61–70 of 232 posts
Has anyone noticed that Slack communities are a lot less active these days? And IRC communities are less active these days. Where are the chatters going to now?
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!
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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.
Why not? Organizations can host their own IRC server(s). Won't that be better than relying on a third-party's services?
And if needed, they can write their own bots, clients, or even their own specific extensions to the protocol.
It is worth noting that IRC is in the middle of overhaul and upgrade with IRCv3 [1] standard. Sadly not many clients and servers support it (almost none of them). [1] https://www.ircv3.net
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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 telnet is fringe because it's totally plaintext and has obviously been replaced by ssh2 everywhere.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.
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IRC isn't "dying off." Many (many) projects still use it as their main communication channel for developers/users.
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
Don't conflate protocols that are terrible with protocols that aren't 'hip'. ftp and telnet have been replaced (thankfully) and should die in a fire. Usenet is still cool though.
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 tried it before and it's not as easy as it sounds. There is no one spec, it's a handful of RFCs and other ad hoc extensions that are barely documented anywhere. I think there's at least a dozen different documents you have to refer to.
I'm not sure you need any of these for communicating via telnet or writing a small bot that will answer back.
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Slack is perfect for organizations, whereas IRC is not. And no, we're not locked into anything.
> Slack is perfect for organizations, whereas IRC is not. Why not? Organizations can host their own IRC server(s). Won't that be better than relying on a third-party's services? And if needed, they can write their own bots, clients, or even their own specific extensions to the protocol.
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 tried it before and it's not as easy as it sounds. There is no one spec, it's a handful of RFCs and other ad hoc extensions that are barely documented anywhere. I think there's at least a dozen different documents you have to refer to.