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IRC turns thirty

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Re: IRC turns thirty

#111

Post by rakoo »

CookieMon wrote: post #74
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.

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.

The UI is the easiest thing to fix and as you have shown already has been for some time. What separates IRC and the rest is all the features you would expect by default in a messenger of the 21st century:

- history

- with search

- logins

- simple bots

- automatic content fetching (wiki/youtube Links, pics and gifs)

- file transfers that just work

- image pasting

- message editing

And probably others. Yes, those features exist in one way or another in IRC. The point is not whether you can or not; the point is how much time and energy do I want to spend to install and maintain those. I may have had the patience to do it a few years back, but I value other things now.

Re: IRC turns thirty

#112

Post by louiz »

bkircher wrote: post #79

Love IRC. But what client should I use on my telephone?

It might seem weird, and probably will not please everyone, but in my experience, using an XMPP client (Conversations) along with biboumi (an XMPP IRC bridge, https://biboumi.louiz.org (note: I'm the author)) is the best way to use IRC on mobile:

- You can idle in the channels without doing hundreds of part/join when your phone loses the connection

- You get the full backlog of what was said while your phone was offline

And you can host just one biboumi instance for all your users. You can even configure it to connect to just one IRC server. The users just have to join channels like #nodejs@irc.myxmppserver.com

Re: IRC turns thirty

#113

Post by [deleted] »

schindlabua wrote: post #102

I always envy the guy who registered the nick "e" on freenode. He must be ancient, one of the first users since NickServ came into being, and I imagine him as this grey-bearded programmer wizard who speaks in x86 assembly. He hangs around in ##C and I've seen him speak occasionally I think.

[deleted]

Re: IRC turns thirty

#114

Post by [deleted] »

schindlabua wrote: post #102

I always envy the guy who registered the nick "e" on freenode. He must be ancient, one of the first users since NickServ came into being, and I imagine him as this grey-bearded programmer wizard who speaks in x86 assembly. He hangs around in ##C and I've seen him speak occasionally I think.

[deleted]

Re: IRC turns thirty

#116

Post by PurpleRamen »

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.

What newbies? Users? Devs? Communities serve a purpose and are not for everyone.

On slack and Gitter they are often focused on work, on getting things done, so they really don't care about users or new developers and their problems which are unrelated to the project. And this is good, because everyone needs a channel where they can focus on getting things done.

Re: IRC turns thirty

#117

Post by Qwertie »

ailideex wrote: post #104
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.

I like slack quite a bit, but it's not designed to be a replacement for general use case of IRC - it focuses on specific use cases and can be manhandled into other use cases with a lot of pain towards the users. matrix.org/riot.im seems like a more sensible alternative to IRC - but their systems are overloaded and slow - multi second latency is the norm.

The speed has gotten better recently. It usually sends messages in under 1 second. The UI is still a little laggy when switching tabs but everything is slowly getting more polished and faster.

Re: IRC turns thirty

#118

Post by [deleted] »

Doxin wrote: post #108
pingec wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps #hackernews and #startups on freenode?

Another good starting point is #xkcd. it is a large channel with a lot of tech-ish and math-y people. EDIT: Note that channel discovery on IRC is largely a word-of-mouth thing so don't be shy to ask people for channel recommendations on irc. Most programming language have a dedicated channel, e.g. #D or #python or whatnot.

[deleted]

Re: IRC turns thirty

#119

Post by eahman09 »

Doxin wrote: post #108
pingec wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps #hackernews and #startups on freenode?

Another good starting point is #xkcd. it is a large channel with a lot of tech-ish and math-y people. EDIT: Note that channel discovery on IRC is largely a word-of-mouth thing so don't be shy to ask people for channel recommendations on irc. Most programming language have a dedicated channel, e.g. #D or #python or whatnot.

[flagged]

Re: IRC turns thirty

#120

Post by Qwertie »

tapland wrote: post #99

Met my fiancée over IRC many years ago and we're both using it as our main social communication with others online. It's an enclave untouched by much of the current toxicity of social media. It requires you to make friends with others based on your words and not content filtering algorithms. You are exposed to other people with other ideas since it isn't filtered. All with a reasonably high lowest level since the lac…

I only started using irc about 5 years ago but I have been using it daily since then and yeah the people on it aren't too bad. I have only really seen tech stuff on it recently, all the non tech irc channels I was in moved to discord :L
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