Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

IRC necromancy

virtuallyfun.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 78 posts

Re: IRC necromancy

#61

Post by kuschku »

metabrew wrote: post #60
kuschku wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Random irccloud/quassel anecdote for you: when I started working on what is now irccloud, I was originally just going to write a (mobile-)web front end for quassel core, since I was using Quassel on KDE at the time (and had been for some time). This predates Quasseldroid I think, at least I don't remember there being a good mobile app for quassel back then. The protocol between the quassel core and clients looked to…

The protocol are serialized Qt objects (I've started documenting it), but compared to Json, this gives a huge performance advantage.

It's planned to be replaced it with protobuf relatively soon, though.

Re: IRC necromancy

#62

Post by fapjacks »

rhave wrote: post #13

Oh, memories. We also made a lightweight channel service to take the load off of Q. I think it was a little before newserv came into production. We designed it over generous amounts of whisky in a suburb to Stockholm. It's on github ( https://github.com/quakenet/lightweight ).

For trivia, which suburb?

Re: IRC necromancy

#63

Post by Fjolsvith »

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…

Does Discord provide easy collection of communications to the NSA?

Re: IRC necromancy

#64

Post by kuschku »

CJefferson wrote: post #59
kuschku wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 acc…

I'm glad you are working on that, but "Just run the core anywhere (we’re looking into offering it hosted, too), connect with the web ui," really doesn't count as easy to use -- now everyone on my IRC channel needs to run a server which is is accessable to the internet, worry about security updates, both for the server and your software specifically. Whereas with slack, I just do "make account, login, done". Until it'…

> now everyone on my IRC channel needs to run a server which is is accessable to the internet, worry about security updates, both for the server and your software specifically.

Well, the beautiful thing about this is that you can run one quassel core, for dozens, hundreds, or potentially even thousands of users.

LDAP login is also supported, and I might add later on automated connecting to a pre-configured network.

You can probably imagine that this is very useful already.

Re: IRC necromancy

#65

Post by kuschku »

na85 wrote: post #49
kuschku wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, Quassel is the same, open source, under GPL, self-hosted. (Disclaimer: I contribute to Quassel occasionally)

Again, it needs to be baked into the server, otherwise it's just another barrier to entry.

That’s not really possible, actually.

The push notification systems used by Android and iOS only allow the same person that can authorize updates for an app to send push notifications to this app.

This means either every IRC app would need to operate an open gateway for notifications, or you’d need to give every IRC server the same certificate that you use to sign your app updates on the Apple AppStore.

Push notifications on mobile devices are designed to only work for situations where the same company controls all servers, and apps.

Re: IRC necromancy

#66

Post by opless »

rhave wrote: post #13

Oh, memories. We also made a lightweight channel service to take the load off of Q. I think it was a little before newserv came into production. We designed it over generous amounts of whisky in a suburb to Stockholm. It's on github ( https://github.com/quakenet/lightweight ).

Q has been around for ~20 years, is quakenet still growing?

Re: IRC necromancy

#67

Post by james_a_craig »

I'm also known as MadHacker, and I'm the original author of one of the other Q variants on the list (Q3). It's good to see people still interested in the history of IRC, especially as it seems to be slowly dying, sadly. I've spoken to the author about the various sets of source code for QuakeNet's services, but the versions linked are the best we can find just now. If there's anyone out there with old copies of any of the Q variants, it'd be good to hear from you. -- MadHacker@quakenet

Re: IRC necromancy

#68

Post by lambada »

jiggunjer wrote: post #52
Linuturk wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having setup and attempted to administer an IRC server, I'd say that's where the barrier exists for someone wanting to create a new community outside of the huge Freenode network.

Why would you want to go outside freenode? They're run by a charity promoting free communication and have encryption for registered users.

So I want to create a new set of channels on freenode. From the home page (on mobile) I’m presented with the following page

https://freenode.net/groupreg

Which is a) very wordy. B) appears to essentially say “only certain kinds of groups are welcome”. C) doesn’t have a simple way of doing so instead being “reach out and discuss with us and then maybe we’ll let you set up shop here”

Re: IRC necromancy

#69

Post by astrobe_ »

YSFEJ4SWJUVU6 wrote: post #46
SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

These kinds of comments almost make me not want to live on this Earth any more.

Most comments really just say:

"IRC is like email. An old boring tool that just does its job. I'm not having fun with it, I'm not feeling special when using, so I need a 'modern' alternative."

Re: IRC necromancy

#70

Post by na85 »

kuschku wrote: post #65
na85 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, it needs to be baked into the server, otherwise it's just another barrier to entry.

That’s not really possible, actually. The push notification systems used by Android and iOS only allow the same person that can authorize updates for an app to send push notifications to this app. This means either every IRC app would need to operate an open gateway for notifications, or you’d need to give every IRC server the same certificate that you use to sign your app updates on the Apple AppStore. Push notifica…

Okay, well, now we've discovered a big obstacle to irc adoption on mobile.

Things like this are the reason slack and discord ate irc.

Most users simply won't sign up for 3 services just to chat.

Post reply on HN