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IRC necromancy

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21–30 of 78 posts

Re: IRC necromancy

#21
post #9
post #7

irc is so useful that i cant believe it is dying, and aside from freenode perhaps even dead. so what killed the IRC? its not like theres any other alternative out there. slack seems to come close but its still very different and for a different purpose.

We use IRC sort of interchangeably with Slack at my work. The nice thing about IRC is you can host it on-premise and Slack doesn't have all of your company's confidential information. The downside is that it doesn't come bundled with a pretty webapp with GIFs and emojis.

To me, that's not a downside but a positive feature. At work, I connect to slack via the weechat wee-slack plugin, and it's great to filter out all that gunk. I want plain text chat, and this way I can still get it.

Re: IRC necromancy

#22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s always Riot https://about.riot.im/ which is a nice and fully open source app so you could set that up on-premise too. :)

Not sure why you're getting voted down. I'm looking for something to replace hip chat at the moment (we replaced slack with hipchat as slack didn't work well for us either), so I'm genuinely curious why a suggestion for riot is unpopular. Anyone care to comment?

What part of slack didn't work out for you? We're using slack at my workplace - and I think it's okish. Not a fan of it being a web app - but not frustrated enough yet to try the irc bridge with weechat (which is on my todo-list. Seems like a sane way forward, the last irc client I used was BitchX, and I don't think I'll likely to trust such an old c codebase with anything if I can help it..).

Now that everyone "knows" what slack is, I wonder if it's time to blow some dust off of Apache (née Google) wave...

Re: IRC necromancy

#23
post #7

irc is so useful that i cant believe it is dying, and aside from freenode perhaps even dead. so what killed the IRC? its not like theres any other alternative out there. slack seems to come close but its still very different and for a different purpose.

Discord, overwhelmingly. Every IRC community I used to be a part of even a year ago has made the jump. It's just more convenient for all concerned- the only holdouts are people clinging to their CLIs and people objecting for ideological reasons. I wish it hadn't come to this, but IRC's just stagnated for too long. The barrier to entry's too high, using it on mobile devices is a chore, the feature set's extremely limi…

I just wish this wasn't a battle of decentralization vs centralization. Discord seems cool and all but channel operators lack reasonable amount of ownership over their channels and Discord touches every message that comes through its network.

Re: IRC necromancy

#24
post #7

irc is so useful that i cant believe it is dying, and aside from freenode perhaps even dead. so what killed the IRC? its not like theres any other alternative out there. slack seems to come close but its still very different and for a different purpose.

There is still #xkcd on foonetic, #ludumdare on afternet, as well as #lobsters and #proglangdesign on freenode. They may not be active 24/7, but there are good conversationa there if you lurk for awhile.

Re: IRC necromancy

#25
post #7

irc is so useful that i cant believe it is dying, and aside from freenode perhaps even dead. so what killed the IRC? its not like theres any other alternative out there. slack seems to come close but its still very different and for a different purpose.

Discord, overwhelmingly. Every IRC community I used to be a part of even a year ago has made the jump. It's just more convenient for all concerned- the only holdouts are people clinging to their CLIs and people objecting for ideological reasons. I wish it hadn't come to this, but IRC's just stagnated for too long. The barrier to entry's too high, using it on mobile devices is a chore, the feature set's extremely limi…

discord has also had $80 million dollars in funding

an IRC network developed entirely by volunteers can't really compete with that sort of funding

Re: IRC necromancy

#26
post #10
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We use IRC sort of interchangeably with Slack at my work. The nice thing about IRC is you can host it on-premise and Slack doesn't have all of your company's confidential information. The downside is that it doesn't come bundled with a pretty webapp with GIFs and emojis.

At work we have an onsite Zulip instance which meets both those requirements for us (including SSO integration). It's surprising to me that there aren't more places using it.

That's a good suggestion, thanks.

Re: IRC necromancy

#27
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We use IRC sort of interchangeably with Slack at my work. The nice thing about IRC is you can host it on-premise and Slack doesn't have all of your company's confidential information. The downside is that it doesn't come bundled with a pretty webapp with GIFs and emojis.

There’s always Riot https://about.riot.im/ which is a nice and fully open source app so you could set that up on-premise too. :)

Yep. Perhaps emphasis on the "bundled with."

Unfortunately, I suspect Slack use at my company grew largely out of IT's unwillingness to spin up a web-facing IRC solution, and their unwillingness to expose internal services to the web. The latter is very convenient for sales or on-call employees. As a result of that security posture, we instead share tons of company secrets on a 3rd party service. It's kind of a weird local maxima.

Re: IRC necromancy

#28
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure why you're getting voted down. I'm looking for something to replace hip chat at the moment (we replaced slack with hipchat as slack didn't work well for us either), so I'm genuinely curious why a suggestion for riot is unpopular. Anyone care to comment?

What part of slack didn't work out for you? We're using slack at my workplace - and I think it's okish. Not a fan of it being a web app - but not frustrated enough yet to try the irc bridge with weechat (which is on my todo-list. Seems like a sane way forward, the last irc client I used was BitchX, and I don't think I'll likely to trust such an old c codebase with anything if I can help it..). Now that everyone "know…

The Slack IRC bridge works pretty well, IMO. I use it with irssi. The only negative I can think of is it joins you to every Slack channel you're in every time you reconnect. (Including #general, which you can't permanently leave.)

(I guess the other caveat is: it's a 3rd party hosted application; an internet outage or service outage could take it down, and it's potentially vulnerable to massive information leak in a way that your company isn't.)

Re: IRC necromancy

#29
post #7

irc is so useful that i cant believe it is dying, and aside from freenode perhaps even dead. so what killed the IRC? its not like theres any other alternative out there. slack seems to come close but its still very different and for a different purpose.

Discord, overwhelmingly. Every IRC community I used to be a part of even a year ago has made the jump. It's just more convenient for all concerned- the only holdouts are people clinging to their CLIs and people objecting for ideological reasons. I wish it hadn't come to this, but IRC's just stagnated for too long. The barrier to entry's too high, using it on mobile devices is a chore, the feature set's extremely limi…

> Discord, overwhelmingly.

A community I'm a moderator of recently set up shop in Discordland, due to its superior user management stuff. Both I and another person independently the similarities to IRC; I said that we're re-inventing IRC practices from the ground up.

Re: IRC necromancy

#30
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discord, overwhelmingly. Every IRC community I used to be a part of even a year ago has made the jump. It's just more convenient for all concerned- the only holdouts are people clinging to their CLIs and people objecting for ideological reasons. I wish it hadn't come to this, but IRC's just stagnated for too long. The barrier to entry's too high, using it on mobile devices is a chore, the feature set's extremely limi…

discord has also had $80 million dollars in funding an IRC network developed entirely by volunteers can't really compete with that sort of funding

What did Discord spend that money on?

I'd wager that most of the value gained was in marketing.

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