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IRC turns thirty

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Re: IRC turns thirty

#31

Post by sdegutis »

twright0 wrote: post #28
sdegutis wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Respect goes both ways. It's not respectful to ask someone to speak differently than what they believe about existence.

If you see an equivalence between asking you to respect someone else's identity, and asking someone else to respect your opinion about their identity - I don't know what to tell you. It's not the same, and it's dishonest to claim it is.

It's asking me to assent to someone else's belief about the concept identity, all the while completely dismissing my belief about the concept of identity. It's inherently saying their belief is more important than my belief.

Re: IRC turns thirty

#32

Post by superkuh »

sithadmin wrote: post #5
subhro wrote: post #3

I am invariably going to see in the world of Slack, "IRC, why don't you die already". No, IRC is not going to die. FreeNode is alive and well. And while you busy slamming and wishing death of IRC, just check the memory usage of your Slack client.

How does the memory usage of my Slack clients in any way impact the utility of the tool? Private and public communities that are active, relevant, and directly impact my livelihood are on Slack, so I'm also on Slack. I'm also on IRC, Discord, and Telegram. This isn't a zero-sum game.

The problem is that those communities chose to use Slack. And now they're locked in to a proprietary protocol controlled by a single company with perverse incentives for censorship.

In prior years those communities would've chosen IRC. But nowdays everything has to be pretty hand hold your hand for you (ie, host your images, assume you know nothing of how to participate on the 'net by yourself).

It is a zero-sum game. And Slack has done the embrace, they done the extend, and they've started the extinguish (by cutting off IRC bridges).

Re: IRC turns thirty

#33

Post by gt565k »

ahhh IRC

It brought me the joys of learning how to program while trying to write some tcl scripts for eggdrop bots and goofing around in a shell setting up said bot.

Every time I think of IRC I get this nostalgic feeling of the good old times when communities were vibrant. It was so much easier to just hop on gamesurge or quakenet and find people to game with, organize pugs, find random channels where you can discuss things that interest you, and of course your favorite local's city mingle spot.

I made some good friends from my local city's IRC channel in the early 2000s that I still talk to this day.

I feel as though communities aren't as strong as they used to be as IRC has been slowly losing its population. It just had this quick and fluid way of hopping channels and finding people with similar interests. Listing all of the channels with their user count, and seeing what's popular, or even creating your own channel and community was so empowering.

Re: IRC turns thirty

#34

Post by donatj »

If you've never poked the IRC protocol directly, Google how to connect to IRC with Telnet.

You can pretty reasonably use IRC just by writing to a socket - by hand. It's all human readable and understandable. It's incredible. It's what an open protocol should be.

Writing a simple IRC client is a breeze!

Re: IRC turns thirty

#35

Post by peatmoss »

walrus01 wrote: post #29
keithnz wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sure.... I still use it. But now IRC is much much more fringe, somewhat like usenet, ftp, telnet, etc is very fringe these days. It used to be like THE social networking tool. Somewhat like facebook. Maybe one day facebook too will be used by developers to communicate while everyone else is in virtual worlds

ftp is fringe because it's unencrypted and deals very poorly with NAT, and has performance/scaling issues for huge file transfers and transfers with huge numbers of discrete files. telnet is fringe because it's totally plaintext and has obviously been replaced by ssh2 everywhere. whereas irc daemons can easily be linked together by TLS1.2 and irc clients can also talk to servers over TLS.

Yeah, it’s easy to get nostalgic about old stuff, particularly when the old stuff was legit good. But man, FTP and telnet needed to die in a fire.

Re: IRC turns thirty

#36

Post by ryanisnan »

superkuh wrote: post #32
sithadmin wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does the memory usage of my Slack clients in any way impact the utility of the tool? Private and public communities that are active, relevant, and directly impact my livelihood are on Slack, so I'm also on Slack. I'm also on IRC, Discord, and Telegram. This isn't a zero-sum game.

The problem is that those communities chose to use Slack. And now they're locked in to a proprietary protocol controlled by a single company with perverse incentives for censorship. In prior years those communities would've chosen IRC. But nowdays everything has to be pretty hand hold your hand for you (ie, host your images, assume you know nothing of how to participate on the 'net by yourself). It is a zero-sum game…

Slack is perfect for organizations, whereas IRC is not. And no, we're not locked into anything.

Re: IRC turns thirty

#37

Post by Operyl »

throwawaymath wrote: post #10
protomyth wrote: post #9

If someone was going to install an irc server, which one is recommended? Also, any client reconditions for Windows and Mac?

I like Textual on macOS. It's rather nice. EDIT: Since this seems to be unclear: I was referring to the second question regarding IRC clients.

For those confused: Textual isn't an IRC Server, it's an IRC client.

Re: IRC turns thirty

#38

Post by movedx »

yeukhon wrote: post #23

I hate Slack and I particularly despise Gitter. All the communities I had to go on at one point were totally out of service or totally uninterested in helping newbies. I am glad some organizations still use IRC as their main online network.

I used IRC Cloud for some time. Pretty good, actually. Works almost everywhere, nice UI. It's certainly no irssi in a tmux/screen, but it's pretty good. Costs $5/month when I was using it (so close to the same as a VPS or proxy.)

Re: IRC turns thirty

#39

Post by no_protocol »

walrus01 wrote: post #24
sysashi wrote: post #11

I feel like we will end up with another program that abstracts Slack/Telegram/IRC into neat CLI interface and we will go full circle again. :) Happy birth day IRC!

Until they recently shut it down (boooooo), it was possible to bridge a company Slack channel into IRC and vice versa. https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=sla...

My Discord IRC Slack Matrix bridge with Matterbridge [0] still works as of today, I didn't notice anything being shut down.

[0]: https://github.com/42wim/matterbridge

Re: IRC turns thirty

#40

Post by movedx »

donatj wrote: post #34

If you've never poked the IRC protocol directly, Google how to connect to IRC with Telnet. You can pretty reasonably use IRC just by writing to a socket - by hand. It's all human readable and understandable. It's incredible. It's what an open protocol should be. Writing a simple IRC client is a breeze!

I keep meaning to write a simple client to get some networking code practice. It's been sometime since I wrote some.

> It's what an open protocol should be.

I'm not sure how I feel about this. I agree, but I also want to welcome things like gRPC/Protobuffs over HTTP/2 which introduce really fast comms between clients and servers, sacrificing the visibility of the stream's contents.

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