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>Why can't we have a federated standard for chat, controlled by no one? It seems that we have come close at various times but it has never happened. Will it eve

by Morgawr 12y ago

>Why can't we have a federated standard for chat, controlled by no one? It seems that we have come close at various times but it has never happened. Will it ever happen? Or is it already too late? This is why I simply love IRC.

antihero 12y ago
But IRC has failed, colossally, because it is old-school technology for old-school people. The vast majority of users don't want to think about servers, clients, etc. They want to at most get the app, and start talking to their mates. I mean there may be some way to do this with IRC where you don't have to piss around with ident and nicks and nets and netsplits and all this other ridiculous stuff, but the proof is in the pudding. IRC is great, for geeks.
- Morgawr 12y ago
  IRC is old-school technology just as much as email, the only difference is that email itself has been adopted and provided to non-tech users for a very long time and has arguably been more useful for non-tech users since the days before web2.0 and social networks, whereas instant messaging has become more rampart in the newer generations where we already have newer technologies. IRC is a very transparent protocol, there are A LOT of chat applications that you see and use every day that are actually implemented using an underlying IRC protocol or variation of it and provide an IRC interface (an example would be Twitch chat). Furthermore, I've seen IRC being used in a lot of companies internally by most engineers and not. I would definitely say that IRC has NOT failed, let alone colossally. EDIT: To reply to everybody and make it easier, I fully understand that IRC isn't universally used (that is the point of the original post) and that is in a steep decline, I'm just saying that claiming it 'failed' (both as front and back end technology) is simply not true. It's old and not as used anymore, that's it. It's like saying the Nokia 3310 phone has failed colossally because not many people use it anymore.
  - blowski 12y ago
    Everyone has an email address. I know only three or four people who have even used IRC since 2000, typically for developers on open source product chat rooms like Drupal. Whatever the pros and cons of the technology, or the whys and wherefores of the reason for this lack of widespread use, it clearly has not been adopted by the mainstream. If the goal of a protocol is to be used widely, then clearly IRC has failed.
  - stingraycharles 12y ago
    I think one of the main disadvantages of IRC is that you cannot have offline messaging; this is basically unacceptable nowadays.
    - Mithaldu 12y ago
      Incorrect. It is easy to get that via self-hosted services like znc.in or third-party services like: https://www.irccloud.com/ https://www.irccloud.com/
      - corobo 12y ago
        For the sake of argument I'm pretty sure stingraycharles meant built in, not another extra thing added on before you can use it
  - antihero 12y ago
    Ok, so there's a difference between failing as an underlying technology, and failing as an actual thing people use. Herein lies the difference between e-mail and IRC - e-mail is fundamentally the same as an underlying technology (we still use IMAP!), but as an end-user product has changed a huge amount over the last twenty years. Things like webmail have progressed a huge amount, and systems like Outlook/Exchange have been built that allow it to be managed in a business centric manner. With modern e-mail, you sign up for an e-mail, and that's it. You can now go to a website and e-mail people. With IRC as a product, (aside from the ugly webchats that still expose huge streams of text and NickServ and other things), the end-user experience is still fundamentally the same.
- userbinator 12y ago
  I think the one big distinction between IRC and email which made the latter gain massive popularity is that theoretically (i.e. spam-prevention and other blocking notwithstanding), any email you send from one address' provider/domain can reach any other email address. This means people can publish an email address and anyone else is able to easily contact them. The server that gets mailed is even specified in the DNS system - MX records. With IRC, you basically have to be on the same network to chat, and there's no way to publish an "IRC server address" in the DNS. I have a feeling that if DNS had this capability, and "IRC addresses" became standardised in the same way as emails (e.g. nick!irc.example.com), allowing anyone to use it with the same universality as email, the story might be very different today.
- oddvar 12y ago
  IRC is great, and I'm sure it could be great for non-geeks too! When we started working on Matrix (matrix.org) we based a lot of the messaging/chat side of things on the features we like (and the ones we miss!) from IRC, and now we have a bridge to our IRC channels which means you can chat to Matrix-users from irssi or whatever - or you can use the webbrowser or android/ios matrix client and still keep an eye on IRC. Auto-backfill is really nice. And being able to send rich content is something we kind of take for granted these days. (disclaimer: I work on Matrix.org)

by Morgawr 12y ago

antihero 12y ago

But IRC has failed, colossally, because it is old-school technology for old-school people. The vast majority of users don't want to think about servers, clients, etc. They want to at most get the app, and start talking to their mates. I mean there may be some way to do this with IRC where you don't have to piss around with ident and nicks and nets and netsplits and all this other ridiculous stuff, but the proof is in the pudding. IRC is great, for geeks.

Morgawr 12y ago
IRC is old-school technology just as much as email, the only difference is that email itself has been adopted and provided to non-tech users for a very long time and has arguably been more useful for non-tech users since the days before web2.0 and social networks, whereas instant messaging has become more rampart in the newer generations where we already have newer technologies. IRC is a very transparent protocol, there are A LOT of chat applications that you see and use every day that are actually implemented using an underlying IRC protocol or variation of it and provide an IRC interface (an example would be Twitch chat). Furthermore, I've seen IRC being used in a lot of companies internally by most engineers and not. I would definitely say that IRC has NOT failed, let alone colossally. EDIT: To reply to everybody and make it easier, I fully understand that IRC isn't universally used (that is the point of the original post) and that is in a steep decline, I'm just saying that claiming it 'failed' (both as front and back end technology) is simply not true. It's old and not as used anymore, that's it. It's like saying the Nokia 3310 phone has failed colossally because not many people use it anymore.
- blowski 12y ago
  Everyone has an email address. I know only three or four people who have even used IRC since 2000, typically for developers on open source product chat rooms like Drupal. Whatever the pros and cons of the technology, or the whys and wherefores of the reason for this lack of widespread use, it clearly has not been adopted by the mainstream. If the goal of a protocol is to be used widely, then clearly IRC has failed.
- stingraycharles 12y ago
  I think one of the main disadvantages of IRC is that you cannot have offline messaging; this is basically unacceptable nowadays.
  - Mithaldu 12y ago
    Incorrect. It is easy to get that via self-hosted services like znc.in or third-party services like: https://www.irccloud.com/ https://www.irccloud.com/
    - corobo 12y ago
      For the sake of argument I'm pretty sure stingraycharles meant built in, not another extra thing added on before you can use it
- antihero 12y ago
  Ok, so there's a difference between failing as an underlying technology, and failing as an actual thing people use. Herein lies the difference between e-mail and IRC - e-mail is fundamentally the same as an underlying technology (we still use IMAP!), but as an end-user product has changed a huge amount over the last twenty years. Things like webmail have progressed a huge amount, and systems like Outlook/Exchange have been built that allow it to be managed in a business centric manner. With modern e-mail, you sign up for an e-mail, and that's it. You can now go to a website and e-mail people. With IRC as a product, (aside from the ugly webchats that still expose huge streams of text and NickServ and other things), the end-user experience is still fundamentally the same.
userbinator 12y ago
I think the one big distinction between IRC and email which made the latter gain massive popularity is that theoretically (i.e. spam-prevention and other blocking notwithstanding), any email you send from one address' provider/domain can reach any other email address. This means people can publish an email address and anyone else is able to easily contact them. The server that gets mailed is even specified in the DNS system - MX records. With IRC, you basically have to be on the same network to chat, and there's no way to publish an "IRC server address" in the DNS. I have a feeling that if DNS had this capability, and "IRC addresses" became standardised in the same way as emails (e.g. nick!irc.example.com), allowing anyone to use it with the same universality as email, the story might be very different today.
oddvar 12y ago
IRC is great, and I'm sure it could be great for non-geeks too! When we started working on Matrix (matrix.org) we based a lot of the messaging/chat side of things on the features we like (and the ones we miss!) from IRC, and now we have a bridge to our IRC channels which means you can chat to Matrix-users from irssi or whatever - or you can use the webbrowser or android/ios matrix client and still keep an eye on IRC. Auto-backfill is really nice. And being able to send rich content is something we kind of take for granted these days. (disclaimer: I work on Matrix.org)