14 ms·

Absence of certain features in IRC considered a feature

298 points by kragniz 7y ago

jnty 7y ago
I've certainly encountered channels where lack of image embedding is less of a feature and more of a mental health necessity!
outime 7y ago
It seems that the author references different IRC clients but at the same time ignores (can't say if on purpose or not) the fact that there are also alternative Slack clients which address many of the pain points.
- grenoire 7y ago
  But that doesn't prevent other people from relying on these features.
- stefan_ 7y ago
  You mean bootleg clients that will break randomly. Meanwhile a playing visible GIF in the official client still throttles a CPU core.
  - Spivak 7y ago
    I mean all IRC clients are 3rd party so I'm surprised that your sentiment towards 3rd party Slack clients is so bad. I've been using wee-slack for a while now and I have very few complaints. I mean it's not IRC where the protocol is etched on stone tablets but Slack has been thus far a good steward of their API.
    - johannes1234321 7y ago
      The difference is that the IRC standard is decades old and stable and made for "independent" clients. Slack is Young and evolving and driven by a single company which wants to push their client
      - Spivak 7y ago
        This is all very true but they're also a company that wants to push their API since that's where most of their stickyness comes from as a business. IRC definitely has stability going for it but it also means it has been unable to adapt to user requirements changing over time. The most usable IRC client right now is IRCCloud which is good, but it doesn't inspire much hope because it's only usable since they completely plaster over the protocol in their UI. In this model there's nothing special about IRC except that it's a common denominator protocol for a few networks that use it. If we were choosing a inter-network protocol I don't think anyone today would come up with IRC.
        johannes1234321 7y ago
        > This is all very true but they're also a company that wants to push their API since that's where most of their stickyness comes from as a business. This is what people said about Twitter as well ;) And slack, for instance, discontinued their IRC gateways as that limited their possibilities to "innovate" and I can image Slack, being pushed by shareholders, restricting free add-ons to getting data into slack (from Version control, business tools, task trackers, ...) but restricting getting data out to more expensive tiers (making transition of Slack harder) But there are the key difference between open and proprietary protocols: Open protocols are slow to evolve (see also the state of mail protocols ... where innovation happens mostly in Gmail's protocols, not SMTP/imap/...) but allow wide variety of clients, while proprietary systems can evolve faster, but are more limited in clients.
        Spivak 7y ago
        Well yeah, I'm in no way saying that people in the OSS world should standardize on single company's proprietary protocol and platform and if IRC is the only thing people from two projects can agree to speak then it's what we've got. But we really need to stop trying to make IRC 'work' and build something more usable that can interop with existing IRC networks (hi Matrix!). IRC is fundamentally not a good enough protocol for how people people chat today but it's easy for people who have been using it for 20 years and have a lot of pride and machismo sunk into figuring it to dismiss outsiders that are struggling and believe that if you pile enough barely-working brittleware on top that it can sorta-kinda work like Slack or Mattermost.
    - est31 7y ago
      > I mean all IRC clients are 3rd party so I'm surprised that your sentiment towards 3rd party Slack clients is so bad. The difference between IRC and Slack is that IRC is seen as a standard protocol while for Slack the network protocol is an inofficial implementation detail and any use other than of the official client is unsupported. I'm not very familiar with Slack, but I've heard about Whatsapp users being banned just for the crime of using an alternative client. That's the difference between an open protocol and a proprietary one.
      - Spivak 7y ago
        Huh? The network protocol for Slack is JSON over WebSockets and is completely documented and supported [1]. You don't need a Slack SDK to speak to Slack and can do it with any plain WebSocket library. Obviously Slack doesn't provide support for 3rd party clients; how could they? But they do provide support to the developers of those clients using their API. [1] https://api.slack.com/rtm https://api.slack.com/rtm
        Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
        I'm going to remind you of this comment in 5 years.
        Spivak 7y ago
        I mean if Slack didn't end up ruining their API in the name of greater development flexibility I'm not sure I could even comprehend it. But that's the thing, I think Slack is a fundamentally inappropriate tool for FOSS work or public communications. Anyone who stakes their long-term community on a single company's proprietary product is asking to be hurt down the road. But I don't think IRC is the right alternative because the UX is so newcomer unfriendly and requires so many disparate 3rd party services to be useful. I would much rather see communities standardize on something like Riot or Mattermost with OpenID. Simultaneously, I think that Slack (and its contemporaries) are a breath of fresh air for internal team/office chat. Sure it's expensive, and like all corporate-y things you have to keep a little distance so you can migrate when they get shitty, but we can at least acknowledge that it's a damn slick product.
- chaosite 7y ago
  The author references different IRC clients as being societal forces that tends to curtail adoption of certain features. The official Slack client sets the tone for usage there.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
  To stefan's point, Slack clients are unofficial and unsupported software built on top of proprietary protocols which are subject to change at any time according to the whims of a private company which has their bottom line at heart instead of your communication needs.
  - walrus01 7y ago
    And even more so to the point, you can't self host slack and have absolute root level to the OS it's running on admin control. For somebody who knows what's they're doing it takes maybe 45 minutes to set up a basic ircd-hybrid daemon on Debian or centos.
    - AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
      If you use a high level language like Python you could almost write an IRC server in 45 minutes.
  - outime 7y ago
    I don't disagree with you on that - but that's not written in your post so my point still stands. Many of the paint points are solved when using alternative clients. Alternative clients will allow you to, for example: * Use Slack on an ancient computer * Use TTS systems * Not use threads (you can just dump everything in the channel) * Not have link previews * Use keyboard only * Get a less distracting experience I'm also an IRC user and I like it but I just wanted to point out the post isn't fair with Slack if only one client is evaluated. Edit: list formatting
    - est31 7y ago
      They can crack down on alternative clients at any time they want. You are living on borrowed time. A guest who is wild camping in their gated community walled garden private property.
      - outime 7y ago
        I also agree with you. It was painful when e.g. Twitter basically killed 3rd party apps. What happens here is that I don’t see any significant portion of Slack users moving to IRC anytime soon. Therefore, if you’re forced to use Slack, you should know that alternative clients are available as of today.
Pigo 7y ago
I'm glad Freenode has a user base for work related stuff, but I man do I miss when Undernet or Dalnet was still popular. I know I'll never run into my mother on IRC, and it is probably because of the format.
- ircdrone 7y ago
  I too miss the good old days of Undernet, where Romanian criminals would show off hacked systems, or DDOS other IRC users.
  - Pigo 7y ago
    I miss the wild west, sue me. My entire life wasn't on whatever system I was using, so it wouldn't have mattered if someone messed it up. I don't miss the hardware of the time, but at least the web wasn't sterilized and owned by a few companies.
    - ircdrone 7y ago
      Correct, today’s internet has been taken over by companies and search engines by seo spam. But if there was anyone left enjoying tue good ole days of lawlessness, irc would still be a thing.
      - ohithereyou 7y ago
        I don't know where you went, but there are still plenty of people using IRC. Not as many as were in the past, but it's still popular enough with the crowd of people I hang around.
        Pigo 7y ago
        Out of curiosity, what servers do you frequent? Or is it more personal servers that you and your friends run?
  - ryanlol 7y ago
walrus01 7y ago
Give me irssi or give me death
- _eht 7y ago
  RIP In Peace
- darkpuma 7y ago
  You should give weechat a whirl.
kabwj 7y ago
IRCv3 is a scourge because of this. They’re looking to bloat the protocol. IRC is good because it’s IRC.
- crankylinuxuser 7y ago
  IRC was made a spec in 1993. Not 2003, or even 2013. And when that RFC was made, they made strong decisions about bandwidth costs. They gave up things like federation and more. So yeah, it's time that it's revisited in making a IRC that can be federated, multiple login/endpoints without using bouncers, and more. I welcome their new RFC. And it it doesn't work, we're free to keep what we currently have.
  - pmlnr 7y ago
    What you're after is called XMPP.
    - duskwuff 7y ago
      No, it isn't. XMPP was designed primarily as an IM protocol to replace proprietary messengers like AIM and ICQ, not as a service for group chats. It's a flawed protocol even for IM, and its conference features verge on broken. (For example: A user's visible presence in a conference is neither necessary nor sufficient for them to send and/or receive messages in the conference.)
slezyr 7y ago
> IRC messages are always lines of characters terminated with a CR-LF (Carriage Return - Line Feed) pair, and these messages shall not exceed 512 characters in length, counting all characters including the trailing CR-LF. Thus, there are 510 characters maximum allowed for the command and its parameters. Yeah, lets just forget how painful it was for non english speaking users to use IRC. 255 characters for unicode and 510, but you have to guess encoding.
- Athas 7y ago
  I remember when this was a significant problem but with the rise of UTF-8 it is less so (even if that is strictly against the letter of the spec, it works fine in practice). Are there languages where the 510 bytes per message are a significant limitation?
  - ygra 7y ago
    Isn't a major problem that the client cannot know how long the message can be because it's prefixed on the server side again (which counts into the 510 bytes). But apart from that, I've certainly had my share of truncated messages, both in German and English. Sometimes you want to express a thought in full in several sentences without twenty other channel messages appearing in between the sentences while you're typing.
  - sirn 7y ago
    I can only speak from experience, but Thai language uses 3 bytes per character in UTF-8 and rely on vowels and tone marks to compose a word, so the number of bytes can grow pretty quick. A headline of an article in Thai have a good chance of exceeding 510 bytes. This is why one of the major Thai IRC networks were stuck with TIS-620 for a long time (ThaiNet/irc.thai.com, though I'm not sure if this is still the case) which is 8-bit compatible with ASCII (uses 0xA1 to 0xFB for Thai characters).
  - slezyr 7y ago
    Cyrillic symbols are encoded in UTF-8 with two bytes. You limited with 255 characters.
- 7y ago
chapium 7y ago
Perhaps a side pan for embeds makes sense. upload images or code snippets by providing irc style references in the chat while not interrupting the flow of conversation because images and whatnot are expanded on the embed pane.
peterwwillis 7y ago
The idea of embedding links to multimedia is a good one. They just need to form an open standard for encoding media and rich text in text streams, and let clients parse the standard and decide how to format it. Text clients could remove any multimedia/rich text, GUI users could render it all, blind users would receive alt-tags in a way that's easily spoken by TTS, etc. Because it's a standard for encoding media in a text stream, you don't have to change the IRC protocol, just add a plugin to the client. You could even format it so the simplest clients could just strip everything but the text. Something like: %M!i=//shrt.url/j3f87h38f;t=fr,bb;a=Kitten Mittens! Finally, there is an elegant, comfortable mitten for cats. This indicates an image link, a text foreground color of red, text background color of black, and alt-text for the image as "Kitten Mittens". Any existing IRC client can simply remove everything from "%M!" to the "!" + newline, or if they don't, the text just shows up on its own line below the metadata, which isn't hard to read. You could even encode it in-line, such as "This is some %M!t=fr,b!text!." Harder to read if the client doesn't implement the standard, though.
dusted 7y ago
I agree, IRC, it is what it is, it's done, if you want something else, you want something else, not IRC.
emptyparadise 7y ago
Formatting is pure fluff - it's convenient to have bold/italic/spoiler/code tags, and it is possible to implement them in a TUI without degrading anybody's experience. Link tags are not really necessary and a lot of clients don't even have them. The image upload thing, though, the convenience there is being able to just upload an image directly into the client, rather than having to deal with some external service. That's it. There isn't much preventing this from being implemented in an IRC client. Character limits are silly and should be removed - enforce them with a moderation bot if you really have to. Just because most modern chat services are Electron trash does not mean we should throw out every bit of convenience learned. IRC (clients) could stand to gain better text formatting and file sharing options - things that make life easier for users, and in most cases don't really affect how the actual protocol works.
fnord123 7y ago
This really comes back to the Capability vs. Suitability model that Gary Bernhardt has spoken about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NftT6HWFgq0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NftT6HWFgq0 IRC is capable. It is a box of nuts and bolts that lets us communicate and build awesome bots and so on. Bloating the protocol gives us suitability: features that are robust and can federate.
fivre 7y ago
Lacking support for pretty much everything other than lines of text alongside a handle enables one of my favorite aspects of IRC: a 10-row terminal is more than sufficient for the entire client UI.
raverbashing 7y ago
I think if most people saw the limitations of irc as the author then it would still be the dominant protocol And it doesn't seem to me that "fixing" irc is just a matter of adding the bells and whistles, but there's some work to be done on the lower levels as well For example, how well would irc work on mobile? Keeping logs requires a bot usually on irc as well.
- moftz 7y ago
  For mobile, I had a bouncer setup that would keep me up to date whenever someone would message or mention me. I could pull up AndChat and connect right up to all of my channels, I was never actually offline. I had an icon on my taskbar that would connect me to my VPN and pull up irssi. I see now that there is a cloud client for mobile called "IRC Cloud", it sounds like a one step setup kind of bouncer for someone that doesn't have an always online machine to run a bouncer on. I really do miss using IRC all the time. My favorite server got taken down and I never bothered to find out where everyone ran off to.
zaarn 7y ago
Well, I consider stuff like the absence of server-side friend lists, server-rendered embeds and formatted messages a bug at best, though in IRC's case it's simply the lack of ability because the protocol is horribly outdated, modern approaches and limitations could afford a lot of QoL improvements.
maeln 7y ago
I love the simplicity of IRC, I still use it to this day, but I have to say, I understand why IRC cannot be used for any serious team communication. The two biggest pain point that I see is: 1. Because there is no real account management you don't have any proper authentication, which make administrating a channel real dodgy (even with network provided bots). 2. No offline history: You have to have a client/bouncer running 24/24 if you want history. One thing though, because of how IRC work, you don't have the problem that other protocol like XMPP faced with multy-device sync (there is a extension for that in XMPP but, like almost every extension in XMPP, not many client support it). Also, nowadays we should consider end-to-end encryption standard. I feel like IRC is in the same space as email: It's a very good technology that just lack a few feature to be perfect but any project that try to replace them just end up over-bloated with features ...
- Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
  I think both of these are important problems (and number among the issues I alluded to in the conclusion of the article). I hope to see them improved in the future and will provide whatever support I can to IRC networks working on them. However, if you're going to run your own IRC server you can also run your own bouncer service. Lots of authentication options exist as well. IRC is totally fine for an org who can stand up a server. It's pretty low-maintenance too.
- swebs 7y ago
  After doing some digging, it looks like there's some people working on a new spec for IRC version 3. One of the additions is the ability to request chat history from the server. Though I'm not sure when it will be implemented since it's been on the table for 4 years now. https://github.com/ircv3/ircv3-specifications/milestone/4/ https://github.com/ircv3/ircv3-specifications/milestone/4/
  - derefr 7y ago
    > Though I’m not sure when it will be implemented Presumably, when some random IRCd hacker decides to spend their spare time doing so. Most of the IRCds are FOSS, no?
zimbatm 7y ago
The article doesn't talk about the best feature of Slack: a consistent message history for all the users. In IRC messages can easily get lost due to network splits or client disappearing. Not having everyone with the same message timeline can make some conversations quite awkward. This is really the only feature I miss in IRC.
- nayuki 7y ago
  In exchange, you have gut-wrenching systemwide outages of Slack once in a while. The CAP theorem says you can't have it both ways. News from 3 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20303479 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20303479
  - deadbunny 7y ago
    Are you living in a world without netsplits?
    - ryanlol 7y ago
      Netsplits are pretty rare these days.
      - clarry 7y ago
        Yeah? I just counted six netsplits in the past 24 hours that affected a channel I'm on on IRCnet. I still love IRC. My second home.
        ryanlol 7y ago
        This is because of IRCnet is operated by multiple entities and has rather peculiar links, other networks are not like this. http://dx.fi/alt/ircmap/fdp.png http://dx.fi/alt/ircmap/fdp.png here’s a map of IRCnet, they’re really going out of their way to generate netsplits. A network operated by a single entity doesn’t need such a silly amount of nodes, you can support hundreds of thousands of IRC uses on a single server.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
693471 7y ago
IRC is forever tainted by graybeards that won't give up their terminal clients. People who want to get work done have moved on. The next generation of developers have no interest in IRC. It's a dead end.
- moftz 7y ago
  I think you misunderstand the real quality of running an IRC client from anywhere on anything. I don't need to carry around a $4000 laptop to get my work done when I can use my home dev server from anywhere using a 10-year old Thinkpad junker. Break it? Pitch it and buy another for less than $100 on ebay.
  - syntheticcdo 7y ago
    Saying Slack requires a $4000 laptop is a bit of hyperbole don't you think? I've used the Slack web client on a $300 Chromebook and it was just fine.
    - moftz 7y ago
      You don't need that for Slack but if you want a quality machine to carry around to handle your workload, that's the price neighborhood.
- danmg 7y ago
  Why should text chat need more than a 'terminal client'?
  - mixologic 7y ago
    The bigger point is that 'text chat' is antiquated and unnecessarily limited, and that the advent of "richer" text chat is a gigantic improvement in communications efficiency. As one of these greybeards who started with 300 baud modems and text chats in the 80's, and moved onto IRC because the internet was better than BBS's, I wholeheartedly endorse the idea that the only people clinging to the UX garbagefire that is IRC are the people who are either unwilling or unable to adapt to the new reality that modern services offer so much more value than IRC will ever be capable of.
superkuh 7y ago
It isn't that the features don't exist. I think most people on IRC just see the internet as their platform. Integrating image hosting into IRC seems absurd when there are perfectly good browsers and ways to host or self host images. Stuffing everything into one client, or worse, one corporation just restricts features and provides a single point of failure in both technical and censorship terms.
- ddingus 7y ago
  I agree, however a simple image copy paste would see a ton of use. ...and a ton of hate.
- abstractbeliefs 7y ago
  An example of how this could work is that a client could support receiving an image. When this happens, it could upload it to an image host of choice, get the url, and send that. It's what users already do, but without having to pop a new tab, head to imgur, upload the image, and copy paste it back etc.
  - superkuh 7y ago
    But why? Why add extra steps and add in having to keep the code to adapt to APIs or URL paths that change every 6 months? It's not like keeping a browser and IRC client open are mutually exclusive. I personally just $ cp whatever.jpg ~/www/ because I host my static site from my home connection and have for 20 years. I know self-hosting is not for everyone but everyone self hosting would literally solve all the problems of the web.
    - abstractbeliefs 7y ago
      well, it's an entirely client side thing to have, so the "why" very much comes down to the developers balance on adding extra code for extra convenience. The developer might like it personally, or they might find it's a feature that their users want, or both. As an example, I have my thinkpads prtscr button hooked up to automatically capture the screen, upload to 0x0.st, put the url into my clipboard, and then alert dunst to pop a notification that it's done. It takes a very common 60 second process and makes it almost as fast as prtscr, ctrl+v
anilakar 7y ago
IRCv3 notwithstanding, the protocol from a software engineering point of view is horrible. It doesn't support asynchronous operations because responses cannot be tied to their corresponding requests, and many commands, successful or not, require a human to parse. Too bad that IRCnet only runs whatever has been written down in an official IETF RFC. Despite all these deficiencies it's still widely used – My guess is that nobody has come up with a chat medium that would replace it completely. It's still pretty much the only decentralized, push-pull, clutter free real time discussion medium.
KirinDave 7y ago
Now let's talk about the inherent lack of a good centralized identity service, the danger of the majority of IRC servers and clients being written in C and the inefficiency of the protocol itself for applications like high latency links? We might also talk about the lack of important modern features like basic negotiation of client encoding capabilities and what an absolute tire fire DCC-based features continue to be due to the "just link to an external website" mentality that stifles all discussion of replacements?
- chipotle_coyote 7y ago
  I'm not sure if "festues" is a word I don't recognize or a typo for a word that I can't mentally correct into something I'd recognize.
  - KirinDave 7y ago
    Fixed. Sorry, I've been engaging is user behavior that IRC as a protocol can't support: using a mobile client. I'm still new to going fast with my TAP strap.
  - ben509 7y ago
    I think it was meant to be features.
enriquto 7y ago
I love this blog. When I read it I find myself repeatedly smashing the table with my fists and shouting "YES! OH MAN, YES!".
chicob 7y ago
I like IRC a lot. Simple, light, and a very good example of the minimalist principle that "less is more".
lossolo 7y ago
We are running our own IRC server (UnrealIRCd + Anope for services) for 10+ years. We have bots for gitlab/github, schedulers, management bots (you can basically control whole infrastructure and all services from IRC), event logging channels, alerting, jobs/tasks bots, status checking etc. all with authentication and authorization. This is working well for us, without any issues for years.
bluefox 7y ago
IRC is one of the few Internet venues I still frequent. Been using it since 1998. Some years ago an important (but small, private) channel moved from EFnet to Freenode, so that is the network I now use. Seeing Freenode IRCops looking to fix what ain't broken ("but it's opt-in" they'll say..) makes me have doubts about the move. If this sounds "get off my lawn" to you, you're getting it.
- abstractbeliefs 7y ago
  You're welcome to come chat to me in ###kline over there, there's some useful upstream discussion on it here as well: https://cmpwn.com/@kline/102333166678467931 https://cmpwn.com/@kline/102333166678467931 Make no mistake, we don't want to change IRC, but we do want to take some of the sharp edges off. I'll never move away from hexchat, the client I use now, and maintaining that backwards compatibility and character for all users is a red line for us.
- buzzert 7y ago
  What are some good channels to visit in 2019? I feel like most of the ones I used to frequent are dead silent now. And my small friend channels have since moved to Discord.
  - bluefox 7y ago
    I guess the programming language related ones are a good start. In my experience they have a high signal-to-noise ratio. Otherwise, it depends on your interests... you can always start your own, making sure it's good... There is/was a /list command, but I never really used it as all the good channels were at least +s ;) It's all word of mouth, really.
frou_dh 7y ago
Kooky "reaction GIFs" in work chat are so inane. I mean, there's certainly a time and a place for browsing funny GIFs on the web, but making it a first-class part of work chat is so juvenile it's unreal.
- abstractbeliefs 7y ago
  For what it's worth, that's not the intention on freenode's side - we want to sand off some of the rough edges. As an example, it would be nice to have a common flow for speaking to services. Once we have some sensible way, then clients can sensibly opt to pop a dialog for new users allowing them to register an account with nickserv without having to fiddle away in a query.
- Karunamon 7y ago
  This mindset is alien to me. Humor is a generally positive thing and can't help but improve mental state while working.
  - mceachen 7y ago
    > can't help but improve mental state Unless you regard it as inane. Throwing reaction gifs at a happy birthday/congratulation post is one thing. Throwing them into the oncall production ops channel and context switch everyone so they can see Homer back into a hedge is another.
    - alyandon 7y ago
      How is that really any different from someone engaging in off-topic banter in an IRC channel? Humans are being human and I don't really see how the problem as you describe it is somehow specific to non-IRC mediums.
    - Groxx 7y ago
      >Throwing them into the oncall production ops channel and context switch everyone so they can see Homer back into a hedge is another. This is part of the reason I like the "reactji" of slack / discord / etc. They don't cause a new message notification. Because of that, they're less interruptive, and you can do some interesting, useful things. Like lightweight interaction - we "seed" an up/down arrow pair for voting, people just click one. Or controlling bots more easily - we use one to add Qs to a queue, others to shut them up when they're being noisy, or there's fancier options: https://codeascraft.com/2018/10/10/etsys-experiment-with-immutable-documentation/ https://codeascraft.com/2018/10/10/etsys-experiment-with-imm...
abathur 7y ago
This reminds me of what Apple does to the SMS/MMS ecosystem. MUDs face a similar set of issues. Some new MUD frameworks skip over these by ignoring telnet and going HTML/JS. There's an interesting third path, GMCP, which is basically treated by the server/client (once support is negotiated) as out-of-band communication. If either end can't negotiate support, you get the basic experience. As a pressure-release valve, options like this can be better than clients or servers trying to overload the primary protocol with magic messages that other servers/clients without support are still forced to digest and display.
floor_ 7y ago
Anyone else still using microsoft comic chat?
- dole 7y ago
  It's dangerous to go alone. Take this. https://gist.github.com/richardg867/bb19ca2b03545f71ae15 https://gist.github.com/richardg867/bb19ca2b03545f71ae15 http://www.mermeliz.com/cchat.htm http://www.mermeliz.com/cchat.htm
mikedd 7y ago
I just use https://www.irccloud.com/ https://www.irccloud.com/ and it's the best of both wordls ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
dfabulich 7y ago
The article here claims that IRC is better than Matrix because Matrix supports pasting long snippets and IRC doesn't. The author furthermore claims that Matrix users are being a "nuisance" by posting long snippets to IRC with a link fallback, like this: ihabunek [m] sent a long message: < https://matrix.org/_matrix/media/blahblahblah > ihabunek [m] uploaded an image: image.png (39KB) < https://matrix.org/_matrix/media/blahblahblah > This is "being a nuisance"? It's just two chat lines, and the first line isn't meaningfully longer than a link to pastebin. Maybe pasting the image was a bit excessive, but it's very likely to be auto-expanded in GUI IRC clients, making it an excellent fallback. It's not "being a nuisance." It's two links. It's fine. The truth is, IRC folks do need to share long snippets and images, and they do it by linking to them; that's exactly what Matrix does when integrating with IRC. That's one among many reasons that Matrix is better than IRC.
- Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
  I expanded on this here: https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/public-inbox/%3Ca6e64b69-c0cf-22b1-94e4-d948209392e8%40adelielinux.org%3E#%3CBV82SMB8KEDN.16DDFWUTXGJTE@homura%3E https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/public-inbox/%3Ca6e64b69-c0cf-...
  - adrusi 7y ago
    Worth drawing attention to: many users are familiar and comfortable with the way that Twitter handles embedded content, which is more-or-less the solution that you said would be "less of a concern for you". I think this could prove to be a good compromise. https://i.imgur.com/O1qw0dI.png https://i.imgur.com/O1qw0dI.png
  - joepie91_ 7y ago
    That seems like an extremely handwavy motivation, not much of an elaboration. > When one side sees it embedded in the chat but the other side sees it as a link, it affects how the former uses the feature and how the latter perceives the former, in ways that could be unexpected to the former. The point of my article is that these features have a social effect which is not necessarily positive. How does it affect it? What ways? What social effect? This explanation is totally devoid of any concrete examples of a mismatch of expectations and resulting social effects, it just alludes to them existing without any concrete basis - essentially weasel wording.
gridlockd 7y ago
> "Remember that not everyone is like you." Of course they aren't, but most people aren't like Drew Devault either. Most people don't use ancient hardware to prove some sort of point. The "Drew Devault will approve of it"-argument generally doesn't show up in a business case. In a perverse way, I am glad that programmers come up with better and better ways to waste hardware resources. In doing so, they ensure the continued progress of the semiconductor (and battery) industry through mass market demand. I do not believe it is a coincidence that Moore's law has slowed significantly right at the time when computers became "good enough" for the everyday user. If it wasn't for gamers spending hundreds of dollars on pushing more pixels on-screen, we'd be way behind on deep learning. Buy a new computer, Drew.
- u801e 7y ago
  > Buy a new computer I've purchased a number of computers over the last several decades, yet using facebook/slack is still slower and less responsive on a computer with a Core i7 processor and 16 MB of system memory and a 100 Mbps downstream connection compared with using usenet/irc on a 486 with 16 MB of system memory and a a 28.8 kbps downstream connection.
  - gridlockd 7y ago
    > I've purchased a number of computers over the last several decades Good, keep going.
stcredzero 7y ago
P.S. A friend pointed out that the migration of non-hackers away from IRC is like a reverse Eternal September, which sounds great I was a part of the original Eternal September in the 1980's as the Internet was opened up to undergrads. The idea of a "Reverse Eternal September" sounds super awesome! I wonder how it can be implemented? (In a limited context, not across the whole of the Internet, of course.)
- ohithereyou 7y ago
  Tilde servers were sort of the start in my mind of things like that, as is SDF
  - stcredzero 7y ago
    I only know SDF as the abbreviation of the Sol Defense Force from the Robotech anime translations.
- antepodius 7y ago
  Well, the the article pointed out one way... Have a community somewhat gated by the need for technical proficiency, and have a bigger, shinier, "popcorn internet" alternative (facebook) to bait the normies away from it. For example, suckless programs are configured by compiling them from source. This is for several reasons, but one explicit one is that it keeps away less technical users, keeping the userbase "small and elite". The eternal september happened when the manswarm flooded in; you can't bail out the flood, but it'll drain to a lower-common-denominator cesspool if one is available, and you might be able to build a high enough tower to stay above the waterline.
andrewshadura 7y ago
Have the author tried to write bots for Matrix? It's much simpler than for IRC and doesn't require a persistent connection.
- MaxLeiter 7y ago
  I don't think the author would agree its much simpler: https://drewdevault.com/2018/03/10/How-to-write-an-IRC-bot.html https://drewdevault.com/2018/03/10/How-to-write-an-IRC-bot.h...
xvilka 7y ago
Ability to remove spam messages would be awesome, these days it is very hard to deal with on a public channels. Also log out of the box. None of them are distraction. And proper authentication out of the box. Better design for poor, unstable connections, i.e. mobile phones.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Justsignedup 7y ago
Counterpoint: The lack of accessibility in Slack does not mean it shouldn't be solved. Baby with the bathwater. Why dump all of slack when instead we can work on an accessible interface.
mproud 7y ago
This is called being stubborn. If you don’t adapt, you die. Wanna die? Sure, no one is stopping you.

298 points by kragniz 7y ago

jnty 7y ago

I've certainly encountered channels where lack of image embedding is less of a feature and more of a mental health necessity!

outime 7y ago

It seems that the author references different IRC clients but at the same time ignores (can't say if on purpose or not) the fact that there are also alternative Slack clients which address many of the pain points.

grenoire 7y ago
But that doesn't prevent other people from relying on these features.
stefan_ 7y ago
You mean bootleg clients that will break randomly. Meanwhile a playing visible GIF in the official client still throttles a CPU core.
- Spivak 7y ago
  I mean all IRC clients are 3rd party so I'm surprised that your sentiment towards 3rd party Slack clients is so bad. I've been using wee-slack for a while now and I have very few complaints. I mean it's not IRC where the protocol is etched on stone tablets but Slack has been thus far a good steward of their API.
  - johannes1234321 7y ago
    The difference is that the IRC standard is decades old and stable and made for "independent" clients. Slack is Young and evolving and driven by a single company which wants to push their client
    - Spivak 7y ago
      This is all very true but they're also a company that wants to push their API since that's where most of their stickyness comes from as a business. IRC definitely has stability going for it but it also means it has been unable to adapt to user requirements changing over time. The most usable IRC client right now is IRCCloud which is good, but it doesn't inspire much hope because it's only usable since they completely plaster over the protocol in their UI. In this model there's nothing special about IRC except that it's a common denominator protocol for a few networks that use it. If we were choosing a inter-network protocol I don't think anyone today would come up with IRC.
      - johannes1234321 7y ago
        > This is all very true but they're also a company that wants to push their API since that's where most of their stickyness comes from as a business. This is what people said about Twitter as well ;) And slack, for instance, discontinued their IRC gateways as that limited their possibilities to "innovate" and I can image Slack, being pushed by shareholders, restricting free add-ons to getting data into slack (from Version control, business tools, task trackers, ...) but restricting getting data out to more expensive tiers (making transition of Slack harder) But there are the key difference between open and proprietary protocols: Open protocols are slow to evolve (see also the state of mail protocols ... where innovation happens mostly in Gmail's protocols, not SMTP/imap/...) but allow wide variety of clients, while proprietary systems can evolve faster, but are more limited in clients.
        Spivak 7y ago
        Well yeah, I'm in no way saying that people in the OSS world should standardize on single company's proprietary protocol and platform and if IRC is the only thing people from two projects can agree to speak then it's what we've got. But we really need to stop trying to make IRC 'work' and build something more usable that can interop with existing IRC networks (hi Matrix!). IRC is fundamentally not a good enough protocol for how people people chat today but it's easy for people who have been using it for 20 years and have a lot of pride and machismo sunk into figuring it to dismiss outsiders that are struggling and believe that if you pile enough barely-working brittleware on top that it can sorta-kinda work like Slack or Mattermost.
  - est31 7y ago
    > I mean all IRC clients are 3rd party so I'm surprised that your sentiment towards 3rd party Slack clients is so bad. The difference between IRC and Slack is that IRC is seen as a standard protocol while for Slack the network protocol is an inofficial implementation detail and any use other than of the official client is unsupported. I'm not very familiar with Slack, but I've heard about Whatsapp users being banned just for the crime of using an alternative client. That's the difference between an open protocol and a proprietary one.
    - Spivak 7y ago
      Huh? The network protocol for Slack is JSON over WebSockets and is completely documented and supported [1]. You don't need a Slack SDK to speak to Slack and can do it with any plain WebSocket library. Obviously Slack doesn't provide support for 3rd party clients; how could they? But they do provide support to the developers of those clients using their API. [1] https://api.slack.com/rtm https://api.slack.com/rtm
      - Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
        I'm going to remind you of this comment in 5 years.
        Spivak 7y ago
        I mean if Slack didn't end up ruining their API in the name of greater development flexibility I'm not sure I could even comprehend it. But that's the thing, I think Slack is a fundamentally inappropriate tool for FOSS work or public communications. Anyone who stakes their long-term community on a single company's proprietary product is asking to be hurt down the road. But I don't think IRC is the right alternative because the UX is so newcomer unfriendly and requires so many disparate 3rd party services to be useful. I would much rather see communities standardize on something like Riot or Mattermost with OpenID. Simultaneously, I think that Slack (and its contemporaries) are a breath of fresh air for internal team/office chat. Sure it's expensive, and like all corporate-y things you have to keep a little distance so you can migrate when they get shitty, but we can at least acknowledge that it's a damn slick product.
chaosite 7y ago
The author references different IRC clients as being societal forces that tends to curtail adoption of certain features. The official Slack client sets the tone for usage there.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
To stefan's point, Slack clients are unofficial and unsupported software built on top of proprietary protocols which are subject to change at any time according to the whims of a private company which has their bottom line at heart instead of your communication needs.
- walrus01 7y ago
  And even more so to the point, you can't self host slack and have absolute root level to the OS it's running on admin control. For somebody who knows what's they're doing it takes maybe 45 minutes to set up a basic ircd-hybrid daemon on Debian or centos.
  - AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago
    If you use a high level language like Python you could almost write an IRC server in 45 minutes.
- outime 7y ago
  I don't disagree with you on that - but that's not written in your post so my point still stands. Many of the paint points are solved when using alternative clients. Alternative clients will allow you to, for example: * Use Slack on an ancient computer * Use TTS systems * Not use threads (you can just dump everything in the channel) * Not have link previews * Use keyboard only * Get a less distracting experience I'm also an IRC user and I like it but I just wanted to point out the post isn't fair with Slack if only one client is evaluated. Edit: list formatting
  - est31 7y ago
    They can crack down on alternative clients at any time they want. You are living on borrowed time. A guest who is wild camping in their gated community walled garden private property.
    - outime 7y ago
      I also agree with you. It was painful when e.g. Twitter basically killed 3rd party apps. What happens here is that I don’t see any significant portion of Slack users moving to IRC anytime soon. Therefore, if you’re forced to use Slack, you should know that alternative clients are available as of today.

Pigo 7y ago

I'm glad Freenode has a user base for work related stuff, but I man do I miss when Undernet or Dalnet was still popular. I know I'll never run into my mother on IRC, and it is probably because of the format.

ircdrone 7y ago
I too miss the good old days of Undernet, where Romanian criminals would show off hacked systems, or DDOS other IRC users.
- Pigo 7y ago
  I miss the wild west, sue me. My entire life wasn't on whatever system I was using, so it wouldn't have mattered if someone messed it up. I don't miss the hardware of the time, but at least the web wasn't sterilized and owned by a few companies.
  - ircdrone 7y ago
    Correct, today’s internet has been taken over by companies and search engines by seo spam. But if there was anyone left enjoying tue good ole days of lawlessness, irc would still be a thing.
    - ohithereyou 7y ago
      I don't know where you went, but there are still plenty of people using IRC. Not as many as were in the past, but it's still popular enough with the crowd of people I hang around.
      - Pigo 7y ago
        Out of curiosity, what servers do you frequent? Or is it more personal servers that you and your friends run?
- ryanlol 7y ago

walrus01 7y ago

Give me irssi or give me death

_eht 7y ago
RIP In Peace
darkpuma 7y ago
You should give weechat a whirl.

kabwj 7y ago

IRCv3 is a scourge because of this. They’re looking to bloat the protocol. IRC is good because it’s IRC.

crankylinuxuser 7y ago
IRC was made a spec in 1993. Not 2003, or even 2013. And when that RFC was made, they made strong decisions about bandwidth costs. They gave up things like federation and more. So yeah, it's time that it's revisited in making a IRC that can be federated, multiple login/endpoints without using bouncers, and more. I welcome their new RFC. And it it doesn't work, we're free to keep what we currently have.
- pmlnr 7y ago
  What you're after is called XMPP.
  - duskwuff 7y ago
    No, it isn't. XMPP was designed primarily as an IM protocol to replace proprietary messengers like AIM and ICQ, not as a service for group chats. It's a flawed protocol even for IM, and its conference features verge on broken. (For example: A user's visible presence in a conference is neither necessary nor sufficient for them to send and/or receive messages in the conference.)

slezyr 7y ago

> IRC messages are always lines of characters terminated with a CR-LF (Carriage Return - Line Feed) pair, and these messages shall not exceed 512 characters in length, counting all characters including the trailing CR-LF. Thus, there are 510 characters maximum allowed for the command and its parameters. Yeah, lets just forget how painful it was for non english speaking users to use IRC. 255 characters for unicode and 510, but you have to guess encoding.

Athas 7y ago
I remember when this was a significant problem but with the rise of UTF-8 it is less so (even if that is strictly against the letter of the spec, it works fine in practice). Are there languages where the 510 bytes per message are a significant limitation?
- ygra 7y ago
  Isn't a major problem that the client cannot know how long the message can be because it's prefixed on the server side again (which counts into the 510 bytes). But apart from that, I've certainly had my share of truncated messages, both in German and English. Sometimes you want to express a thought in full in several sentences without twenty other channel messages appearing in between the sentences while you're typing.
- sirn 7y ago
  I can only speak from experience, but Thai language uses 3 bytes per character in UTF-8 and rely on vowels and tone marks to compose a word, so the number of bytes can grow pretty quick. A headline of an article in Thai have a good chance of exceeding 510 bytes. This is why one of the major Thai IRC networks were stuck with TIS-620 for a long time (ThaiNet/irc.thai.com, though I'm not sure if this is still the case) which is 8-bit compatible with ASCII (uses 0xA1 to 0xFB for Thai characters).
- slezyr 7y ago
  Cyrillic symbols are encoded in UTF-8 with two bytes. You limited with 255 characters.
7y ago

chapium 7y ago

Perhaps a side pan for embeds makes sense. upload images or code snippets by providing irc style references in the chat while not interrupting the flow of conversation because images and whatnot are expanded on the embed pane.

peterwwillis 7y ago

The idea of embedding links to multimedia is a good one. They just need to form an open standard for encoding media and rich text in text streams, and let clients parse the standard and decide how to format it. Text clients could remove any multimedia/rich text, GUI users could render it all, blind users would receive alt-tags in a way that's easily spoken by TTS, etc. Because it's a standard for encoding media in a text stream, you don't have to change the IRC protocol, just add a plugin to the client. You could even format it so the simplest clients could just strip everything but the text. Something like: %M!i=//shrt.url/j3f87h38f;t=fr,bb;a=Kitten Mittens! Finally, there is an elegant, comfortable mitten for cats. This indicates an image link, a text foreground color of red, text background color of black, and alt-text for the image as "Kitten Mittens". Any existing IRC client can simply remove everything from "%M!" to the "!" + newline, or if they don't, the text just shows up on its own line below the metadata, which isn't hard to read. You could even encode it in-line, such as "This is some %M!t=fr,b!text!." Harder to read if the client doesn't implement the standard, though.

dusted 7y ago

I agree, IRC, it is what it is, it's done, if you want something else, you want something else, not IRC.

emptyparadise 7y ago

Formatting is pure fluff - it's convenient to have bold/italic/spoiler/code tags, and it is possible to implement them in a TUI without degrading anybody's experience. Link tags are not really necessary and a lot of clients don't even have them. The image upload thing, though, the convenience there is being able to just upload an image directly into the client, rather than having to deal with some external service. That's it. There isn't much preventing this from being implemented in an IRC client. Character limits are silly and should be removed - enforce them with a moderation bot if you really have to. Just because most modern chat services are Electron trash does not mean we should throw out every bit of convenience learned. IRC (clients) could stand to gain better text formatting and file sharing options - things that make life easier for users, and in most cases don't really affect how the actual protocol works.

fnord123 7y ago

This really comes back to the Capability vs. Suitability model that Gary Bernhardt has spoken about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NftT6HWFgq0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NftT6HWFgq0 IRC is capable. It is a box of nuts and bolts that lets us communicate and build awesome bots and so on. Bloating the protocol gives us suitability: features that are robust and can federate.

fivre 7y ago

Lacking support for pretty much everything other than lines of text alongside a handle enables one of my favorite aspects of IRC: a 10-row terminal is more than sufficient for the entire client UI.

raverbashing 7y ago

I think if most people saw the limitations of irc as the author then it would still be the dominant protocol And it doesn't seem to me that "fixing" irc is just a matter of adding the bells and whistles, but there's some work to be done on the lower levels as well For example, how well would irc work on mobile? Keeping logs requires a bot usually on irc as well.

moftz 7y ago
For mobile, I had a bouncer setup that would keep me up to date whenever someone would message or mention me. I could pull up AndChat and connect right up to all of my channels, I was never actually offline. I had an icon on my taskbar that would connect me to my VPN and pull up irssi. I see now that there is a cloud client for mobile called "IRC Cloud", it sounds like a one step setup kind of bouncer for someone that doesn't have an always online machine to run a bouncer on. I really do miss using IRC all the time. My favorite server got taken down and I never bothered to find out where everyone ran off to.

zaarn 7y ago

Well, I consider stuff like the absence of server-side friend lists, server-rendered embeds and formatted messages a bug at best, though in IRC's case it's simply the lack of ability because the protocol is horribly outdated, modern approaches and limitations could afford a lot of QoL improvements.

maeln 7y ago

I love the simplicity of IRC, I still use it to this day, but I have to say, I understand why IRC cannot be used for any serious team communication. The two biggest pain point that I see is: 1. Because there is no real account management you don't have any proper authentication, which make administrating a channel real dodgy (even with network provided bots). 2. No offline history: You have to have a client/bouncer running 24/24 if you want history. One thing though, because of how IRC work, you don't have the problem that other protocol like XMPP faced with multy-device sync (there is a extension for that in XMPP but, like almost every extension in XMPP, not many client support it). Also, nowadays we should consider end-to-end encryption standard. I feel like IRC is in the same space as email: It's a very good technology that just lack a few feature to be perfect but any project that try to replace them just end up over-bloated with features ...

Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
I think both of these are important problems (and number among the issues I alluded to in the conclusion of the article). I hope to see them improved in the future and will provide whatever support I can to IRC networks working on them. However, if you're going to run your own IRC server you can also run your own bouncer service. Lots of authentication options exist as well. IRC is totally fine for an org who can stand up a server. It's pretty low-maintenance too.
swebs 7y ago
After doing some digging, it looks like there's some people working on a new spec for IRC version 3. One of the additions is the ability to request chat history from the server. Though I'm not sure when it will be implemented since it's been on the table for 4 years now. https://github.com/ircv3/ircv3-specifications/milestone/4/ https://github.com/ircv3/ircv3-specifications/milestone/4/
- derefr 7y ago
  > Though I’m not sure when it will be implemented Presumably, when some random IRCd hacker decides to spend their spare time doing so. Most of the IRCds are FOSS, no?

zimbatm 7y ago

The article doesn't talk about the best feature of Slack: a consistent message history for all the users. In IRC messages can easily get lost due to network splits or client disappearing. Not having everyone with the same message timeline can make some conversations quite awkward. This is really the only feature I miss in IRC.

nayuki 7y ago
In exchange, you have gut-wrenching systemwide outages of Slack once in a while. The CAP theorem says you can't have it both ways. News from 3 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20303479 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20303479
- deadbunny 7y ago
  Are you living in a world without netsplits?
  - ryanlol 7y ago
    Netsplits are pretty rare these days.
    - clarry 7y ago
      Yeah? I just counted six netsplits in the past 24 hours that affected a channel I'm on on IRCnet. I still love IRC. My second home.
      - ryanlol 7y ago
        This is because of IRCnet is operated by multiple entities and has rather peculiar links, other networks are not like this. http://dx.fi/alt/ircmap/fdp.png http://dx.fi/alt/ircmap/fdp.png here’s a map of IRCnet, they’re really going out of their way to generate netsplits. A network operated by a single entity doesn’t need such a silly amount of nodes, you can support hundreds of thousands of IRC uses on a single server.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

693471 7y ago

IRC is forever tainted by graybeards that won't give up their terminal clients. People who want to get work done have moved on. The next generation of developers have no interest in IRC. It's a dead end.

moftz 7y ago
I think you misunderstand the real quality of running an IRC client from anywhere on anything. I don't need to carry around a $4000 laptop to get my work done when I can use my home dev server from anywhere using a 10-year old Thinkpad junker. Break it? Pitch it and buy another for less than $100 on ebay.
- syntheticcdo 7y ago
  Saying Slack requires a $4000 laptop is a bit of hyperbole don't you think? I've used the Slack web client on a $300 Chromebook and it was just fine.
  - moftz 7y ago
    You don't need that for Slack but if you want a quality machine to carry around to handle your workload, that's the price neighborhood.
danmg 7y ago
Why should text chat need more than a 'terminal client'?
- mixologic 7y ago
  The bigger point is that 'text chat' is antiquated and unnecessarily limited, and that the advent of "richer" text chat is a gigantic improvement in communications efficiency. As one of these greybeards who started with 300 baud modems and text chats in the 80's, and moved onto IRC because the internet was better than BBS's, I wholeheartedly endorse the idea that the only people clinging to the UX garbagefire that is IRC are the people who are either unwilling or unable to adapt to the new reality that modern services offer so much more value than IRC will ever be capable of.

superkuh 7y ago

It isn't that the features don't exist. I think most people on IRC just see the internet as their platform. Integrating image hosting into IRC seems absurd when there are perfectly good browsers and ways to host or self host images. Stuffing everything into one client, or worse, one corporation just restricts features and provides a single point of failure in both technical and censorship terms.

ddingus 7y ago
I agree, however a simple image copy paste would see a ton of use. ...and a ton of hate.
abstractbeliefs 7y ago
An example of how this could work is that a client could support receiving an image. When this happens, it could upload it to an image host of choice, get the url, and send that. It's what users already do, but without having to pop a new tab, head to imgur, upload the image, and copy paste it back etc.
- superkuh 7y ago
  But why? Why add extra steps and add in having to keep the code to adapt to APIs or URL paths that change every 6 months? It's not like keeping a browser and IRC client open are mutually exclusive. I personally just $ cp whatever.jpg ~/www/ because I host my static site from my home connection and have for 20 years. I know self-hosting is not for everyone but everyone self hosting would literally solve all the problems of the web.
  - abstractbeliefs 7y ago
    well, it's an entirely client side thing to have, so the "why" very much comes down to the developers balance on adding extra code for extra convenience. The developer might like it personally, or they might find it's a feature that their users want, or both. As an example, I have my thinkpads prtscr button hooked up to automatically capture the screen, upload to 0x0.st, put the url into my clipboard, and then alert dunst to pop a notification that it's done. It takes a very common 60 second process and makes it almost as fast as prtscr, ctrl+v

anilakar 7y ago

IRCv3 notwithstanding, the protocol from a software engineering point of view is horrible. It doesn't support asynchronous operations because responses cannot be tied to their corresponding requests, and many commands, successful or not, require a human to parse. Too bad that IRCnet only runs whatever has been written down in an official IETF RFC. Despite all these deficiencies it's still widely used – My guess is that nobody has come up with a chat medium that would replace it completely. It's still pretty much the only decentralized, push-pull, clutter free real time discussion medium.

KirinDave 7y ago

Now let's talk about the inherent lack of a good centralized identity service, the danger of the majority of IRC servers and clients being written in C and the inefficiency of the protocol itself for applications like high latency links? We might also talk about the lack of important modern features like basic negotiation of client encoding capabilities and what an absolute tire fire DCC-based features continue to be due to the "just link to an external website" mentality that stifles all discussion of replacements?

chipotle_coyote 7y ago
I'm not sure if "festues" is a word I don't recognize or a typo for a word that I can't mentally correct into something I'd recognize.
- KirinDave 7y ago
  Fixed. Sorry, I've been engaging is user behavior that IRC as a protocol can't support: using a mobile client. I'm still new to going fast with my TAP strap.
- ben509 7y ago
  I think it was meant to be features.

enriquto 7y ago

I love this blog. When I read it I find myself repeatedly smashing the table with my fists and shouting "YES! OH MAN, YES!".

chicob 7y ago

I like IRC a lot. Simple, light, and a very good example of the minimalist principle that "less is more".

lossolo 7y ago

We are running our own IRC server (UnrealIRCd + Anope for services) for 10+ years. We have bots for gitlab/github, schedulers, management bots (you can basically control whole infrastructure and all services from IRC), event logging channels, alerting, jobs/tasks bots, status checking etc. all with authentication and authorization. This is working well for us, without any issues for years.

bluefox 7y ago

IRC is one of the few Internet venues I still frequent. Been using it since 1998. Some years ago an important (but small, private) channel moved from EFnet to Freenode, so that is the network I now use. Seeing Freenode IRCops looking to fix what ain't broken ("but it's opt-in" they'll say..) makes me have doubts about the move. If this sounds "get off my lawn" to you, you're getting it.

abstractbeliefs 7y ago
You're welcome to come chat to me in ###kline over there, there's some useful upstream discussion on it here as well: https://cmpwn.com/@kline/102333166678467931 https://cmpwn.com/@kline/102333166678467931 Make no mistake, we don't want to change IRC, but we do want to take some of the sharp edges off. I'll never move away from hexchat, the client I use now, and maintaining that backwards compatibility and character for all users is a red line for us.
buzzert 7y ago
What are some good channels to visit in 2019? I feel like most of the ones I used to frequent are dead silent now. And my small friend channels have since moved to Discord.
- bluefox 7y ago
  I guess the programming language related ones are a good start. In my experience they have a high signal-to-noise ratio. Otherwise, it depends on your interests... you can always start your own, making sure it's good... There is/was a /list command, but I never really used it as all the good channels were at least +s ;) It's all word of mouth, really.

frou_dh 7y ago

Kooky "reaction GIFs" in work chat are so inane. I mean, there's certainly a time and a place for browsing funny GIFs on the web, but making it a first-class part of work chat is so juvenile it's unreal.

abstractbeliefs 7y ago
For what it's worth, that's not the intention on freenode's side - we want to sand off some of the rough edges. As an example, it would be nice to have a common flow for speaking to services. Once we have some sensible way, then clients can sensibly opt to pop a dialog for new users allowing them to register an account with nickserv without having to fiddle away in a query.
Karunamon 7y ago
This mindset is alien to me. Humor is a generally positive thing and can't help but improve mental state while working.
- mceachen 7y ago
  > can't help but improve mental state Unless you regard it as inane. Throwing reaction gifs at a happy birthday/congratulation post is one thing. Throwing them into the oncall production ops channel and context switch everyone so they can see Homer back into a hedge is another.
  - alyandon 7y ago
    How is that really any different from someone engaging in off-topic banter in an IRC channel? Humans are being human and I don't really see how the problem as you describe it is somehow specific to non-IRC mediums.
  - Groxx 7y ago
    >Throwing them into the oncall production ops channel and context switch everyone so they can see Homer back into a hedge is another. This is part of the reason I like the "reactji" of slack / discord / etc. They don't cause a new message notification. Because of that, they're less interruptive, and you can do some interesting, useful things. Like lightweight interaction - we "seed" an up/down arrow pair for voting, people just click one. Or controlling bots more easily - we use one to add Qs to a queue, others to shut them up when they're being noisy, or there's fancier options: https://codeascraft.com/2018/10/10/etsys-experiment-with-immutable-documentation/ https://codeascraft.com/2018/10/10/etsys-experiment-with-imm...

abathur 7y ago

This reminds me of what Apple does to the SMS/MMS ecosystem. MUDs face a similar set of issues. Some new MUD frameworks skip over these by ignoring telnet and going HTML/JS. There's an interesting third path, GMCP, which is basically treated by the server/client (once support is negotiated) as out-of-band communication. If either end can't negotiate support, you get the basic experience. As a pressure-release valve, options like this can be better than clients or servers trying to overload the primary protocol with magic messages that other servers/clients without support are still forced to digest and display.

floor_ 7y ago

Anyone else still using microsoft comic chat?

dole 7y ago
It's dangerous to go alone. Take this. https://gist.github.com/richardg867/bb19ca2b03545f71ae15 https://gist.github.com/richardg867/bb19ca2b03545f71ae15 http://www.mermeliz.com/cchat.htm http://www.mermeliz.com/cchat.htm

mikedd 7y ago

I just use https://www.irccloud.com/ https://www.irccloud.com/ and it's the best of both wordls ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

dfabulich 7y ago

The article here claims that IRC is better than Matrix because Matrix supports pasting long snippets and IRC doesn't. The author furthermore claims that Matrix users are being a "nuisance" by posting long snippets to IRC with a link fallback, like this: ihabunek [m] sent a long message: < https://matrix.org/_matrix/media/blahblahblah > ihabunek [m] uploaded an image: image.png (39KB) < https://matrix.org/_matrix/media/blahblahblah > This is "being a nuisance"? It's just two chat lines, and the first line isn't meaningfully longer than a link to pastebin. Maybe pasting the image was a bit excessive, but it's very likely to be auto-expanded in GUI IRC clients, making it an excellent fallback. It's not "being a nuisance." It's two links. It's fine. The truth is, IRC folks do need to share long snippets and images, and they do it by linking to them; that's exactly what Matrix does when integrating with IRC. That's one among many reasons that Matrix is better than IRC.

Sir_Cmpwn 7y ago
I expanded on this here: https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/public-inbox/%3Ca6e64b69-c0cf-22b1-94e4-d948209392e8%40adelielinux.org%3E#%3CBV82SMB8KEDN.16DDFWUTXGJTE@homura%3E https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/public-inbox/%3Ca6e64b69-c0cf-...
- adrusi 7y ago
  Worth drawing attention to: many users are familiar and comfortable with the way that Twitter handles embedded content, which is more-or-less the solution that you said would be "less of a concern for you". I think this could prove to be a good compromise. https://i.imgur.com/O1qw0dI.png https://i.imgur.com/O1qw0dI.png
- joepie91_ 7y ago
  That seems like an extremely handwavy motivation, not much of an elaboration. > When one side sees it embedded in the chat but the other side sees it as a link, it affects how the former uses the feature and how the latter perceives the former, in ways that could be unexpected to the former. The point of my article is that these features have a social effect which is not necessarily positive. How does it affect it? What ways? What social effect? This explanation is totally devoid of any concrete examples of a mismatch of expectations and resulting social effects, it just alludes to them existing without any concrete basis - essentially weasel wording.

gridlockd 7y ago

> "Remember that not everyone is like you." Of course they aren't, but most people aren't like Drew Devault either. Most people don't use ancient hardware to prove some sort of point. The "Drew Devault will approve of it"-argument generally doesn't show up in a business case. In a perverse way, I am glad that programmers come up with better and better ways to waste hardware resources. In doing so, they ensure the continued progress of the semiconductor (and battery) industry through mass market demand. I do not believe it is a coincidence that Moore's law has slowed significantly right at the time when computers became "good enough" for the everyday user. If it wasn't for gamers spending hundreds of dollars on pushing more pixels on-screen, we'd be way behind on deep learning. Buy a new computer, Drew.

u801e 7y ago
> Buy a new computer I've purchased a number of computers over the last several decades, yet using facebook/slack is still slower and less responsive on a computer with a Core i7 processor and 16 MB of system memory and a 100 Mbps downstream connection compared with using usenet/irc on a 486 with 16 MB of system memory and a a 28.8 kbps downstream connection.
- gridlockd 7y ago
  > I've purchased a number of computers over the last several decades Good, keep going.

stcredzero 7y ago

P.S. A friend pointed out that the migration of non-hackers away from IRC is like a reverse Eternal September, which sounds great I was a part of the original Eternal September in the 1980's as the Internet was opened up to undergrads. The idea of a "Reverse Eternal September" sounds super awesome! I wonder how it can be implemented? (In a limited context, not across the whole of the Internet, of course.)

ohithereyou 7y ago
Tilde servers were sort of the start in my mind of things like that, as is SDF
- stcredzero 7y ago
  I only know SDF as the abbreviation of the Sol Defense Force from the Robotech anime translations.
antepodius 7y ago
Well, the the article pointed out one way... Have a community somewhat gated by the need for technical proficiency, and have a bigger, shinier, "popcorn internet" alternative (facebook) to bait the normies away from it. For example, suckless programs are configured by compiling them from source. This is for several reasons, but one explicit one is that it keeps away less technical users, keeping the userbase "small and elite". The eternal september happened when the manswarm flooded in; you can't bail out the flood, but it'll drain to a lower-common-denominator cesspool if one is available, and you might be able to build a high enough tower to stay above the waterline.

andrewshadura 7y ago

Have the author tried to write bots for Matrix? It's much simpler than for IRC and doesn't require a persistent connection.

MaxLeiter 7y ago
I don't think the author would agree its much simpler: https://drewdevault.com/2018/03/10/How-to-write-an-IRC-bot.html https://drewdevault.com/2018/03/10/How-to-write-an-IRC-bot.h...

xvilka 7y ago

Ability to remove spam messages would be awesome, these days it is very hard to deal with on a public channels. Also log out of the box. None of them are distraction. And proper authentication out of the box. Better design for poor, unstable connections, i.e. mobile phones.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

Justsignedup 7y ago

Counterpoint: The lack of accessibility in Slack does not mean it shouldn't be solved. Baby with the bathwater. Why dump all of slack when instead we can work on an accessible interface.

mproud 7y ago

This is called being stubborn. If you don’t adapt, you die. Wanna die? Sure, no one is stopping you.