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IRC necromancy

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Re: IRC necromancy

#31

Post by pavel_lishin »

kakarot wrote: post #23
LocutusOfBorges wrote: post #18

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…

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.

I'm not necessarily disagreeing, but do you mean ownership over Discord channels or Discord servers?

Re: IRC necromancy

#32

Post by scruffyherder »

lowglow wrote: post #3

I think the author, Neozeed, is the person back in the day when I asked them to teach me how to "hack", they instead taught me what telnet was and that there was a larger network beyond AOL. It lead me to what I am today. Thanks.

Unixgod? Lol long long time ago. ...

But I'm just hosting this post, it's not mine. The rest of the blog ramblings are.

Re: IRC necromancy

#33

Post by ryandrake »

kakarot wrote: post #23
LocutusOfBorges wrote: post #18

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…

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.

Unfortunately it seems to be an irreversible trend: Decentralized/federated services with many compatible client options are dying and being replaced by many competing and incompatible centralized services, each with few (or one) client options. It's like programmers are all constantly asking the question: "How can we make the Internet worse?"

If E-mail were invented today, there would be 5+ competing protocols, owned by 5+ competing companies, you could only use clients written by those companies, and you wouldn't be able to send E-mail to someone on a different service than the one you were on. Kind of like the current text chat app cluster-fuck we have to live with.

Re: IRC necromancy

#34

Post by dijit »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #30
blibble wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Odd argument. I run an irc network. Quite a large one. My funding is less than 0.00001% of that. It doesn't take much to out compete monetarily. Even if a large amount of your total money goes to marketing.

Re: IRC necromancy

#35

Post by astrobe_ »

LocutusOfBorges wrote: post #18
jaequery wrote: 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…

> The barrier to entry's too high

I don't understand this statement. One finds IRC clients everywhere. One literally has to know just one command at the beginning: /join. And then if you Google "IRC commands" or something like that, you get the rest of them easily (if your client lacks in the help area).

> the feature set's extremely limited

I don't understand this mindset. Why should a program have an extra-large set of features? Is the value of a program measured by the number of features it has?

> Had IRCv3 managed to get off the ground and made some strides towards creating a modern user experience maybe two years ago, Discord wouldn't have had such a vulnerable market open for it to stroll in and snatch up

Apples and oranges. Discord did have serious opponents named Teamspeak, Skype, Mumble and other VOIP clients - but certainly not IRC. And if my memory serves, the first thing they did was to make sure to dislodge those programs from the gamers community.

Re: IRC necromancy

#36

Post by SOLAR_FIELDS »

astrobe_ wrote: post #35
LocutusOfBorges wrote: post #18

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…

> The barrier to entry's too high I don't understand this statement. One finds IRC clients everywhere. One literally has to know just one command at the beginning: /join. And then if you Google "IRC commands" or something like that, you get the rest of them easily (if your client lacks in the help area). > the feature set's extremely limited I don't understand this mindset. Why should a program have an extra-large se…

I’ve been a software engineer for several years now and I still have trouble with MiRC and Adium. I tried Irssi and eventually gave up with it. The problem with IRC is that even the “simple” clients never just work. There’s always some little infuriating quirks that you have to dive super deep into configs to figure out if it’s even possible to resolve without some sort of PR to the repository.

Re: IRC necromancy

#37

Post by kuschku »

SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #36
astrobe_ wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The barrier to entry's too high I don't understand this statement. One finds IRC clients everywhere. One literally has to know just one command at the beginning: /join. And then if you Google "IRC commands" or something like that, you get the rest of them easily (if your client lacks in the help area). > the feature set's extremely limited I don't understand this mindset. Why should a program have an extra-large se…

I’ve been a software engineer for several years now and I still have trouble with MiRC and Adium. I tried Irssi and eventually gave up with it. The problem with IRC is that even the “simple” clients never just work. There’s always some little infuriating quirks that you have to dive super deep into configs to figure out if it’s even possible to resolve without some sort of PR to the repository.

Well, quassel for example doesn’t even have configs, everything is done in simple ways via the UI, and everyone, including the devs, uses that. It’s rocksolid, just works, and if you use the core/client split version, you can also connect a webinterface and mobile client to it.

Re: IRC necromancy

#38

Post by kuschku »

na85 wrote: post #20
jaequery wrote: 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.

Change aversion killed IRC. A lot of the opers on the big networks are extremely conservative and default to poo-pooing ideas because it's simpler. IRC with good mobile/push support could have taken off, but using it from a mobile device is painful because of the constant drops and the need to have your device responding to ping pongs every few seconds kills your battery.

> IRC with good mobile/push support could have taken off, but using it from a mobile device is painful because of the constant drops and the need to have your device responding to ping pongs every few seconds kills your battery.

You mean, something like IRCCloud, or what I’m moving Quasseldroid to right now?

Re: IRC necromancy

#39

Post by kuschku »

CJefferson wrote: post #17
jaequery wrote: 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.

For me, it is the fact that most people connect with multiple devices, and want to have a smooth transition between them, and to be able to see history on all of them. There is no easy way of doing that with IRC, which kills it for me.

> There is no easy way of doing that with IRC, which kills it for me.

Yes, there is! This is exactly what Quassel is made for.

Just run the core anywhere (we’re looking into offering it hosted, too), connect with the web ui, the desktop client (Linux, Mac, Windows - uses Qt5, and is only a few megabytes, uses almost no RAM at all. A true native client), or the Android client.

As many devices as you want under one account, a smooth transition from one to any other, shared history (just scroll up - all devices remember where the others left off, and you always see exactly the same on all of them).

With some minor extra effort, you even get nice and fast fulltext search – this video is recorded on a 2$ OVH VPS, searching through 3 years and 6GB of logs in 65ms: https://s3.kuschku.de/public/quassel-rest-search.mp4

All of this under GPL.

Re: IRC necromancy

#40

Post by zanny »

jaequery wrote: 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.

On the bright side from all the proprietary locked in sell-your-data platforms that were mentioned as IRC successors, Gitter and Matrix are popular and open, and the later is federated. I'm not aware of any major feature IRC has the Matrix protocol doesn't provide, and it has all the niceties of Discord without being the proprietary product of a for profit company.
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