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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)

#341

Post by mananaysiempre »

ginko wrote: post #339
mananaysiempre wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 essenti…

I think I'm reasonably tech savvy and at no time in my life I had a system I could trust to be 100% always-on. No way you could expect average users to run their own service just so they don't miss messages. Anyways it feels silly to require always-on service when history could just be part of the protocol.

I don’t actually disagree about chat logs. (An argument could be made that no-logging IRC was a good thing when it allowed volunteers to run genuinely large networks on the relatively wimpy contemporary machines they had access to, but it’s solely of historical relevance.)

I just think that the general argument that users are only capable of running server software with as much uptime as they care for (in the “easy” All that aside, a say 95- to 99-percent-online machine is pretty handy to have when you can code, you should try it if you don’t have one. The best such machine is one you don’t use interactively—an old desktop in a closet, an RPi with a USB HDD, hell, that old Eee PC you have laying around gathering dust works pretty well and even comes with builtin battery backup. You don’t—and shouldn’t—need to have one, but it’s liberating to be able to go “oh I’ll just throw that into urlwatch and have it poke me on Telegram” without a second thought. Now excuse me while I pacman -Syu && reboot my webserver :)

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

#342

Post by WesolyKubeczek »

pynappo wrote: post #330
WesolyKubeczek wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s also like Slack but very noisy. I don’t get its appeal at all.

discord makes hosting a real-time online place for most communities of all sizes very easy. it also doubles as a free cross-platform messaging app with a massive userbase. as the top-level GP posted, it mostly has a superset of the features of other community/messaging platforms (at the cost of searchability and data ownership/privacy). as a student, I'm in discord servers for friend groups, school clubs, unofficial…

I don’t know, I’ve tried joining some discord communities, and they were all like slack with trigger-happy channel creation, in each channel it was really hard to even grasp what the conversation was about because of emoji and meme flooding.

Maybe it’s me getting old, but while I remember quite vividly that IRC regulars liked to flood with emoticons just as much, in five minutes I’d know what the conversation was about. In discord… not so much. And there’s the whole voice layer I didn’t even touch. It’s too chaotic and demanding full immersion, so I just noped out of there.

(And there’s the whole aspect of Discord actually owning it all, and banning you discord-wide if you blow your nose funny.)

The idea of using discord as a medium for conversations you mean to log and refer to later seems like bollocks in the light of above. Also the idea of having work discussions there seems to be bollocks too and indistinguishable from Slack in 99% aspects imaginable.

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

#343

Post by jdougan »

lolinder wrote: post #332
Groxx wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is what it seems like to me too. Which is why I find it puzzling that it's so frequently a make-or-break feature, when everything I've used since early teamspeak days has had a keypress to toggle mute. (I have not used Teams)

I don't play multiplayer games, but I can totally see how push-to-talk would be essential for them. In an intense game with lots of keyboard work, people would be liable to accidentally leave the mic open, distracting teammates with keyboard sounds or whatever. Push to talk also frees up your brain cycles from having to keep track of which mode you're in.

I do play multi-player games, and that is exactly my experience. Also, on occasion I've had to be connected to more than one VoIP system at the same time and having to track all the toggles would be a huge pain.

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

#344

Post by nullifidian »

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…

>bloated python monstrosity

>an ultra lightweight

370 crates in Cargo.lock

176 crates downloaded by cargo-tree

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

#345

Post by progval »

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…

What client do you use? I can try looking for why it would hide it from you.

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

#346

Post by progval »

Arathorn wrote: post #329
rvz wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IRC has "lost" many times before and yet it's still around. IRC is no more relevant than the fossils that are still underneath the ground. > while the previous "winners" are all gone or irrelevant. So Matrix is gone and irrelevant? > Even if Discord is tolerable today how long before it becomes terminally enshittified? Even if that happens I can guarantee you that they won't be going back to IRC.

Matrix is very much alive and well; we just hit 100M total addressable users on the network :)

How do you count users? I couldn't find a way to get stats from other people's homeservers when I looked into it

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

#347

Post by Borg3 »

TylerE wrote: post #211
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…

Reliability? IRC? Is this article a joke?

Not at all.

Server Up 1375 days, 10:05:01

*.XXX.net[xx.x.x.xx] 0 9696 10570 56550590

Its server to server link, online 56M secs. Now do the math, how much days this link is up (no netsplit).

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

#348

Post by Groxx »

jdougan wrote: post #343
lolinder wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't play multiplayer games, but I can totally see how push-to-talk would be essential for them. In an intense game with lots of keyboard work, people would be liable to accidentally leave the mic open, distracting teammates with keyboard sounds or whatever. Push to talk also frees up your brain cycles from having to keep track of which mode you're in.

I do play multi-player games, and that is exactly my experience. Also, on occasion I've had to be connected to more than one VoIP system at the same time and having to track all the toggles would be a huge pain.

Would this imply you're using a globally available key to briefly talk, without having to see / switch to the voice app? I don't think I've seen or noticed that, if so, only "focus discord and hold a button to talk"... at which point I'm already looking at it there's nothing to track, personally.

If it's global though I can absolutely see why that's useful.

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

#350

Post by jrm4 »

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" is literally never a useful metric here.

Federation and federation type ideas should be enough; let's get (back?) to a place like cars mostly used to be. You should theoretically be able to know a friend who can fix your car if you don't want to be a mechanic, and the same for "computer stuff."

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