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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)

#301

Post by kaoD »

kyrofa wrote: post #286
progval wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IRC uses persistent TCP connections as a transport. You can't lose a message in the middle of a stream without the whole connection being closed, and your client would tell you about that.

> You can't lose a message in the middle of a stream without the whole connection being closed, and your client would tell you about that. I don't know what to tell you other than "that doesn't mesh up with the reality of my experience" shrug . Even if they did tell me about a connection issue (which they often didn't), those messages are still gone with no indication that I missed anything ("hey your connection blip…

Well, I don't know what to tell you other than "that doesn't mesh up with the reality of TCP".

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

#302

Post by ranger207 »

Groxx wrote: post #294
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…

Since you are a Push To Talk user, I'm honestly curious: how is it different from temporarily un-muting yourself? Like, how does it work better for you, or cause fewer problems, or something. It's so popular in so many places that I assume I'm missing something obvious. I've always just hit a key to toggle mute though.

I mean, practically speaking it is just temporarily unmuting yourself. It's active while being held instead of toggling is the only major difference

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

#303

Post by mburns »

Renaud wrote: post #95
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…

>But Discord is an information black hole where data goes to die. I'm really saddened and angry that projects end up using Discord as their main forum interface. Not everything is worth keeping around forever, but Discord is as closed a closed garden as can be. That's great for private servers between friends, but it's contrary to the ethos of Open Source, as nothing is really in the open. History is basically unsear…

Linen might be a good fit.

https://github.com/Linen-dev/linen.dev

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31494908

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

#304

Post by prmoustache »

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…

It is not like hosting a mumble server was a difficult thing to do.

And some communities had it setup for you so it is not something that each user had to do.

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

#305

Post by prmoustache »

lucideer wrote: post #284
ImPostingOnHN wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if IRC weren't fit for purpose, nobody would be using it

That depends on your definition of purpose. If the purpose is to be niche tech, then yeah, sure, you're right.

The purpose has slided.

IRC was an instant/synchronous chat protocol. We had newsgroup/web forums for unsynychronous chat/dicussions.

The likes of slack, and later discord, had the idea of merging sync and unsync discussion to provide both.

In the end slack/discord/teams ended up being jack of all trades/master of none.

Yes the backlog is saved automatically but for most of them the search is slow and borderline unusable and it ends up being much more difficult to search for information than using google with the site:yourwebforum.example.org option.

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

#306

Post by Dylan16807 »

pmoriarty wrote: post #46
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…

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…

Discord's search can't even find many specific words because it conflates them with other words and the results are flooded.

It's also very bad at URLs.

And sometimes it just breaks and loses results. If I remember right I even hit a situation where searching one word found a chat line, and another word found that same line, but both words didn't find it.

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

#307

Post by Dylan16807 »

Zetice wrote: post #180
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…

Literally all of your concerns are 100% solved by adding a log bot to the channels you care about, both on IRC and Discord. I’m beyond sick of the helplessness performative shtick around Discord. This is an ancient problem with obvious solutions. Do better.

Among other things, there's no way to add a log bot to private messages.

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

#308

Post by mananaysiempre »

mplewis wrote: post #229
jrm4 wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genuine question: Why isn't "run bot on top" a solution for this? And for that matter, for "pretty much everything?" Seems to me the simplicity of the bot is the biggest feature?

The average user cannot be expected to run an additional piece of software just to use chat.

The average user cna be expected to run quite a lot of things, actually; it’s just that the last decade of VC-funded services has trained them not to. Otherwise—AIM/ICQ/Pidgin, LAN game servers, Hamachi, DC++, a BitTorrent node ... Remember when Opera came with a web server? I doubt people have gotten so much stupider since then, even if computers have become much more complex and mainstream consumer software essentially troubleshooting-proof.

(Now if it’s an extra-special piece of software just to use your extra-special chat, then they’ll tell you to take a hike, true. They’ve got to actually want to get to the dancing bunnies[1] first.)

[1] https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-dancing-bunnies-problem/

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

#309

Post by jcul »

chromatin wrote: post #278
scarygliders wrote: post #78

I've been on IRC since the 90's and was an Op for Undernet #Linux & #Japan for many years, used to run an IRC server for a small IRC network back in my London days, and also ran a server for the same little network in my Japan days... The article was excellent, however, it made no mention of Matrix. Matrix, like IRC, is decentralised. You can run your own homeserver - just like running an ircd. Connecting to a Matrix…

Many who have causally read about Matrix and looked into running a homeserver have run across the reference implementation Synapse, which is (IMO only, pls no flame) a bloated python monstrosity. This turned me off for years. A second-gen (?) alternative written in Go called Dendrite is much lighter weight, but is lacking in some features last I looked. A couple of years ago, I found Conduit ( https://conduit.rs/ ) a…

Thanks, will check it out. Last time I looked, dendrite, construct, and conduit were not ready, so synapse was the only option (which I used).

Look forward to trying out conduit.

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

#310

Post by jimmychoozyx »

I've tried Slack and Discord. Of course, ICQ & MSN Messenger long ago.

IRC is #1 in my book. I always come back to it. I like its simplicity and its community. It has been immensely valuable to me, to get guidance and answers to questions, from software engineers with tons of experience.

Libera server all day!

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