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IRC turns thirty

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Re: IRC turns thirty

#191

Post by movedx »

rane wrote: post #147
movedx wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used IRC Cloud for some time. Pretty good, actually. Works almost everywhere, nice UI. It's certainly no irssi in a tmux/screen, but it's pretty good. Costs $5/month when I was using it (so close to the same as a VPS or proxy.)

Running a weechat client on a ipv6, nat ipv4 VPS that costs me 3€/year. With weechat you also get a responsive web client for free through glowing-bear.org, so it's quite close to IRCCloud in the end.

Impressive! Any more details on that?

Re: IRC turns thirty

#192

Post by netsec_burn »

pen2l wrote: post #143
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…

> current toxicity of social media The only response I can conjure up for this is “wat” IRC in my experience is the most toxic and mean-spirited place on earth. 4chan is easier to take because I can justify their meanness to lulz. People on IRC seem to be out to kill people’s spirit. There are some exceptions like python on free node which is heavily moderated, but by and large (in my nearly 15 years of heavy IRCing)…

Wait, you think #python on Freenode is a friendly place? It's consistently the worst channel I've visited on IRC. The language is fantastic though.

Re: IRC turns thirty

#193

Post by netsec_burn »

bkircher wrote: post #79

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

I have a $5/mo VPS on DigitalOcean that I run IRSSI in screen/tmux. On Android, you can use JuiceSSH. Many people use this combination actually, JuiceSSH has swipe left-right IRSSI shortcuts and you can read the scrollback you missed (no ping timeouts on a VPS). Swipe left-right can also be changed to window left-right in screen/tmux. I think my favorite feature is JuiceSSH has an input option that allows you to use your standard Swype-like keyboard or voice input.

Re: IRC turns thirty

#194

Post by dmos62 »

lrvick wrote: post #146
pen2l wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> current toxicity of social media The only response I can conjure up for this is “wat” IRC in my experience is the most toxic and mean-spirited place on earth. 4chan is easier to take because I can justify their meanness to lulz. People on IRC seem to be out to kill people’s spirit. There are some exceptions like python on free node which is heavily moderated, but by and large (in my nearly 15 years of heavy IRCing)…

Sounds like you might be blaming a protocol for some poor channel choices. There are still plenty of educational/social IRC communities that welcome curious people of all skill levels. I can vouch for https://hashbang.sh (irc.hashbang.sh/6697) which has piles of industry leaders as regulars that prefer investing in open federated standards for internet communication over the endless array of hip walled garden flavor…

I concur. I've learned a lot listening and participating in chat rooms, but not all of them are the same. Some are definitely toxic, some are uplifting -- intellectually or otherwise. My personal recipe is once I have a topic in mind, I browse through the channel list, filtering by popularity. In my experience, "toxicity", for the lack of a better term, is proportional to popularity (crowdedness) and mainstreamness. In practical terms, if a channel has a lot of members (150+) that's not a good sign. If it's also a mainstream topic, that's a definite red flag. In my case, I would consider joining that channel a waste of time and energy. If I'm interested in a mainstream topic, sorting the channels by user count will quickly reveal where people go to escape the madness; as channels get big and sickly the interesting and helpful people tend to go to one of the sattelite channels that don't have those problems. As an example, the best channel on Python I found for my purposes had ~5-15 active users per day. I'm especially happy with IRC, because I am intrinsically drawn to more obscure technologies and their channels don't have these problems.

That said, IRC is made by the communities using it. The only, but a significant technological advantage it has over other chat mediums is its minimalism. Barebones chat is much more conducive to technical discussions, than the bloated alternatives, and I think the same applies for other kinds of discussions as well.

Re: IRC turns thirty

#195

Post by jenscow »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #173
peatmoss wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Unfortunately, as of today, the majority of "computer operators" struggle to share a file if it requires more than a single operation of "drag/drop".

Re: IRC turns thirty

#196

Post by Un1corn »

Qwertie wrote: post #117
ailideex wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They are also working on a new server written in Go instead of Python which will hopefully make it faster

Re: IRC turns thirty

#197

Post by namibj »

Qwertie wrote: post #117
ailideex wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'd blame it on using python to implement the server...

Yes, sure, good for a PoC, but there are reasons ejabberd exists.

Re: IRC turns thirty

#198

Post by fuzzyoneuk »

I've met some great people and fellow Devs on efnet back in the day, it used to be pretty much my only socialising back in the late 90s, some really disturbing toxic people too but a great experience all together.

Still pop in every now and then.

Re: IRC turns thirty

#199

Post by traviscj »

keithnz wrote: post #97
jiggunjer wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

there was comic chat :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Comic_Chat

Oh man, so many hours in my teens on this. It was my tumblr, I think.

Re: IRC turns thirty

#200

Post by Cthulhu_ »

beavis2 wrote: post #188
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 also met my Wife on IRC, ~20 years ago (after chatting for 2 years). Explaining then to people how we met was difficult, so we ended up just saying through a mutual friend - which was also true. I strongly doubt it we would have met, in this day and age. The mainstream online socialising of today is superficial and desperate. Today, a remote worker, I communicate with my colleagues over IRC. It's rare that I'd spea…

> The mainstream online socialising of today is superficial and desperate.

You say that but it's a sweeping generalization; a filtering down to more close-knit and direct interaction still happens all over the place. You're just not 'in' that kinda thing at the moment.

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