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Why I Live in IRC (2015)
- ionwake 3y agodid the freenode startups channel die? It was active until atleast a few years ago...
- gerikson 3y agoI'd love to know if the author still lives in IRC after the Freenode meltdown.
- arccy 3y agomost stuff just moved to libera without much change
- srgpqt 3y agoFreenode was smoothly recombobulated into Libera Chat, so the meltdown shouldn't have affected much.
- g4zj 3y agoI could've written this article at that time. I was all about Weechat and IRC in general. Unfortunately, the Freenode situation was what finally made me jump ship. I've been using Discord every since and while I'd still prefer to use IRC, I don't mind it nearly as much as I originally expected to.
- uoaei 3y agoIt's surprising to me that IRC diehards jumped to Discord and not to hosting Matrix servers.
- bifrost 3y agoIts because Matrix is just that bad.
- uoaei 3y agoWould you elaborate? What makes it bad?
- sph 3y agoThe most used client, Element, is somehow worse that the Discord electron client, believe it or not. My experience of joining Matrix channels is through sluggish and clunky UI that makes me want to tear my hair out. I would reconsider if there was a half-decent TUI client that doesn't have 250ms latency to send a bloody plaintext message on a top-shelf Linux workstation. Is it that hard to make it run as smooth as mIRC did on my old Pentium II?
- Arathorn 3y agoagreed that Element Web is clunky, although we’re working on it. Perhaps try https://github.com/ulyssa/iamb https://github.com/ulyssa/iamb or weechat-matrix for your TUI? Or if on macOS, Element X is a pleasure to use as a truly native GUI client.
- sph 3y agoCheers, I might give iamb a go.
- bifrost 3y agoBasically everything about it. The clients, the server, the org that manages it.
- mortallywounded 3y agoHe's on IRC, @aaronpk in #indieweb within Libera.
- aaronpk 3y agooh hi. Yes I moved to Libera a while back and am still there regularly.
- susam 3y ago18 years and counting! Still living in IRC. I use the old and humble Irssi as the client with ZNC running on a Debian VM on Linode as the bouncer to maintain a persistent connection. It is simple, reliable, and well established. I initially used to hang out on multiple networks like DALnet, EFnet, etc. but I quickly settled on becoming a regular at Freenode and OFTC because those are where most of the free and open source software communities were active. The biggest recent event in IRC that happened recently from my perspective (user perspective) was the controversial change in ownership of Freenode. I switched to Libera like everyone else. The migration took only about 30 minutes or so: point my ZNC to the new server, register my nick, register my channels, and done!
- nerdponx 3y agoA side benefit of ZNC is that it makes setup on a new machine easy. I don't want to have to remember how to set up CertFP for OFTC, and with ZNC I don't need to.
- catherinecodes 3y agoSame here. ZNC on Debian (apt install znc) on an Entrywan instance. The freenode debacle impacted a handful of my favorite channels. #tcl is noticably quieter and a couple others are still trying to decide whether they're an official channel or not (this affects #channel vs ##channel naming). I'd bet that the number of active users has dropped but I don't have any emperical evidence. If anyone is considering ZNC, here are a couple suggestions to change to the default config: 1. AllowWeb = false (only enable the web interface if you need it) 2. For each channel, add Buffer = 10000 so that you can have history for more than a day or two (the default is quite small) 3. Add these two lines: LoadModule = chansaver LoadModule = clearbufferonmsg to get better history tracking and avoid duplicate messages.
- doublerabbit 3y ago#tcl is now on liberachat although I believe its bridged between. Unless you meant in general. If so, apologies
- bitwize 3y agoAll the action is on Discord and Mastodon these days.
- aaronpk 3y agoDiscord is just fancy IRC
- uoaei 3y agoNo, it's much more than that. Matrix is fancy IRC.
- didntcheck 3y agoWhenever someone says this I can only presume they've never used at least one of the two. Or think that IRC invented the concept of text messaging Zoom is just fancy telegraphy
- aaronpk 3y agosorry my sarcasm didn't make it through the computer screen
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- robobro 3y ago
- gtirloni 3y agoCoincidentally I had to use IRC today, not much changed. Biggest hurdle continues to be messages when I'm away and it seems IRCCloud hasn't seen an update in a while.
- nerdponx 3y agoI've been using ZNC for several years now. It definitely feels a little janky and weird to set up, but once it's working it's virtually maintenance-free. I run it on a cheap Debian VPS at Hetzner.
- korse 3y agot2.micro AWS instance + irssi and tmux. Problem solved.
- art0rz 3y agoFor some reason I always used `screen` and never considered alternatives, it's just how I learned to use irssi.
- korse 3y agoI still live there. Rizon and Libera baby!
- robobro 3y agoOne of the weirdest irc networks I've seen is a rizon adjacent one, irc.sageru.org - its basic premise is forced anonymity implemented serverside. It's a bit slow. It's not an entirely beautiful place. But it's a fun idea, at its core.
- korse 3y agoThanks. Will be checking that out asap.
- bifrost 3y agoFor a very long time Rizon was populated entirely with useless trolls, whats the troll/signal ratio like now?
- swozey 3y agoI was an ircop on efnet for like half my childhood until they figured out I wasn't 18 and desynced my server. I just could never go back to IRC. I stopped using it probably 15 years ago or more after using it for 20ish years. Got my first job on it, learned linux and networking through it, definitely propelled my career. TOO many bots log entire channels out to public html sites. This is prevalent in everything like discord etc but the degree to it in IRC is just ridiculous god knows what any of those 1500 bots in a channel are doing. NO features. I'm just over the IRC client and protocol and whatever else. It won't preview gifs, you probably still have to do some xdcc crap to send a file. After using discord and twitch and anything remotely modern it just doesn't allow the same type of conversations, socializing, interactions, but a lot of people do love that about it. I don't include weird irc clients like AcidMAX or whatever would be hip nowadays that probably came from a russian warez group that now has your credit card numbers. No syncing without running an eggdrop or some tty somewhere running it 24/7. No multi-device support, have to join the server and log in again etc. if it ever restarts or you're somewhere without a shell running it. Everyone is just bluntly anonymous and you have no privacy outside of priv chans where you know literally everyone. And being an op the amount of absolutely depraved and creepy stalkery stuff that went on was insane. So many of the few women who identified themselves as women would be harassed and stalked all over irc and sometimes IRL. Lots of glining of creeps. This was very much an efnet problem with some of the communities it developed. Freenode etc I'm sure iddn't suffer that drama much if any.
- triyambakam 3y agoUnder 18 but used it for nearly 20 years? Were you born at a negative number?
- swozey 3y agoI was an op when I was under 18, stopped using IRC 15+ years ago, and used it in total for probably 15-20 years. I'm 39 and started at .. Idk, probably 8-9. I think I was an op from 12-16 maybe 17. A lot of ops were people who synced (peered) their stable and moderated servers on good connections with efnet. Like, OC1-3 connections. My friends and I were pretty much apprentice network engineers to a family member who ran a NOC so we had.. servers.. edit: LOL I just looked up oc1-3 speeds. That used to be so fast. OC1 - 52 Mb OC3 - 156 Mb
- dangus 3y agoNo mention was ever made of why anyone would want their life filled with so many damn notifications. Half of these seem more appropriate for email, and email is already set up to handle them with zero configuration (like GitHub). Twitter, who cares, that’s a time waster. Home surveillance stuff is also a waste of time. It is basically entirely ineffective, every petty criminal knows to wear a mask and clearance rates are below 15%. And putting your sleep logs on your website publicly…really!? Seems like this is just data collection as a hobby with no end goal.
- aaronpk 3y agowhat if data collection as a hobby is the end goal
- Ancapistani 3y ago> Home surveillance stuff is also a waste of time. It is basically entirely ineffective, every petty criminal knows to wear a mask and clearance rates are below 15%. This is very context-dependent. If I lived in a large city somewhere and was often not at home, sure - but I live in a small town and am almost always home. "Home surveillance stuff" notifies me when something unexpected is happening on my property and lets me respond to it personally. The clearance rate for reported crimes is immaterial when you're able to prevent the harm from occurring in the first place.
- aaronpk 3y agoExactly. Even in a relatively dense location, I have a new automation that runs when my cameras detect a person, both blaring a siren outside as well as notifying me in the house. Now about half a dozen times, it has stopped someone from getting farther than a few feet on the property, whereas without it I had people sneaking around looking for unlocked doors.
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- novagameco 3y agoI've tried to get into IRC but the public servers have so many dead channels. On the one channel I did find active someone called me a racial slur because I use Windows. I wish there were more people using these alternative, somewhat decentralized services that weren't just tech people. Whenever I see some cool new fediverse technology or alternative protocl (e.g gemini), 99% of the conversation is just people talking about the technology itself. I originally joined facebook because I had friends on there, not so we could talk about the tech behind facebook
- robobro 3y agoClassic irc! Idling is very much a key aspect of the irc culture.
- spacebuffer 3y agothese are channels I found to be active and had cool people: - #darkscience on the darkscience server - #linux and #indieweb on libera.chat - #talk on snoonet
- mike_hock 3y ago[flagged]
- 15457345234 3y ago> Whenever I see some cool new fediverse technology or alternative protocl (e.g gemini), 99% of the conversation is just people talking about the technology itself. I don't think FreeBSD was _ever_ discussed on efnet's #freebsd lol
- bifrost 3y agoAs one of the former opers in there, yeah, we talked about it a lot lol. If you go real deep I went to the same highschool as JKH so sometimes we'd talk about that too...
- 15457345234 3y ago
- _dain_ 3y ago[flagged]
- ranger_danger 3y agofound the teenager
- aunderscored 3y agoLibera currently has 34.5k users connected. And hi, I'd be someone under 30 that uses IRC quite often.
- sho_hn 3y agoCounter-example experience: At some point I tried to find an active community to discuss Electrical Engineering. I sampled 8-9 Discords, and they were all dead and all had redundant #general and #offtopic channels. ##electronics on Libera otoh is highly active. Discord sucks because it's way too fragmented and diluted.
- lmm 3y agoDiscord is fragmented and diluted because it's the only way to survive (other than by being small enough to be irrelevant, as IRC does). Using any social system that isn't fragmented and diluted for anything other than bland pleasantries carries too much risk of becoming today's "twitter main character".
- austin-cheney 3y agoPeople over 30 have similar thoughts about TikTok.
- joshmanders 3y ago"I don't use X, therefore X is dead" is a very common trope.
- Ancapistani 3y ago> literally nobody under 30 is on it. Maybe once we're all dead, it will. Until then, that's part of its appeal. It's not that it's mostly older people, it's that it's mostly people with a great deal of experience.
- ranger_danger 3y agoThe reason I don't like to use IRC is 100% the people. Just so brazenly rude and egotistical, and always confidently wrong.
- Ancapistani 3y agoI agree with your statement of fact, but not your conclusion :) Those kinds of people are pretty much just a different interface into a knowledge base. Once you get past the off-putting nature of their responses, I've found that IRC has a higher proportion of correct answers to complex problems.
- ranger_danger 3y agoI was using the context of "living in IRC" versus just going in to ask a question. People who sit in the same channel all day watching moderators and regulars abuse and mock people that ask questions, just makes me not want to be there. Unfortunately every large channel on libera operates this way and they get REALLY pissed off if it's ever brought up.
- sph 3y agoYou'd fit right in, I reckon.
- mxuribe 3y agoBack in the early 1990s up until about early 2000s, i would frequent IRC a bunch. It was so new and fun back then to chat with so many different people across the world; to this day, it remains impressive to me in several ways. Nowadays, i spend my time mostly equally across matrix and the fediverse. While i use fediverse clients quite typically (as they're intended), I use matrix in a few different ways (chat, yes, but also system/task notifications, server "logs", system "dashboard", etc.). But, its quite impressive to the extent that the author uses IRC; very clever and awesome indeed! I hope to stretch my use of matrix even more, but sometimes bridges make things a little annoying. Nevertheless, for me, matrix has replaced irc.
- catherinecodes 3y agoThe author describes the alerting and notification workflow really well. We use IRC at work for this purpose. Prometheus alerts flow into channels that anyone is free to join or leave depending on what they're working on at the given moment.
- dang 3y agoDiscussed at the time: Why I Live in IRC (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12267254 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12267254 - Aug 2016 (83 comments)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- rubinlinux 3y agoSurprised no one even mentioned the matrix protocol yet. Its still very rough around the edges, but for an old school IRC person talk of Discord as an alternative just hurts me. Do I want my community to be completely owned by a corporation, so that all the work we put into the network effect belongs to a company and they can impose/change rules at any moment? Have we learned nothing? Matrix is the modern IRC alternative, not discord. And in some cases, you can run a bridge between the two, so I use a matrix client as my daily IRC interface -- best of both worlds.
- iotku 3y ago>Matrix is the modern IRC alternative, not discord. But simultaneously Matrix is not a good enough Discord alternative. Too much friction, too many issues, and still difficult for non-technical users. The reason Discord won out is you can just send a link to somebody and they're already on-boarded.
- lmm 3y agoEven Discord is too hard for non-technical people. My attempt at a family server has dozens of stale accounts belonging to my parents. As much as it infuriates me, I now understand why WhatsApp is phone-only.
- mysteria 3y agoIf you want a family server you will have to set it up for your non-technical family members if you want them to use it. You have to be the IT person and create the accounts, join the rooms, and so forth. Then you get them to install the app, give them the login, and help them change the password. Once that's all out of the way they should be able to just click on the app and chat hassle free.
- lmm 3y ago> You have to be the IT person and create the accounts, join the rooms, and so forth. Then you get them to install the app, give them the login, and help them change the password. I did all that. It wasn't enough. They kept getting another family member to send them a new invite and then manage to somehow create a new account in the web UI each time. I guess that workflow worked for them so they didn't want to change it.
- BMSR 3y agoWhat I like about irc is that the x-topic "communities" are one big channel, centralized. Compare that with Discord where you join a server/guild and you are presented with 10 or more channels and you have to take a guess into what the normal/off-topic/on-topic/general channel is. But irc is also very strange, I wouldn't be surprised if I had been chatting with a swarm of bots all these years.
- sph 3y agoDiscord servers are run by those people that really like putting every thing into neat, well-defined little boxes. Their solution to too many channels is to add even more channels, and maybe some inane automation and bot system so the complexity of the real world is contained and perfectly categorised in their kingdom. Utter lunatics.
- nathias 3y agoyou can also connect other chats to weechat like facebook messenger and slack, so you have a unified chat
- cqqxo4zV46cp 3y agoI kind of miss IRC, but it was probably for a different ‘me’. I ran my own network, with lots of people on it, when I was like…13! Nobody should’ve let me do that. But it was what had me cut my teeth on FreeBSD and Linux. I wrote my own weird UnrealIRCd configuration generator with Perl. IRC bots! Again, with Perl. For all IRC’s downsides vs modern IM services, it sure was easy to start with socket programming and get a bot together quickly. “Scrolling” ASCII images! mIRC colour codes! PP4L! I remember getting help with installing Gentoo on Freenode #gentoo (or was it ##gentoo?), also as a 14 year old. I’d at times love to say that all that knowledge has exited me, but for better or worse some of it remains.
- zeamp 3y agoBack in the late 90s, my IRC server was rejected for linking on EFnet because my uplink was known to host rather shady suspects. Some IRC folks would go on to make the FBI's most wanted list for DDoSing satellites. My equipment was seized and never returned even though I was only being housed in the building, unrelated to the case itself. The data center owner and I are friends and he ran an amazing network, one of the best colocation facilities of its time in such limited space. I ended up getting back "in" with irc.home .com (@Home Cable), on their re-linking efforts. Around these times, we still had big names on IRC, universities, America Online even. I would go on to be linked to HybNet (Hey, Dianora, Hardy, everyone I'm forgetting) testing ircd-hybrid, the IRC server software that powered much of EFnet at the time. Since EFnet had no services, the server's software and its ircops were extremely important to the network. I would later mess with TCM and other auto-regulators, leading into my interest of bot making. Everyone's hailing ChatGPT when we'd write our own SmarterChild, and it could connect to AIM -AND- IRC -AND- Web. 20....25... nearing 30 years later, I'm still on EFnet. My channel is still active, and yes I have quite a few bots. I also still talk to a few friends, some who are still IRC only for privacy or other reasons. We've lost over 100,000+ users, but I still enjoy randomly typing /list thinking I'm going to crash myself with the upcoming flood of activity. Not quite, but it feels good. Also, DALnet services banned me for hacking them and I think I'm still banned. Thanks for listening to my IRC Talk.
- zeamp 3y agoBack in the late 90s, my IRC server was rejected for linking on EFnet because my uplink was known to host rather shady suspects. Some IRC folks would go on to make the FBI's most wanted list for DDoSing satellites. My equipment was seized and never returned even though I was only being housed in the building, unrelated to the case itself. The data center owner and I are friends and he ran an amazing network, one of the best colocation facilities of its time in such limited space. I ended up getting back "in" with irc.home .com (@Home Cable), on their re-linking efforts. Around these times, we still had big names on IRC, universities, America Online even. I would go on to be linked to HybNet (Hey, Dianora, Hardy, everyone I'm forgetting) testing ircd-hybrid, the IRC server software that powered much of EFnet at the time, like a crash test EFnet admin. I had a blast! Since EFnet had no services, the server's software and its ircops were extremely important to the network. I would later mess with TCM and other automated connection regulators, leading into my interest of bot making. Everyone's hailing ChatGPT when we'd write our own SmarterChild, and it could connect to AIM -AND- IRC -AND- Web. 20....25... nearing 30 years later, I'm still on EFnet. My channel is still active, and yes I have quite a few bots. I also still talk to a few friends, some who are still IRC only for privacy or other reasons. We've lost over 100,000+ users, but I still enjoy randomly typing /list thinking I'm going to crash myself with the upcoming flood of activity. Not quite, but it feels good. Also, DALnet services banned me for supposedly hacking them and I think I'm still banned from NickServ. Thanks for listening to my IRC Talk.
- doublerabbit 3y agoHybrid-ircd was the best. You had +v, +h and +o which was all you needed. Meanwhile unreal started introducing +a and +q for those power hungry folk.
- bifrost 3y agoDianora is on Mastodon.social last I checked