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Ask HN: What's Wrong with IRC?

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Re: Ask HN: What's Wrong with IRC?

#11

Post by johnea »

Nothing? I read these HN link posts from IRC. ##hntop on libera network.

Many s/w projects still maintain support channels on IRC.

The migration to proprietary support mechanisms isolates a number of users. Mozilla in particular is much more difficult to interact with since migrating away from IRC.

I've also worked for a company that ran it's own XMPP chat server. XMPP chat clients allow file attachments, see messages from times when client is disconnected (without a bouncer), integration of voice and video chat, whiteboard, etc. Pretty much everything slack, discord, etc offer.

This question is similar to why do companies use the cloud, when most of the time they could just run a server. My biased opinion: laziness. Mostly the laziness of following fashion instead of the technically superior solution.

Re: Ask HN: What's Wrong with IRC?

#12

Post by nutrie »

doubled112 wrote: post #7
skilled wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shell sessions and bouncers sort of alleviate the history issue if that is what you really need. I always thought that not having history was part of the magic of IRC. That said, all your private messages as well as any messages in public channels can be logged and will persist on your PC until you delete them.

You can't just tell Julie in HR to get a persistent shell session and set up her bouncer. For Matrix, you can say "go to chat.company.com" and click log in with Google.

> For Matrix, you can say "go to chat.company.com" and click log in with Google.

And half of them logs in with their private Google account.

Re: Ask HN: What's Wrong with IRC?

#13

Post by xboxnolifes »

"I know the UI/UX isn't the best, but that could probably be fixed pretty easily" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Most of the time when you ask "why isn't open source thing more popular" the answer is UI/UX. Impericaly, it is neither easy nor common for open source software to have good enough UI/UX to be adopted by non-technical people.

Re: Ask HN: What's Wrong with IRC?

#14

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

doubled112 wrote: post #7
skilled wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shell sessions and bouncers sort of alleviate the history issue if that is what you really need. I always thought that not having history was part of the magic of IRC. That said, all your private messages as well as any messages in public channels can be logged and will persist on your PC until you delete them.

You can't just tell Julie in HR to get a persistent shell session and set up her bouncer. For Matrix, you can say "go to chat.company.com" and click log in with Google.

You absolutely can tell Julie in HR to log into the company instance of The Lounge or whatever friendly frontend IT set up. Users should no more need to run their own bouncer than their own homeserver.

Re: Ask HN: What's Wrong with IRC?

#15

Post by duskwuff »

> What's Wrong with IRC?

• No support for server-side history, and all that comes with that (usable mobile clients, offline messaging and push notifications to mobile clients, persistent presence in channels, search, editing/deleting messages, auditability, etc). Bouncers are a poor solution, as they aren't part of the IRC server and integrate awkwardly, if at all, with clients.

• No support for attachments. (DCC SEND isn't a solution; not only does it require direct IPv4 connection between users, but it doesn't work at all in groups.)

• Poor user authentication. Connection-time auth solutions like SASL are poorly supported; after-connection auth like NickServ is hokey. Support for federated (non-password) authentication is practically nonexistent.

• Short - and unpredictable - message length limits (typically around 500 bytes).

• Crude permissions system.

Re: Ask HN: What's Wrong with IRC?

#16

Post by polpo »

If all you want is text chat with no shared history, sure IRC is fine. But think about these features that the chat apps bring:

Search: half-remember some conversation from months/years ago? It's right there, in the app.

Persistent history: onboarding a new employee? All of the company's past communication is there to browse and search (see above point).

Inline file attachments: need to share a small file or a screenshot with someone? Drag it into the app and they can get it at their leisure. No need to mess around with DCC send or uploading to Google Drive and sharing a link, it's right there.

All of these could be solved with IRC (in fact, Slack was initially built around IRC) but they require extra infrastructure and tooling and development to make it seamless, and that takes extra development and hosting costs.

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