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Leaving irc.perl.org

sungo.wtf

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Re: Leaving irc.perl.org

#21

Post by daneel_w »

jpswade wrote: post #19

Why does Perl warrant its own network? Why not join freenode instead?

There already is a well-populated #perl channel on Freenode. Unfortunately it's a socially unwell place that in a way has been taken hostage by a small tight-knit group of regulars - users like MST, Grinnz and pinkmist, to name a few - who go about managing and policing the channel in not only unfriendly ways but also in very unwelcoming ways in relation to new and casual visitors.

(ps. I'm a regular of the channel since the late 2000s, and can confidently state that its environment is today unhealthy and degraded)

Re: Leaving irc.perl.org

#22

Post by vertex-four »

CalRobert wrote: post #5
simias wrote: post #3

Both Perl and IRC have suffered heavily from a massive loss of popularity over the past decade, I can't say I'm too surprised that irc.perl.org is going the way of the dodo. I really like IRC and I'm really sorry to see it go, and I still have an irssi running full time on a handful of servers. Freenode is basically the only server that manages to maintain its user base, but even for them it's not really growing anym…

I've been trying to get back to IRC, but the clients seem dated for the most part. Do you have recommendations for something with a UI that feels reasonably modern?

IRCCloud is pretty modern-feeling, but is saas paid for on a subscription basis.

Re: Leaving irc.perl.org

#23

Post by [deleted] »

daneel_w wrote: post #21
jpswade wrote: post #19

Why does Perl warrant its own network? Why not join freenode instead?

There already is a well-populated #perl channel on Freenode. Unfortunately it's a socially unwell place that in a way has been taken hostage by a small tight-knit group of regulars - users like MST, Grinnz and pinkmist, to name a few - who go about managing and policing the channel in not only unfriendly ways but also in very unwelcoming ways in relation to new and casual visitors. (ps. I'm a regular of the channel s…

[deleted]

Re: Leaving irc.perl.org

#24

Post by rurban »

Good move, thanks. A very unhealthy place where you are bombarded with hostilities by very juvenile folks, who generally have no idea what they are talking about. I left it years ago.

Re: Leaving irc.perl.org

#25

Post by floatingatoll »

I miss the chat social culture of the 90s, and all of my IRC nostalgia is really just for that. ICQ, IRC, it was all different then. After the 90s we had the blog era and that was fine until Google and Facebook indexed and monetized searches and networks. Now there’s Slack and Discord, which are still too persistent to be truly safe but have regained much of the undiscoverability that makes small communities possible. Perhaps someday we’ll regain safety, and then it will be like 90s IRC but with good UX and more wisdom about the harm tech did to us in service of feature creep. Good luck and be well, sungo.

Re: Leaving irc.perl.org

#26

Post by floatingatoll »

flxy wrote: post #14
simias wrote: post #3

Both Perl and IRC have suffered heavily from a massive loss of popularity over the past decade, I can't say I'm too surprised that irc.perl.org is going the way of the dodo. I really like IRC and I'm really sorry to see it go, and I still have an irssi running full time on a handful of servers. Freenode is basically the only server that manages to maintain its user base, but even for them it's not really growing anym…

As a techy person in their mid twenties, I've used irc extensively over the years and I miss it quite a bit. It doesn't have all the fancy features of modern messaging solutions because it was focused on the thing that actually mattered: conversations with others. These days when I look at the discord servers I'm in, a lot of it is just sharing images, spamming emotes and other silly things. Actual conversations are…

There’s an irony / dilemma to point out here in the contrast between “spamming emotes” and “fairly serious”: both of these are a success, in a certain view.

The non-work Discord you describe now resembles how actual social interactions and friendship often work these days: mostly irrelevant interactions by volume, with a low incidence of significant conversation surrounded mostly by a lot of brief flashes of emotion shared haphazardly without much weight behind them.

The work Slack-ish you describe now resembles a professional environment, focused more effectively on doing work and less on watercooler chat.

I think that the chat platforms selected in each case are exaggerating how we behave in each situation, and that’s not necessarily a positive or negative.

IRC is wildly unproductive without extraordinarily high levels of effort invested in keeping it under control. Slack-ish work chats are wildly productive without a conscious effort to drag some degree of personal interaction into the workplace to replace what’s drained away when leaving IRC.

Is IRC truly the only way to return a bit of social coexistence to a workplace, or has culture changed in a more significant way that just happens to be reflected through the lens of chat systems?

Re: Leaving irc.perl.org

#27

Post by dregin »

CalRobert wrote: post #5
simias wrote: post #3

Both Perl and IRC have suffered heavily from a massive loss of popularity over the past decade, I can't say I'm too surprised that irc.perl.org is going the way of the dodo. I really like IRC and I'm really sorry to see it go, and I still have an irssi running full time on a handful of servers. Freenode is basically the only server that manages to maintain its user base, but even for them it's not really growing anym…

I've been trying to get back to IRC, but the clients seem dated for the most part. Do you have recommendations for something with a UI that feels reasonably modern?

Weechat is king. https://github.com/weechat/weechat

Re: Leaving irc.perl.org

#28

Post by CalRobert »

simias wrote: post #11
CalRobert wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been trying to get back to IRC, but the clients seem dated for the most part. Do you have recommendations for something with a UI that feels reasonably modern?

Not really, I'm generally fine with "dated". I use irssi with a config file that hasn't change in a decade. Not that I think that you're wrong for wanting a more modern experience, it's clearly one of the main reasons IRC is losing traction. Some things can be solved client-side by, for instance, auto-fetching some URLs to display image links inline (although it could cause privacy concerns) but you also have limitat…

For the most part I just want it to be less than half-broken. And to have buttons for things that are IRC commands. In Thunderbird the compose window has white text on a white bg at the moment, for instance.

Re: Leaving irc.perl.org

#29

Post by dTal »

CalRobert wrote: post #5
simias wrote: post #3

Both Perl and IRC have suffered heavily from a massive loss of popularity over the past decade, I can't say I'm too surprised that irc.perl.org is going the way of the dodo. I really like IRC and I'm really sorry to see it go, and I still have an irssi running full time on a handful of servers. Freenode is basically the only server that manages to maintain its user base, but even for them it's not really growing anym…

I've been trying to get back to IRC, but the clients seem dated for the most part. Do you have recommendations for something with a UI that feels reasonably modern?

Quassel is very nice and achieves the level of desktop integration people expect nowadays (notifications and so on). It's nicely GUIfied and it's QT so it themes nicely. It also has a core/client split so you can put the core on an always-on server somewhere.

There's also an Android client, making it a pretty unified system. You can seamlessly switch between laptop and phone.

Re: Leaving irc.perl.org

#30

Post by Fnoord »

Crinus wrote: post #16
flxy wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a techy person in their mid twenties, I've used irc extensively over the years and I miss it quite a bit. It doesn't have all the fancy features of modern messaging solutions because it was focused on the thing that actually mattered: conversations with others. These days when I look at the discord servers I'm in, a lot of it is just sharing images, spamming emotes and other silly things. Actual conversations are…

> Actual conversations are fairly rare. FWIW this is exactly my experience with pretty much every single IRC server and channel i've been the last 15 years or so. It used to be more... chatty before that, but over time people just join and idle. I wonder if the ability to have IRCs running all the time actually harmed IRC since at the past (90s mainly and perhaps very early 2000s) if someone was in a channel, they'd…

It started out as a necessity, and it isn't new. Its because of netsplits, DoS, and channel takeovers that bots existed on EFnet and IRCnet. Chanserv/Nickserv/X/W (and UnderNet/DALnet) came later on.

> I wonder if the ability to have IRCs running all the time actually harmed IRC since at the past (90s mainly and perhaps very early 2000s) if someone was in a channel, they'd be up for chatting too whereas now channels are full of "zombies".

Untrue; bots existed in past. Take a look at Eggdrop's age, for example. Whether it is much more common nowadays I don't know, but BNCs are nothing new either. If anything, it is because running a computer 24/7 is much more cheaper nowadays (although back then you could get a shell for e.g. 5-10 USD / month).

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