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What a shame. IRC is one of the few protocols left of the early Internet that hasn't been aggressively commercialized and colonized by corporate interests, and
by ryandv 3y ago
What a shame. IRC is one of the few protocols left of the early Internet that hasn't been aggressively commercialized and colonized by corporate interests, and this is just another nail in the coffin.
Often times I wonder why basically _everything_ must be on the Web, and if all that historical baggage and complexity is really necessary, or even worth it at all.
- agentultra 3y agoEven many social services provided by governments in the west are not available to you unless you have access to the web. Sounds like we're headed in the right direction... if you're in the business of selling shovels.
- kridsdale1 3y agoIRC was commercialized very successfully. It’s called Slack and Discord.
- cobertos 3y agoTwitch chat also uses IRC
- mondobe 3y agoSo does the online multiplayer for Worms: Armageddon, ChanServ and all.
- puzzlingcaptcha 3y agoIIRC the original Battlenet (Starcraft etc) also used it.
- opello 3y agoYes! We had Diablo 2 Battle.net bots that were IRC clients. :) Fond memories.
- cmsj 3y agorandom fun fact, the creator of Worms used to hang out on a #worms channel on IRCnet. It was a lot of fun for many years, but eventually Andy left and people slowly drifted away as the Amiga scene shrank, and now all that's left is me and a few people who weren't even there in the original era, in a #worms channel on ARCNet (I forget why we moved from IRCnet). Sadly, I have no logs from the old days, so all I have is memories of lots of CTCP SOUND shenanigans.
- PokemonNoGo 3y agoCan you connect to it with a regular client?
- ericbarrett 3y agoYou could back in the early days (I did it), not sure today.
- themoonisachees 3y agoYou still can, it's very useful for bots and game integrations because you just need an IRC lib in your language of choice. However, the servers aren't IRC anymore, they just have a compat shim that speaks IRC for those purposes.
- fivre 3y agoyes, i use irssi to hold persistent sessions for all the twitch chats im in. doesn't require anything special beyond an oauth token sent as the server password
- s3krit 3y agoneither of those things use IRC. unless you're just referring to channel-based instant messaging.
- fivre 3y agothe original "protocol not commercialized" sentiment in the OP is a bit odd. nobody commercialized HTTP per se (okay, you could make an argument for SaaS CDN proxies, but i don't think that was the spirit of the original argument), they commercialized things you could deliver using it. the channel-based real time chat model is what mattered, not the intricate details of how the underlying bits are delivered functionally, Discord and Slack have commercialized that model, with clear and obvious effects for people that were using IRC. every community i was part of via IRC has migrated to those services, and i haven't encountered a new community on IRC in forever, but have encountered plenty of new Discord communities
- ryandv 3y agoThe particular point about protocols is that IRC is dead-simple to implement. It's all ASCII/UTF-8, CRLF-delimited messages of space-separated tokens. You can get a working implementation with the stdlib of most languages in about 200 lines. The protocol hasn't really changed much over the years. Contrast with HTTP and other related web technologies, whose specifications are so complex that only the largest tech firms can even dream of building their own implementations, let alone achieving full standards compliance. Moreover, those standards are also often driven by those same corporate interests who own significant usage share in the browser space. To the extent that corporate interests will advocate for standards in their own self-interest (recent example: Google WEI), I would say that the protocol has been commercialized.
- ascorbic 3y agoEven if Slack doesn't IRC it is absolutely based on it, down to slash commands and channel name syntax.
- fernandotakai 3y ago
- JeffSnazz 3y agoI was able to have literally months of logs from a dozen servers streamed to a single app running with 1/256th the memory I have in the laptop I'm writing on, and it was both more responsive and had more features. And you didn't need to deal with anyone's custom emoticons or gif spam. That is a serious loss from my perspective. Hell, just today I was trying to figure out how to use native emoji in Discord. Turns out, you can't, and they just force you to deal with those god-awful cartoony ones. Ugh. One day someone will come back around and reimplement basic text chat as a "minimal", "sleek", or "uncluttered" experience and we'll come full-circle. Maybe it'll even use XMPP this time....
- Vorh 3y agoYou actually can, you have to preface your emoji with a backslash.
- JeffSnazz 3y agoOh wow, thank you!
- heyoni 3y agoWe need to take a serious step back as a society to declutter our digital lives. It’s why I want beeper to succeed so badly. It’s become atrociously difficult to just transmit text, it never needed to become this bloated of an experience.
- pwg 3y ago> Often times I wonder why basically _everything_ must be on the Web Because for the great majority of users, i.e. those who thought that "the internet" lived inside the blue "e" icon for IE on Win XP, or those who "break their cup holders" [1] they have great difficulty handling the fact that they need to launch different apps on their computer for different purposes and so everything has coalesced around "web based" as the lowest common denominator in an attempt to accommodate everyone. [1]https://www.ebaumsworld.com/jokes/computer-cup-holder-joke/81169782/ https://www.ebaumsworld.com/jokes/computer-cup-holder-joke/8...
- krapp 3y agoI'm pretty sure the great majority of users nowadays have only ever interacted with the internet through apps on a tablet or phone. And even the dinosaurs who "logged on" when desktops and icons were a thing knew how to launch different apps on their computer for different purposes because that's how Windows worked, and people were using home computers before the web and web browsers even came along. The decision to appify the web was an economic one made not on behalf of the end user, but corporations. It's cheaper to write a website or a webapp than a native application, to distribute bits than burn a CD or cartridge. It's cheaper to publish in bits than ink and paper. It's cheaper to handle electronic forms than physical, mailed in forms. It's cheaper to send an email than call someone on the telephone.
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y agoDo you have any data to support your assertion that a "great majority"(whatever that means) of users in the present "have great difficulty handling the fact that they need to launch different apps on their computer for different purposes"? Because it seems wildly hyperbolic. We're not in the year 1995 anymore.
- throwitaway1123 3y ago> Because it seems wildly hyperbolic. We're not in the year 1995 anymore. That's exactly what I was thinking. We're not in the 90s when people thought AOL and the internet were synonyms.
- arccy 3y agonot for the want of trying, (see freenode)
- pixl97 3y ago>I wonder why basically _everything_ must be on the Web NAT. You can thank NAT for making the internet far worse.
- ryandv 3y agoThat's right. The death of P2P is in many ways thanks to NAT. How reliable is hole punching these days? Where is the activity in the peer to peer space today?
- mikrotikker 3y agoI miss direct connect terribly...
- Vicinity9635 3y ago[dead]