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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

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/
nottorp 3y ago
> But all of the modern services like Teams, Slack and Discord, have seamlessness between client devices as their first priority. First? Slack takes ages to sync lately (sometimes you have to explicitly refresh) and has a ... random ... idea of how to move unread counts around. Discord never notifies me of direct messages from my daughter but always notifies me of announcements in a gaming discord i've explicitly muted to hell and back.
progval 3y ago
> The whole protocol you would have to build around IRC to achieve client agnosticity would arguably be more complex than IRC itself. You don't have to build a new protocol. The Ergo IRCd supports multiple clients connecting to the same account (and using the same nick) at the same time using the regular IRC protocol: https://github.com/ergochat/ergo/blob/master/docs/USERGUIDE.md#multiclient https://github.com/ergochat/ergo/blob/master/docs/USERGUIDE....
PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago
> 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. On IRC, I leave my desktop (quasselclient), go to the bathroom, get out my phone and go on typing (quassel app) (*) All functioning because I'm actually connected to Quassel. (*) actually I would never do this.

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/

nottorp 3y ago

> But all of the modern services like Teams, Slack and Discord, have seamlessness between client devices as their first priority. First? Slack takes ages to sync lately (sometimes you have to explicitly refresh) and has a ... random ... idea of how to move unread counts around. Discord never notifies me of direct messages from my daughter but always notifies me of announcements in a gaming discord i've explicitly muted to hell and back.

progval 3y ago

> The whole protocol you would have to build around IRC to achieve client agnosticity would arguably be more complex than IRC itself. You don't have to build a new protocol. The Ergo IRCd supports multiple clients connecting to the same account (and using the same nick) at the same time using the regular IRC protocol: https://github.com/ergochat/ergo/blob/master/docs/USERGUIDE.md#multiclient https://github.com/ergochat/ergo/blob/master/docs/USERGUIDE....

PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago

> 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. On IRC, I leave my desktop (quasselclient), go to the bathroom, get out my phone and go on typing (quassel app) (*) All functioning because I'm actually connected to Quassel. (*) actually I would never do this.