the messages I sent were ugly in his client, maybe because of a bad font on one side or the other or something, don’t know, don’t care.
  - vilunov 3y ago
    This may sound true, until you realize that matrix is just as extensible, and it has the same problem with clients which don’t support the full set of features. This is not the problem. I’d say that XMPP is just as alive as Matrix, except it’s not so hip anymore. It definitely feels faster with more mature clients.

wsdookadr 3y ago

I'd say IRC and Matrix are the only viable protocols. The rest are just proprietary, centralized, corporate-owned. Here's a short list of those: Teams, Zoom, Discord, Whatsapp, Telegram, Skype, Ring.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

iamnotsure 3y ago

Chanel-less tag-only chat protocols are missing.

timbit42 3y ago
What are some examples of such protocols?

pard68 3y ago

Incase the website owner is checking HN and sees this: On mobile the links in your header are fiddly because the links clickable area overlap.

MildRant 3y ago

> The fundamental fact that Discord users refuse to see is that the platform isn't run on magic dust and fairy incantations, but actual human beings. Using Discord is no different from having a group of strangers sitting in your room with you, noting down every word you say to your friends and everything you run on your computer, and doing the devil knows what with it. Anyone making this argument doesn't understand why people use Discord. These articles about why Discord is bad crop up over time and they ALL miss the boat. If your argument is that "Discord isn't private" then you've already lost because no one who uses Discord cares about that and you've shown that you don't actually understand Discord.

jowea 3y ago
Well, in fairness, I believe the guy that got caught posting classified docs in a small private discord server would appreciate privacy, even if I myself and a lot of people almost exclusively use public servers and would prefer if they were even less private so internet search would work.
- lolinder 3y ago
  His friends passed the documents along to their friends, and they eventually got the attention of the New York Times. At that point tracing the documents back to him would probably have happened regardless of whether he used IRC or anything else. Do you have any evidence that him using a centralized platform like Discord played a role in him getting caught?
  - mmercedes 3y ago
    Discord handing over his billing details certainly made it quicker at least https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattnovak/2023/04/14/fbi-used-discord-billing-records-to-identify-alleged-leaker-of-classified-military-documents-report/amp/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattnovak/2023/04/14/fbi-used-d...
    - MildRant 3y ago

Grom_PE 3y ago

No, I much prefer XMPP MUC to IRC. - Doesn't expose your IP address by default - No need to fiddle with automating responses to NickServ to log in - No need to register with that specific chat server, can simply use your XMPP account for any server - No annoying netsplits - Supports multiline text messages - Has avatar, away status, profile info support - Can show about 20 last messages when you join a chat so you have some context of the conversation - Nicknames can have spaces and Unicode - Can transparently join from multiple devices under a single nickname, no need to kill a "ghost" from time to time after a lost connection - Configurable with GUI instead of cryptic modes designated by a single character symbol that varies from server to server

naikrovek 3y ago

discord is great, ideal maybe, except for the closed nature. IRC as a protocol is extremely simple and that has value, and I feel that Discord's UI, search, built-in history, and finer-grained permissions (finer than anything IRC can do, anyway) are all plusses that IRC advocates should not discount. other great features that Discord has which are discounted by IRC afficionados: replies. inline image and short video support. reactions. very high quality video streaming and voice chat (though IRC can be forgiven here given the time period in which it arose.) these things almost all matter to modern day users. saying that no one needs them because you don't need them or want them is gatekeeping and is myopic and short-sighted.

NoboruWataya 3y ago

Discord vs IRC is just another extension of the "open, decentralised vs proprietary, centralised social media" debate. It baffles me that even people who are aware of, and opposed to, the ongoing enshittification of Twitter and Reddit would so happily choose Discord. That said, I think privacy is a weak argument against Discord (or, rather, a weak argument for IRC). I have used IRC for many years and I never assumed that anything I put on there was private. Everything you post can be seen and trivially recorded by other users as well as the server operator. To me it's more about not having your access to social media entirely at the whim of a corporation whose incentives are not aligned with yours and who, sooner or later, is going to come under significant pressure to monetise you. So I guess, in a word, control is the main advantage. This includes control over whether you can access the service, how you access it, what you can access and on what terms you can access it. IRC's simplicity is a definite plus in that regard. And then you have the "average user", who ruthlessly selects for ease of use and cost and doesn't care about any of this stuff. I think that is a short-sighted position, but ultimately people will make their choice and the average user's preference for walled gardens built by VC-backed corporations is so strong I think it unlikely to be reversed by any amount of blogs or HN comments. I think these services (or their successors) will always continue to exist and will probably always be far more popular than the open alternatives, but it is still worth maintaining and promoting those alternatives, which can provide a sustainable platform for those of us who care about such things.

shrimp_emoji 3y ago
I care about privacy and flexibility and the other things decentralization gets you, but I grew up with instant messengers (Yahoo, WLM, now Discord, which is the closest thing to WLM in feature completeness yet still not at parity since it's a thin client where every feature rent seeks). Not only could I barely figure out how to use IRC last time I tried, but it doesn't have things I've come to expect, like avatars, emoticons, file transfer with embedded previews, etc. D: That shit's in the Stone Age! I'm excited by projects like Element, which is Matrix protocol-powered Discord but open source, but, aside from network performance and feature parity, network effects rule social tech. You're doomed to use Discord if nobody uses Element.

INTPenis 3y ago

I dislike web chat for one reason, the overview is very limited. So Matrix, with a bitlbee plugin or a text client, would be amazing imho. I'm just so used to seeing many lines of text, and getting a good quick overview of what is going on that way. Sometimes I use /last in irssi, and very rarely I've searched through a channel's web archive. But mostly I just see whatever it is I need directl in the client. If it's a slow chat I see it the next day. It's not going anywhere.

toastal 3y ago

I like that Prosody MUCs default to just giving you the last 20 messages–enough to give you context of the current topic. Shipping the entire history like Matrix & others do is more that should be necessary for the communications best suited for chatrooms. If you needed something to be longer lived, it should have been on the forum and/or mailing list.

soldeace 3y ago

> Anyone who has ever used IRC knows that there is nothing even remotely complicated about using it, but the terminology and the steps required to use one are ostensibly terrifying enough to reliably keep the technically illiterate at bay. This remark, topped with the author's piece on "normiefication", is the kind of intellectual elitism that reliably keeps me away from IRC whenever I think of coming back to it.

mplewis 3y ago
This person’s view is so insular and so self-centered that they truly seem to believe that IRC is not complicated. This is an excellent illustration of how important it is to stay grounded and connected to your real-world user base.
- Spivak 3y ago
  When the irreducible complexity of a problem is met with a simple implementation the complexity has to go somewhere else, usually the user.
yborg 3y ago
This is a silly statement. The technology doesn't embody any 'elitism', back in the day there were many channels/networks with non-technical users. Back when Shoutcast was a thing, servers often had an associated IRC channel where people would make requests, or just talk music, just as one example. This also makes the "keep technically illiterate users away" statement silly, I've seen middle school age kids connect to IRC channels without any apparent difficulty.
- c-cube 3y ago
  I stopped being engaged when the author uses "normalcattle" in a unironic, disdainful tone. Then later on there's praise of RMS. I like the overall message, as a long time daily IRC user, but the contempt seeping from the whole article is a turn off.

donatj 3y ago

IRC had huge momentum like 5 years ago that just disappeared overnight. Freenode jumping the shark didn't help but I'm still surprised. I loved the days where I'd be in a couple IRC rooms and a couple slack rooms all in the same IRC client. Slack killing IRC support still bums me out.

sylware 3y ago

IRC is the perfect chat protocol for interoperabitily between Big Tech and small tech, ofc where it is reasonable. Namely, regulators should enforce the availability of an IRC bridge (with TLS where pertinent authentication is to be used). Twitch has been providing a non-TLS and public IRC bridge. Moreover, IRC chat can be extremely well extented, namely with bells and whistle features if the client supports them, and if not can be ignored and and then displays harmless garbage (you can encode A LOT in a short text string, and now with utf-8... you can encode MASSIVE load of things within a short text string). From a noscript/basic (x)html, just need a irc:// URL and were good. We can even have pre-authencitated irc connection using a transient TCP port opening with IP[46] locking (ok... you will need a pool of IP[46]s for significantly sized services). Ofc, the bad thing: most of the time the noscript/basic (x)html browser will fire up an irc client, then you get 2 windows. Or we could have an IRC client integrated into a noscript/basic (x)html browser which will open a "frame"/new tab, well... modularity, and this would still be cosmically less costly from a technical point of view than any Big Tech web engine. It is like some _LEAN_ p2p protocols (streaming, live or not) directly integrated into noscript/basic (x)html browsers with good and honest default (that's the hard part, it will be abused, and if it is too much, won't actually work). Well, a "private" tracker would do the "trick". Still, it could fire up an external p2p-enabled media player (via <video> with the p2p URL with the private tracker and video hash, or the private tracker infos could be part of a dash file). Ofc, you have to expect the worst from Big Tech: adamant lobbying against that, sabotage up to shadow-hire hacker teams, etc...

urwrong22 3y ago

No the only viable option is Messaging Layer Security (MLS)

kyrofa 3y ago

> The reliability and lack of bloat that are inherent to IRC [...] First off, I love IRC and always will. But boy, the author sure must have a stable internet connection. In my experience one blip means a lost message with no indication that it's been lost. That is not my definition of reliable.

progval 3y ago
IRC uses persistent TCP connections as a transport. You can't lose a message in the middle of a stream without the whole connection being closed, and your client would tell you about that.
- kyrofa 3y ago
  > You can't lose a message in the middle of a stream without the whole connection being closed, and your client would tell you about that. I don't know what to tell you other than "that doesn't mesh up with the reality of my experience" shrug. Even if they did tell me about a connection issue (which they often didn't), those messages are still gone with no indication that I missed anything ("hey your connection blipped" != "here are the messages you missed while you were gone").
  - kaoD 3y ago
    Well, I don't know what to tell you other than "that doesn't mesh up with the reality of TCP".
  - progval 3y ago
    What client do you use? I can try looking for why it would hide it from you.
kakwa_ 3y ago
This was not a really issue... as long as you had access to a shell on a reliable server to screen+irssi (or tmux+weechat if you felt fancy).
- 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

_8j50 3y ago

The one thing I dislike about matrix is how it has to use http. IRC is an escape from the web. The matrix api is simple enough to use a couple of curl commands for basic chat though. A simple "everything is a json schema" protocol but over TCP/UDP would be cool.

backendanon 3y ago

I used to use PidGin for years. It has both IRC and XMPP. Thinking about using it again. I wonder also about the Freenode shenanigans in recent times and who was behind it. https://pidgin.im/posts/2021-06-irc-network-changes/ https://pidgin.im/posts/2021-06-irc-network-changes/

draw_down 3y ago

[dead]

jokoon 3y ago

Discord Server moderators will create too many channels, which completely fragment conversations, and many channels have zero conversation. Users cannot "bookmark" channels to only follow one or two channels per server, they have to view a server and then select a channel. Discord should limit the amount of channel and force people to pay to have more channels. Chatting "accelerates" conversations which considerably reduce their quality, which is cancelled by discord adding the "slow" mode. Online forums are slow which encourage people to make a better effort to write posts and answers. The UX is not that simple. I have to say discord "forums" are a bit better, but it adds more complexity and there already are threads. It's a lot of noise. Should I write in chat or start a forum post? Discords makes several things at once which will often confuse the user. Discord is mixing chat and forums in a single confusing thing. On top of this, discord is not federated, because communities are often redundant. For example if I just want to join a community to play a certain game, it's all spread across so many communities that those communities are just awful. Quantity over quality. You have some many battlefield or overwatch servers, it's pointless. Quakenet has one channel per game, and it worked well. The single thing that IRC needs is a good frontend interface. I just like minimal software. Discord bloated, and their carbon footprint must be quite high. Not to mention so few people use it for voice or visioconference.

johnea 3y ago

IRC Rulz! Those corps chats suck!

jimmychoozyx 3y ago

I've tried Slack and Discord. Of course, ICQ & MSN Messenger long ago. IRC is #1 in my book. I always come back to it. I like its simplicity and its community. It has been immensely valuable to me, to get guidance and answers to questions, from software engineers with tons of experience. Libera server all day!

zzo38computer 3y ago

IRC has some advantages. You can use with without specialized software (and I have done many times when not having a IRC client), or you can write your own IRC client or use one of many. There may also be web interface if you want them. Note that you can make IRC server which makes logs of channels and could provide a link to access the file in the MOTD or HELP file, if desired. It can also be done by clients and link in the TOPIC message, which is more common. IRC is good for fast communication with short messages, but for slow communication with long form messages is also sometimes more useful and for that, NNTP would be better, I think.

valianteffort 3y ago

IRC leaks your IP address, for that one reason I wouldn't use it. People can be insane and emboldened by anonymity on the internet, and one disagreement turns into some guy swatting your home and getting you killed. No thanks.

vmladenov 3y ago

I wonder why Mattermost hasn’t caught on more. It has most of what I expect from Slack/Discord but it’s open source.

leach 3y ago

I’d love to use open source solutions but my friends would never switch over to that because they are lazy and don’t care. I assume there are many such cases

verandaguy 3y ago

This kind of article occasionally pops up on HN and for lack of a better word, it's just kind of detached from reality. As a preface, I'm not telling you not to use IRC. If it works for you, if you like to use it and deal with its quirks and anachronisms, more power to you. There are loads of great communities out there on various servers. Having said that... I couldn't in good conscience recommend IRC to a hypothetical someone who's never used a chat program, under almost any circumstance. The feature set is truly beyond meagre by modern standard, with some, though not all of these shortcomings being resolved by standing up, and administering, a bouncer, and (if you're using something like irssi) a stew of Perl incantations. Which, again — I'm not bashing, necessarily, but Perl just isn't a language most people are learning these days, for a number of reasons. Following up, though: - Admining a bouncer, while not a full-time job in the long run, is something you need to keep on top of, from keeping the host up (both in terms of potentially paying bills if you're using commercial hosting and in terms of making sure resource usage is fine, nothing's crashing, and security updates). It's also nontrivial in the strict sense: I couldn't teach my parents to do this. - `tmux` or `screen` are _easier_ options, but man, it always feels dodgy to use them like this. I ran Python servers like this when I was an intern because I hadn't figured out how to create an init script and before Docker was the staple that it is now. - Multi-device support is rough. If you have a bouncer, you're better off, but without one, you're talking about either strictly logging out and back in, or having multiple `handles`, `_handles`, `__handles`, etc. - Other commenters have pointed out that Discord, Slack, etc., have occasional sync issues between devices -- but *at least they support multiple devices.* - Server federation/decentralization, while a feature for some, is more of an extra complication for most, I'd wager, especially without a reasonable central source of truth about identity. In Discord, there are server usernames as well as a global username (which is editable by the user), as well as a non-editable numeric identifier. - Search is functionally non-existent without a bouncer - Once again: this is a feature that's not prefect on other platforms, but at least it's *there.* - Bots in IRC have no concept of permissions outside of what the default handful of roles offer, because IRC doesn't really do granular permissions on its own (which sort of makes sense, that's application-level, not protocol-level. I'm not making the argument that Discord/Slack/whatever are universally better than IRC in every way. I'm trying to argue that their usability is top-tier compared to IRC, for most people. I also won't say that Discord "killed" IRC. IRC is an older-generation chat protocol/UX, and by that logic it's gonna keep getting killed with every new generation of chat client. First, it got killed by Teamspeak, then Slack, and now Discord, each using their feature sets and UXes to chip away at what's left of the IRC user base. This isn't even touching on the other features offered by these chat platforms that IRC just doesn't really touch -- mainly, reasonably reliable audio/video calls and screen sharing. And I gotta say, dealing with self-hosted live video streaming is surprisingly hard to get right for calls of more than 2-3 people, generally speaking. There's some argument to be made about data ownership, but honestly, the more time goes on the less I believe most people care about that very much for casual chats. If you're worried about the government or (much more likely,) advertisers coming after your private chats, IRC is absolutely not an inherent solution to this, and is by default probably about as bad as any centralized platform in this regard. Use whatever you want and what works for you. I genuinely don't care. But don't deal in absolutes like this; you'd have to be really full of yourself, or totally out of touch with reality and how users interact with software to make a claim like this article's title. Discord and Slack aren't perfect, and certainly, IRC power users who've been on that platform for years or decades may find it falls short in some ways, but for the average person, they're both likely better alternatives. It's also kinda weird to fanboy over this kind of thing, which is the impression I always get from these posts. "I use X because the communities/friend groups/features/tools I like or am part of are there" is an extremely valid subjective argument for preferring a platform. "I dislike Y because it has A, B, and C issues which break the user experience for me" is just as valid and more objective. "Everything that's not Z is bad because of $PERSONAL_MORAL_FRAMEWORK reasons, and if you wanna put the work into it, Z can be usable actually."