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IRC turns thirty

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Re: IRC turns thirty

#201

Post by Cthulhu_ »

tapland wrote: post #140
fredsir wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

There are plenty. Breakouts from them forming their own communities every few years. The base of our community has been around for at least a decade and the main channel is on its fourth iteration since I joined. Telling exact channel names would out me pretty fast though I reckon.

Same in my 'social' bubble, started as a small gaming community that branched off a bigger one (you know, free forums, then a site, then self-hosted forums, IRC channel which later turned into a Skype group chat which nowadays is a Discord channel, etc). These things just form organically.

Re: IRC turns thirty

#202

Post by taborj »

craftyguy wrote: post #67
keithnz wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> somewhat like usenet, ftp, telnet, etc Don't conflate protocols that are terrible with protocols that aren't 'hip'. ftp and telnet have been replaced (thankfully) and should die in a fire. Usenet is still cool though.

And speaking of Usenet... https://www.eternal-september.org/

Re: IRC turns thirty

#203

Post by [deleted] »

agumonkey wrote: post #162
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)…

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).

[deleted]

Re: IRC turns thirty

#204

Post by [deleted] »

netsec_burn wrote: post #192
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)…

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.

[deleted]

Re: IRC turns thirty

#205

Post by DanielBMarkham »

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!

That's the way it all used to be, back when the net started rolling out. You could hook up to whatever you wanted, even roll your own protocol, just using either telnet or some sort of quasi-primitive scripting.

Now everything you touch has dozens of layers of junk on it -- and it's all mostly http.

It was a lot more fun when you were free to do your own thing without having to carry around 40 tons of tooling.

Re: IRC turns thirty

#206

Post by rakoo »

caf wrote: post #186
rakoo wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 featu…

As a sidebar, from what I can tell the term "bot" for an automated agent accessible through chat originated on IRC.

For sure, credit where it's due. However IRC doesn't beat the ease of installation that Slack providers for bots.

Re: IRC turns thirty

#207

Post by Doxin »

schindlabua wrote: post #125
Doxin wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

Ah I should have specified. sorry. It's at irc.foonetic.net

Re: IRC turns thirty

#208

Post by mrmyers »

asdojasdosadsa wrote: post #101

IRC brings back some memories. I haven't personally used IRC in a few years directly, but I can remember how when I started university, every freshman "had" to login to IRC through SSH and screen :-). That's where the course channels were sitting and you could get help, either if you didn't want to ask face to face, go to school or just needed to ask something. There were other channels too, some where you were invit…

#emacs would be my recommendation. It's a pretty great channel for random discussion/chatter, and every now and then people even discuss emacs.

Re: IRC turns thirty

#209

Post by xfer »

jordigh wrote: post #166
agumonkey wrote: post #162

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.

#emacs is an off-topic channel, if you have any questions(that you can't find just by googling), then it's best to use stackexchange/reddit.

Re: IRC turns thirty

#210

Post by walrus01 »

jenscow wrote: post #195
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

In 2018 teaching totally non-technical users to effectively use Dropbox and OneDrive is even a challenge, and those companies have a great many staff positions between them whose full time job is UI design and usability.
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