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IRC turns thirty

oulu.fi

171–180 of 232 posts

Re: IRC turns thirty

#171

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

For Windows I always use Hexchat, which seems to be the only decent open source client for Windows. If anyone would like to jump in and point out others I don't know about, by all means. (Heck, it's what I use on Linux too)

KVirc is pretty nice on Windows and Linux, IMO.

Re: IRC turns thirty

#172
post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

IRC can't ever have authentication, because most clients won't support it. You can't have conversations that rely on rich text, code blocks with syntax highlighting, embedded images, or web previews: these things are possible (in some cases there's more than one way of doing them) but some users will always be using clients that don't support them, and will regard you as the problem if you try to create an expectatio…

"Most" important clients support SASL authentication already.

Re: IRC turns thirty

#173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 telnet is fringe because it's totally plaintext and has obviously been replaced by ssh2 everywhere.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.

Someday when there's a universal way to share files between people on a network without passwords FTP might die. So far it is the least painful way of having a place people can just dump files to and grab files from without authentication.

Re: IRC turns thirty

#174
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…

You're likely to have filtered a lot more than you think simply by consciously selecting which server and which channel to join. I don't know which kind of filtering you're referring to, but if you're talking about those that constitute echo chambers, IRC isn't really helping much in that regard.

Re: IRC turns thirty

#175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's true that IRC is not free of tension and caustic groups. That said, like reddit, you can find very nice places to chat. #electronics #emacs both are very light on issues and very openminded (maybe too open minded some would say).

I talk a lot in #emacs and I do treat it like a coffee klatch, but when people come with questions, I try to interrupt myself and at least address their questions. I like #emacs. It's like a gathering of friends who happen to use Emacs.

hi, i'm python476 (i know, awkward), so you know I share your sentiment about emacs. And #electronics is similar. Just a bunch of dudes who like that topic, but it's rarely on topic, and they're one of the most friendly bunch I've seen.

Re: IRC turns thirty

#176
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…

What channels do you frequent that can be used as "social channels" and aren't either a technical QA channel, or a those channels' "free talk" companion that nobody really uses?

I think you'll find that many social channels are a well kept secret. No one wants to ruin a good thing by advertising it to the public. Use IRC for a while, explore the bigger channels, start channels for your friends, and eventually you'll find your way into other social channels.

Re: IRC turns thirty

#177

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

I still just use Pidgin. It ain't fancy (neither is IRC), but it also works a client for hangouts and some other things and has a portable apps version.

Re: IRC turns thirty

#179
post #172
post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IRC can't ever have authentication, because most clients won't support it. You can't have conversations that rely on rich text, code blocks with syntax highlighting, embedded images, or web previews: these things are possible (in some cases there's more than one way of doing them) but some users will always be using clients that don't support them, and will regard you as the problem if you try to create an expectatio…

"Most" important clients support SASL authentication already.

Sure. But good luck persuading a network to go authenticated-only, or even configuring your private server that way. It's not impossible but it's very much not the culture and not where the documentation/support will guide you.

Re: IRC turns thirty

#180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Because the last thing organizations eant to do is host their own infra for a chat, implement their own search for a chat, re-implement the bits, the hooks, the integrations for a chat etc.?

Hosting things on their own infrastructure is very popular for large companies. They tend to take security a lot more serious that the average startup.
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