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IRC turns thirty

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Re: IRC turns thirty

#121

Post by kilon »

fouc wrote: post #43

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?

Discord. It was made mainly for games and it has exploded the last few years for pretty much about everything. I was introduced to Slack because the programming language I was using had its official channel there. They had also an irc channel but people were not willing to use it. Then I made a discord server mainly because I was using Discord for Unreal Engine , which has to this day the most active community there according to my experience. Without me realizing it the main dev of the language I was using abandoned Slack and used my Discord server. I made him admin and the rest of the community reluctantly followed cause being coders saw no point using a game orientated chat client but a year later not only the Slack server was almost completely abandoned but not one even mentioned Slack or IRC.

Re: IRC turns thirty

#122

Post by eahman09 »

xvilka wrote: post #58

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

It is worth nothing that IRCv3 is a coup d'etat made by a closed coven of developers:

Most IRC clients are slowly developed or almost dead these days; the modus operandi of the IRCv3 developers is that they write patches for those IRC clients to support IRCv3 features and then push hard for the maintainers of those clients to merge them ("this is what the future of irc looks like! it's what the other clients are implementing! do you wanna be the only one not implementing it???")

They argue the development of their "standards" is open, but the truth is that nobody cares about it (most people are OK with IRC as it is now) so very few people contribute; they pretend that nobody complaining is a tacit agreement that everybody is OK with their changes, when that's far from the truth.

Re: IRC turns thirty

#123

Post by bremensaki »

louiz wrote: post #112
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 offl…

This is exactly what I do - I use Conversations and biboumi to idle in a bunch of channels for various projects I'm watching.

Thanks louiz! You do good work!

Re: IRC turns thirty

#124

Post by Qwertie »

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 tried that once. Main issue is you have to reply to the pings or you get kicked.

I have found Matrix to be easier to interact with. You need a HTTP client instead of netcat but it's super simple to send JSON from a program or terminal.

Re: IRC turns thirty

#125

Post by schindlabua »

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.

Are you talking about freenode? I just joined #xkcd and it's 8 people and no topic set. 3 other users joined and immediately left, I guess those were from HN aswell.

(A big channel for everyone to join is ##programming, by the way.)

Re: IRC turns thirty

#126

Post by kilon »

I was never a fan of IRC although I am still a part time user since 1995. I was always annoyed losing replies just because I went offline and of course all the weird self disconnects and occasional banning bots. Sending files was also a big pain. But was simple to use and with tons of communities so I never actively complained about it. I converted to Discord and never looked back. On the other hand I was never deep into social activity online.

Re: IRC turns thirty

#127

Post by dewey »

The communities around torrent tracker was and is always very active on IRC as having your own IRC network is pretty standard for a tracker. I probably spent the majority of my time during my studies on IRC, and because of timezones it was mostly during the night. I have very fond memories of this time and I'm a bit sad that I don't use it that much any more.

I really can't wrap my head around how communities, especially for programming languages use Slack where all the information gets fed into some silo and is not publicly available. Especially if they don't pay for it, which most open source projects don't do for money reasons and the history gets wiped after a while. If I were to decide what to use in a company I'd probably go for https://www.irccloud.com/ - it's an open protocol but still has the convenience of not having to set up a bouncer and run your own IRC server.

Re: IRC turns thirty

#128

Post by dewey »

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.

There's not, and there are services like https://www.irccloud.com/ that "slackify" IRC so you don't have to deal with ZNC, making your logs searchable,...

Re: IRC turns thirty

#130

Post by Jaruzel »

sbjs wrote: post #62
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 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've written several basic IRC clients and bots over the years. Compared to XMPP, and other newer proprietary protocols it is actually quite simple.

Hardly anyone uses the DCC file transfer stuff anymore, so other than encryption, all you really need to handle is channel messages and private messages, plus the management commands (ops, voice, mute etc).

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