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Ask HN: Do You Miss IRC?

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81–90 of 109 posts

Re: Ask HN: Do You Miss IRC?

#81
No. I was the right age and I’m totally of the right mindset but IRC never clicked with me. I went through phases of using it but it has always been more hassle than it’s worth.

I do think Slack and Discord are overengineered for most teams’ needs. They are attempting to justify their existence and solve all the problems. I’d be happy with a simple text chat I could use from my terminal. But IRC is nothing like “simple”.

Re: Ask HN: Do You Miss IRC?

#82
post #53

I was born in the 90s so I never used IRC outside work. I used it for work on a daily basis until a couple weeks ago, and I hate it with passion. The vpn drops and you miss messages. You are offline you miss messages, don't want to miss messages? set up a relay (seriously?!). Now I'm on a team which uses slack, and I miss how lightweight hexchat is, but in terms of being able to use it my phone and having something t…

Many people use gnu screen to connect to a session and never log out.

This assumes so many things which are the reason lots of us have happily moved on.

Re: Ask HN: Do You Miss IRC?

#84
post #3

I miss the feeling you had using it and the fun bots people made in some channels. I do not miss the difficulty of getting less technical users onto it and it's lack of portability with out some work. New tools these days make the portability aspect easy and barrier to entry low for less technical users which expands the user base of a lot of platforms today.

On the other hand, even if the barrier is a bit higher, nice things will eventually be used by everyone even if it evolves some research and learning - or seeking help from others. The most difficult thing about IRC is probably picking a unique user name or even registering one. But yeah, especially non-tech channels had a fun vibe, something I completely miss from Slack or Facebook.

Re: Ask HN: Do You Miss IRC?

#85
IRC was super important for me - I started using it in 1999, and it was a way for me to talk to other queer folks. I'm still friends with a lot of the people I spoke to back then to this day!

Re: Ask HN: Do You Miss IRC?

#86

I can't say I miss IRC particularly. It does have a nice simplicity to it but the fact that connections are stateful and fragile is a real downer - I don't love that closing my laptop and wandering off somewhere onto a new network causes me to disappear from the network entirely. Bouncers like ZNC rely on having somewhere reliable to host one and are additional maintenance overheads. Leaving irssi or weechat open in…

But why do you need a bouncer? You can just register the user name and then go online again?

Re: Ask HN: Do You Miss IRC?

#87

I was born in the 90s so I never used IRC outside work. I used it for work on a daily basis until a couple weeks ago, and I hate it with passion. The vpn drops and you miss messages. You are offline you miss messages, don't want to miss messages? set up a relay (seriously?!). Now I'm on a team which uses slack, and I miss how lightweight hexchat is, but in terms of being able to use it my phone and having something t…

You still need a VPS or server of some kind, but if the "screen with irssi/weechat" concept sounds too much like 80s UNIX, there is quassel[1].

It's like a relay/proxy/bouncer but actually uses its own protocol between the GUI and core, so you get infinite backscroll, proper sync when running multiple GUI instances at the same time etc. Oh and there is a decent Android client called quasseldroid.

[1] https://quassel-irc.org/

Re: Ask HN: Do You Miss IRC?

#89

I can't say I miss IRC particularly. It does have a nice simplicity to it but the fact that connections are stateful and fragile is a real downer - I don't love that closing my laptop and wandering off somewhere onto a new network causes me to disappear from the network entirely. Bouncers like ZNC rely on having somewhere reliable to host one and are additional maintenance overheads. Leaving irssi or weechat open in…

But why do you need a bouncer? You can just register the user name and then go online again?

Of course, but in that time I've missed what is happening in the channels I was joined to.
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