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I've always wondered, why was IRC not developed further? Some of the features people take for granted in chat clients today never made it to IRC.

• zaik 2y ago
  https://ircv3.net/ https://ircv3.net/
• creesch 2y ago
  It was, someone already pointed you to ircV3 which attempted to bring a lot of modern features to irc. But besides the specification process being slow you also had to content with all the different clients and networks. Most of which at that point in time already had stagnated in development.
• j45 2y ago
  The instant messengers did that. Then slack did the modern IRC client.
  • theshrike79 2y ago
    I'm so old I remember the days when Slack had built-in IRC integration :)
    • j45 2y ago
      I thought I read somewhere the early versions of slack actually ran on irc.
• cpach 2y ago
  Moxie Marlinspoke thought hard about that, here’s his conclusion: https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/ https://signal.org/blog/the-ecosystem-is-moving/
  • ezst 2y ago
    That's more Moxie's PR department rationalizing why they didn't go for the better (more resilient, more privacy respecting, more flexible, freer) decentralized approach. It's also extensively debunked: https://gultsch.de/objection.html https://gultsch.de/objection.html
    • cpach 2y ago
      Ok. So what do you think are the reasons that IRC has lost marketshare to Slack and Discord?
      • mariusor 2y ago
        I would assume it's mostly marketing. There's no entity behind IRC to push its adoption and herd the cats to a singular goal. The lack of features that Slack/Discord specifically added to differentiate themselves from IRC are also important, but it was a lot simpler to add them to their brand new designs, than to work through having to specify them onto the IRC protocol and then get servers and clients to adopt it. You can look at the IRCv3 page linked higher in the thread to see some of the efforts, but this is 10 years later and we're still not there. :D
      • qudat 2y ago
        Popular irc servers still haven’t adopted ircv3, effectively holding all of irc back from making progress.
        • cpach 2y ago
          I rest my case.
• immibis 2y ago
  If it supported things like picture messages, then it wouldn't really be IRC any more. I suppose you could create a new protocol that's most similar to IRC, but when creating new protocols, people typically want to make other improvements at the same time, such as the ability for a user to stay in a group while offline. In my opinion, most of the differences between IRC and Slack/Matrix/Discord/etc stem from trying to keep users in a group chat while they're not actually online, since this requires servers to store message history, and then you're legally required to have a way to moderate the message history, and you might as well send back-history to clients who just joined, and so on. Additionally, since each message is stored authoritatively on the server, it can be updated with things like text edits and emoji reactions. Some of the differences, like being able to send pictures, do not stem from that. I read and responded to a similar comment recently here on HN about email security. The gist of the question is "why don't we create something like email but secure?" and the gist of my reply is "if we created a whole new system, we'd add all the things we can now have that we couldn't have when email was invented, like instant notifications, and then it would be a reinvention of a newer protocol (I didn't name Matrix, Fediverse or XMPP), nothing like email.". https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42633785 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42633785
  • doublerabbit 2y ago
    IRC supports picture messaging. Encode the image to Base64, post the string and have your client decode. Or use your browser. Simple.
• Borg3 2y ago
  Because there is nothing wrong with good old IRC. It was developed to a point and left alone. Trying to improve it could actually lead to overengeeniring and spoiling the protocol. If IRC is not what you want, look for alternatives. There are plenty of those.
• diggan 2y ago
  > I've always wondered, why was IRC not developed further? Personally, part of the charm of the IRC protocol is the simplicity. You can implement a client effortlessly in most languages in just an hour or two.