Love IRC. But what client should I use on my telephone?
I don't know about iPhones, but for Android there is 'IRC for Android' which had so far been excellent.
IRC turns thirty
81–90 of 232 posts
Re: IRC turns thirty
#82very cool. I started with IRC circa 92, on a VAX VMS system after discovering it using Gopher :) Was great, though very addictive. The internet wasn't very well known, and not many people were online, and it was very common to make friends all around the world. I travelled and met a lot of people all over the world through IRC. I remember quite a number of people starting relationships and having babies ( many of whi…
> Then it started to die off with the rise of the web and alternative chat software.
That's news to me and the ~eight IRC networks I'm on.
Re: IRC turns thirty
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
In my opinion the reasons for loss of userbase & mindshare:
1 Spam and noise -> No proper authentication and moderating system for channels. It's hard to keep bad agents out of channels.
2 Competition -> Forums had more features (including a solution for point 1, also https) and didn't require a special client. If you could easily send cat gifs in chats IRC would have been great.
Re: IRC turns thirty
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Listen, you want to convince my boss to spend more on the infra. For in house chat w/ drag and drop file hosting, and boost my pay for now having responsibility to manage that, be my guest :)
Re: IRC turns thirty
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
For most of the client protocol, it's just RFC 1459 and RFC 2812. Then there's CTCP, DCC, server-to-server protocols and the 005 numeric. I'm not sure you need any of these for communicating via telnet or writing a small bot that will answer back.
Each of the big servers implement their own extensions, or share some extensions but not others. All poorly recorded in many documents across the Web.
To have a modern irc client, it is far from a clean protocol. If you just want the basics, it will still connect and send messages.
Re: IRC turns thirty
#86I 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.
Is there a reason IRC couldn't look like slack to the user? kiwiirc is an opensource webUI IRC client (demo at https://kiwiirc.com/ ). To my untrained eye it looks slack-ish, but not being a slack-native I'm not really sure what Slack's draw is and whether its something webUI clients for IRC can't do.
Wow, that is pretty darn nice for an IRC client!
Re: IRC turns thirty
#87I 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.
You’re conflating technology and community.
Ultimately, it is impossible to separate those two entities.
Re: IRC turns thirty
#88Love IRC. But what client should I use on my telephone?
You can use a self hosted client like The Lounge which maintains IRC connections on your own server, and then you can view the client via a web browser (so it looks great on a phone, and you can get web push notifications)
It basically acts like any other chat client (e.g. works on multiple devices at the same time)
Re: IRC turns thirty
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except for the complete lack of security and blind trust of server operators? It's downright dangerous to use it,but then again people still use email.
Your argument can be made about more or less any popular chat platform to have ever existed. At least you can set up your own IRCd, so you and your friends don't have to trust nobodies on the Internet.
To be fair, you do have to ultimately trust everyone communicating with you. Trust is pernicious in that way. That is to say, there is nothing guaranteeing that the communication delivered to your server is what was sent by your clients in a completely "open" system.
There are ways to fix this, I think. And I make no claims that common chat systems have fixed this. Just pointing out that having your own IRCd server is not at all solving it.
Re: IRC turns thirty
#90Love IRC. But what client should I use on my telephone?
On iOS I am extremely happy with Palaver. There’s a ZNC plugin to send you notifications when you are mentioned, if that is something you need or want.
It’s not free, but I think it was around the $2 mark and definitely worth the money.