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IRC is the only viable chat protocol (2022)

koshka.love

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Re: IRC is the only viable chat protocol (2022)

#51

Post by iforgotpassword »

gorgoiler wrote: post #11

We span up a Synapse instance the other day and connected to it with Element on a few different laptops. (This is the Matrix server and client btw — they really need a marketing / branding person!) It was both hellish and amazing. Hellish in that I had absolutely no idea how to use anything. Channels and rooms and stuff. All very complicated and weird. I just wanted a single, default place to hang out! It was also am…

I'd probably switch to Discord before using Matrix as my primary way of communication. It's a clusterfuck held together by duct-tape and ADHS.

I try it every now and then and within a couple minutes, I manage to break something, that my Matrix-using friends just shrug off. As an example, just a few days ago I used the web client again and had a chat with a friend. Just for fun, he added a bazillion emoji reactions to one of my messages, and after that the client would always claim our conversation has unread messages, even after right-clicking and selecting "mark as read".

But my favorite is how they broke the IRC bridge about 3 months ago: It randomly drops messages from IRC -> Matrix. There's an issue[1] for this with pretty much no reaction from the devs. Like, nobody cares. So on one hand, the Matrix folks always stress how it's the best chat protocol on the planet because of all the bridges that connect it to everything, but then in reality those brides are unreliable and apparently only there to tick a box, working as well as Microsoft's POSIX layer for Windows NT in the 90s.

And apart from the complete lack of interest in getting this fixed, it also just boggles the mind how you can even break it in this way. IRC has a persistent connection and streams messages separated by CRLF. How do you end up parsing the protocol properly and then randomly ignore a received message?

In its current form, the bridge does more harm than good, as you can't always keep in mind during a conversation that the bridge might just have dropped a message again, leading to frustrating misunderstandings every now and then.

[1] https://github.com/matrix-org/libera-chat/issues/6

Re: IRC is the only viable chat protocol (2022)

#52

Post by TheFreim »

tester756 wrote: post #16

Discord haters look, it is simple. Until Discord appeared we had Ventrilo, Mumble, TeamSpeak, Skype, etc, etc I've been using those for like 10 years almost everyday They had voice chat, some had viable text chat, etc, etc. And then Discord appeared which had: Voice Chat, Good text chat (images, code snippets, emojis, reactions, etc) Streaming Video (!!) File share Robust bot integration Lack of security problem unli…

> Lack of security problem unlike the self-hosted alternatives have.

This is a major issue. Back in the day TeamSpeak was the primary mode of communication for game servers of a certain kind. Every game server had an associated TS for offering support and many/most of the teams had their own. This was a disaster with people's IP addresses being leaked all over the place, if you joined a server and associated yourself with your in game name there was a high chance that you'd get DDoS'd offline at an important moment. Switching to discord makes this much less likely.

Re: IRC is the only viable chat protocol (2022)

#53

Post by tester756 »

gertrunde wrote: post #50
tester756 wrote: post #16

Discord haters look, it is simple. Until Discord appeared we had Ventrilo, Mumble, TeamSpeak, Skype, etc, etc I've been using those for like 10 years almost everyday They had voice chat, some had viable text chat, etc, etc. And then Discord appeared which had: Voice Chat, Good text chat (images, code snippets, emojis, reactions, etc) Streaming Video (!!) File share Robust bot integration Lack of security problem unli…

Apparently Teams does have push-to-talk, although it's not switched on by default. [ https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/muting-and-unmuti... ]

Interesting, I do wonder whether this is configurable so you can use it on e.g mouse scroll button

Re: IRC is the only viable chat protocol (2022)

#54

Post by Brybry »

judge2020 wrote: post #14
madeofpalk wrote: post #3

> Even if you have full-on Stockholm syndrome in regard to advertisers data-mining your life to sell you garbage, who knows where else your data could be going? Considering the horrific epidemic of sexual abuse being abetted and covered up in the workplace, is it really too difficult to imagine malicious actors at Discord (or any other technology company) illegitimately accessing the data of their business' users and…

The only threat to message data on Discord is third party bots like mee6 who are gateway connected to tons of public, private, and "small friend-group" servers, vacuuming up every message data to some data lake for later use. This is why Discord pushed Application Commands[0], which only receive data from Discord when the application is initialized by the user, and made Message Contents a privileged intent[1] that re…

I don't think the idea of rogue Discord employees accessing uploaded images for nudes or searching logs for personal information is far fetched.

Consider that a Ring employee was doing exactly that, with customer security cameras, and the only reason they were caught is another employee reported them (and Ring has no idea how many other employees were doing the same thing). [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36146062

Re: IRC is the only viable chat protocol (2022)

#55

Post by Arch-TK »

ginko wrote: post #8

> The reliability and lack of bloat that are inherent to IRC ultimately also means that there are a number of fancy modern features that Discord has that IRC lacks, a big one being the inability to view backlogs of conversations that transpired while one was not connected to an IRC server. Although IRC does not itself provide this functionality, the extremely simple nature of IRC allows for a couple of lightweight op…

There are good reasons to not have a backlog in a chat system.

For one it stops you from being lazy and not maintaining FAQs and documentation.

It also forces you to stop treating the chat as something you need to keep up to date with. At work I see people commonly scrolling back for pages and pages to find the last read marker and continue reading from there. This seems unhealthy to me.

I use a bouncer but I very rarely use the logs. For all the purposes for which I would use logs, there are normally bots in the channel which can compensate.

Re: IRC is the only viable chat protocol (2022)

#56

Post by imtringued »

tcfhgj wrote: post #41
phoronixrly wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I prefer no built-in logging (which is and has been easily achieved with bots that loiter in the channel and store messages) in place of orders of magnitude more resources required to run the server. Looking at Matrix btw. XMPP does not have the resource issue, and has XEPs for message archives.

You can look at Matrix, but it won't help you, since Matrix additionally has a DAG datastructure for decentralized chatrooms, which allows to recognize and deal with bad servers in an open federation. Additionally, it's richer in features

I don't understand the Matrix hate. Matrix is the defacto successor to IRC and it is getting feature parity with Discord. IRC refuses to evolve and it will become irrelevant.

Re: IRC is the only viable chat protocol (2022)

#57

Post by roenxi »

imtringued wrote: post #48
pmoriarty wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discord has shitty logging and log-search capabilities. Discord's logging is shitty because: 1 - The logs aren't yours, they're Discord's. If you get banned from the server, your server shuts down, or Discord bans you altogether your access to those logs is gone forever. 2 - Unlike the logs of some IRC channels, Discord's logs aren't available on the web anywhere, so they can't be indexed or searched outside of Disco…

I recorded logs back in my IRC days but I never used them for anything or searched through them. That is a complete red herring. Nobody who uses IRC cares about persistent chat. What most people want is to see the last X hours of chat history while they were offline, so if they open their chat client they don't have to stare at an empty window, not the last X months. Also you forgot to say that Discord had a high qua…

This perspective is internally consistent but reveals why IRC struggles without better logging support - the sort of person who is connected and savvy enough to keep logs does fine. Doesn't need them. The people who use IRC are comfortable with that lack.

But the people who use logs won't use IRC, and the people who often miss out on important conversations because they are only casual users will not have logs. Casual users outnumber dedicated users - the lack of good logging is a real problem for them.

Re: IRC is the only viable chat protocol (2022)

#58

Post by benoliver999 »

aykutcan wrote: post #42

Tell me what happened your freenode? Discord is IRC's next evolution. Next generation chat. Good voice, excellent interactivity. It has problems (bugs & weak beta phases) but after nearly 20 years of irc, i stopped my bnc (currently znc) instance last week. ~20 years of irc, countless bots, tons of good memories. it is time to say goodbye for now.

Look how quick the transition libera.chat was.

If Discord went away no one can just spin up a discord server.

Re: IRC is the only viable chat protocol (2022)

#59

Post by nottorp »

tester756 wrote: post #44
nottorp wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Go ahead and create 1 account per 1 server, nothing prevents you. You think? I still have to use the official client to log on to all of them so they can just ban all if their AI thinks I'm a communist pedophile terrorist.

Yes, I think, because I used to run 2 accounts for a few years. >I still have to use the official client to log on to all of them so they can just ban all if their AI thinks I'm a communist pedophile terrorist. so... what? Your country can cause you a lot of harm too if they think you're pedophile terrorist. That's edge case, not something that happens to 99.99% of the users.

A lot of countries tend to have some sort of due process, as opposed to a chat server's "AI".

Re: IRC is the only viable chat protocol (2022)

#60

Post by pmoriarty »

imtringued wrote: post #48
pmoriarty wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discord has shitty logging and log-search capabilities. Discord's logging is shitty because: 1 - The logs aren't yours, they're Discord's. If you get banned from the server, your server shuts down, or Discord bans you altogether your access to those logs is gone forever. 2 - Unlike the logs of some IRC channels, Discord's logs aren't available on the web anywhere, so they can't be indexed or searched outside of Disco…

I recorded logs back in my IRC days but I never used them for anything or searched through them. That is a complete red herring. Nobody who uses IRC cares about persistent chat. What most people want is to see the last X hours of chat history while they were offline, so if they open their chat client they don't have to stare at an empty window, not the last X months. Also you forgot to say that Discord had a high qua…

I don't know if you ever used IRC to get help on technical issues, but I've done that a lot, and going back to figure out what the solution was to a particularly thorny technical problem that someone told me about years ago has been something I've done multiple times.
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