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Ask HN: What's Wrong with IRC?

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

#81

Post by eterps »

crtasm wrote: post #78
duskwuff wrote: post #15

> 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 SEN…

Ergo (formerly Oragono) covers some of that. I can't say if it provides a server based search. > https://ergo.chat/about - Combining the features of an ircd, a services framework, and a bouncer (integrated account management, history storage, and bouncer functionality). Putting it into SASL-only mode is a couple lines in the config. I'm not sure if you meant poorly supported in clients. Are there any clients that don…

Upvoted, this looks better than most IRC solutions I've seen.

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

#82

Post by mariusor »

esbeeb wrote: post #71

IRC is not mobile-friendly (and I have to regretfully admit we live in a push-notification-requiring sort of world now). Myself, I needed something IRC-like, which was open-source, and mobile friendly , so I tried Mattermost team server for a few years. What turned me off over time was that it required manual upgrades. I would have preferred something which was a nice, tidy Debian package. Now I've turned to the pros…

One of the former SourceHut developers has worked on a pretty good mobile client: Goguma. https://f-droid.org/packages/fr.emersion.goguma/

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

#83

Post by elric »

duskwuff wrote: post #59
elric wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No support for server-side history That's a feature, not a bug. If you want conversations to be searchable, use email. Instant messaging is like phone calls or in person communication: transient (if potentially async). > No support for attachments. Good, no silly gifs cluttering up the chat. But this is a feature that's easily added. > Poor user authentication This one probably has the most merit. But probably easy…

> [server-side history] That's a feature, not a bug. Whatever your personal feelings on message history are, people and businesses need functionality like usable mobile clients they can receive messages in without keeping the client open continuously, or the ability for administrators to delete messages which have been sent by other users. IRC doesn't, and cannot , provide those features. > [no attachments] Good, no…

> people and businesses need functionality like usable mobile clients they can receive messages in without keeping the client open continuously

Do they really, though? If Jim isn't at his desk and I still need to talk to him, I can just send him an email, or try again later. That is the part of communication that IRC excels at: fleeting conversations.

IRC chat history is old-school FOMO.

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

#84

Post by Arathorn »

cpach wrote: post #77
Arathorn wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Element is meaningfully worse to actually use. And it's still the best Matrix client I personally have used. fwiw we’ve spent the last few years fixing this, starting with mobile, and Element X is the result: https://element.io/labs/element-x . it’s more of a whatsapp/imessage/signal replacement rather than a discord replacement right now, but i really hope we fixed the UX this time. (edit: that said, at this point…

TBH, I’m surprised to hear Element (X) described like this. I thought the space that Matrix was intended for was group chat, similar to IRC, Slack, Discord, Mattermost, Zulip, etc. Now you say that Element X is a replacement for WhatsApp/iMessage/Signal, which to me is a totally different kind of application. Basically, I see WhatsApp et al as a better way to send SMS (E2EE) or send vacation pics to my family (withou…

Matrix is intended for chat of any kind. The 'messenger' featureset (i.e. WhatsApp/iMessage) is basically a subset of the 'Team Collaboration' (i.e. Slack/Discord/Teams) featureset. Historically Element has tried to handle both use cases, but it spread us too thin and we didn't pull it off.

So with Element X, we've very deliberately focused on the Messenger use case at first (also driven by the fact that we have more paying customers asking "i want to run my own decentralised WhatsApp/Signal alternative" than "i want to run my own encrypted Teams alternative") - and it is unrecognisably more polished and focused and usable than normal Element. To quote someone in one of the community Element X rooms a few days ago:

> just downloaded element x from f-droid and wowza it just.. loads instantly? can't believe i now live in the age of element being faster than discord

Once the 'messenger' use case is fully launched (aiming for "end of summer"), we'll then carefully add the team-collaboration features (spaces, threads, etc) back in - and hopefully end up with something which can be used for both.

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

#85

Post by katze77 »

steveklabnik wrote: post #9

> Admittedly, I haven't used IRC much and I know the UI/UX isn't the best, I mean, you seem to understand what's wrong. IRC is meaningfully worse to use than Slack/Discord. So people use stuff that's nicer to use. > but that could probably be fixed pretty easily and tacked on to the existing messaging infrastructure? If it were easy, it would have already been done. "The UX isn't great" isn't a recent discovery, it's…

Yes, the fascinating thing about Matrix is that they have 30+ clients listed on their page of which none (!) implements all the features of the protocol — for instance, there is no client that supports E2E and multiple accounts.

You would think instead of creating more than 30 sub-par clients it would make sense to create one that is actually good.

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

#86

Post by kaladin-jasnah »

dingnuts wrote: post #61
kaladin-jasnah wrote: post #33

Actually, I think my biggest issue with IRC is that at least in the past, it looked like it leaked my IP address to chats, which is a pretty big privacy issue (they can figure out what country/province/national subdivision I live in, and that makes me uncomfortable). While I'm sure Discord or Slack or Teams has my IP address at a company level, at least individuals in a Discord/whatever cannot by default get my IP ad…

this has been configurable in at least some IRCds for a very long time, to hide the host. It's been that way from personal experience for at least fifteen years, but it could be longer.

Well, that's awkward. I should have learned that. Unfortunately, it also speaks to the unfriendliness of IRC that I've looked this up before and the answers are always "get a VPN."

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

#87

Post by jodrellblank »

crtasm wrote: post #79
jodrellblank wrote: post #51

I spend time in a coding Discord channel, it's a regular many times a day thing for people to paste 1-10 lines of code. With syntax highlighting. That's not possible on IRC, pasting 10 lines is "spam" and gets you complained at, everyone needs their own syntax highlighter, or the sender needs to bodge uploading to a pastebin site and other people need scripts to fetch them or clicking links waiting for a separate pro…

I see emoji on IRC every day btw :)

I'm sure you do see them, but having encodings consistent between sending client and receiving client isn't part of IRC; RFC 2812 - Internet Relay Chat: Client Protocol[1] says:

    > 2.2 Character codes
    
    >   No specific character set is specified. The protocol is based on a
    >   set of codes which are composed of eight (8) bits, making up an
    >   octet.  Each message may be composed of any number of these octets;
    >   however, some octet values are used for control codes, which act as
    >   message delimiters.
    
    >   Regardless of being an 8-bit protocol, the delimiters and keywords
    >   are such that protocol is mostly usable from US-ASCII terminal and a
    >   telnet connection.
Mojibake from disparate clients is part of the design; people have had to go outside the standard to make undocumented informally specified variation(s) such as "use utf8". Saying IRC is encoding-agnostic passing 8-bit bytes around, is like saying "I see emoji using TCP/IP every day".

(Contrast with HTTP where a client can declare what it accepts in the request headers on a per-request basis, and servers can declare encodings they are sending in the response headers on a per-message basis. Contrast with proprietary Slack where one company codes every client and can make them all behave the same).

[1] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2812#section-2.2

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

#88

Post by Teckla »

scblock wrote: post #21
polpo wrote: post #16

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 screen…

Our group runs The Lounge, and at this point only a couple people use standalone clients any more (and one person with a Matrix bridge). It gives you all the above (except perhaps the company wide persistent history, I'm not sure) and it's still IRC.

The last time I looked at The Lounge, the installation and configuration seemed pretty involved, not to mention ongoing maintenance.

Has this improved recently?

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

#89

Post by Teckla »

theideaofcoffee wrote: post #40
polpo wrote: post #16

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 screen…

Being able to search in the past for a half-remembered conversation sounds great until you have idiotic, asinine corporate data retention policies that require anything beyond 90 days to be deleted anyway, for some bullshit reason like being open to litigation or whatever and that being subject to discovery. Then that's implemented with no warning to be able to migrate important info out into a wiki or other document…

Being able to search in the past for a half-remembered conversation sounds great until you have idiotic, asinine corporate data retention policies that require anything beyond 90 days to be deleted anyway, for some bullshit reason like being open to litigation or whatever and that being subject to discovery.

The company I work for has the same chat retention policy, but despite that, even being able to go back just 90 days has proven very useful!

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

#90

Post by Teckla »

jmclnx wrote: post #70
elric wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No support for server-side history That's a feature, not a bug. If you want conversations to be searchable, use email. Instant messaging is like phone calls or in person communication: transient (if potentially async). > No support for attachments. Good, no silly gifs cluttering up the chat. But this is a feature that's easily added. > Poor user authentication This one probably has the most merit. But probably easy…

I do not know why you were down voted, but I fully agree with you. I do not want to see pictures in IRC at all, you want pictures, movies etc, got to one of the many pointy-clicky apps. Or you can PM and send the pic to the person who wants it via email. No history, good for me, but you want history enable logging in your client. User authentication - maybe a bit harder for new people, but you also have the option of…

The solution to these issues isn't to simply not have those features, but to make it possible to toggle those features on/off.
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