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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)

#361

Post by Zetice »

boredtofears wrote: post #328
Zetice wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then why bring up IRC’s lack of a “pleasant” app? Just seems like a problem you can and should solve for yourself, but is otherwise wholly unrelated to the protocol. One doesn’t complain about http because the mobile browser options aren’t to one’s liking.

You don't have to take responsibility for fixing something just because you criticized it. Fixating on the term used is a tad disingenuous. I think most people reading hacker news understands that the IRC ecosystem is being referenced here - not the protocol itself. IRC has been around 30+ years and it still doesn't have any great clients. If you wanted to build a featureful chat client IRC wouldn't even be a good ch…

Sorry but this passive voice over a completely open system is intolerable. Fix it yourself.

It annoys me.

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

#362

Post by chromatin »

nullifidian wrote: post #344
chromatin wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

lightweight refers to resource utilization; it's disingenuous to pretend that has anything to do with compile-time dependencies.

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

#363

Post by j45 »

doublerabbit wrote: post #252
j45 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good point, connecting to a client or bouncer right on the server resolves this.

Yes, but then you need a client/bouncer which costs some sort of resource, whether it being your own computer, VPS or paid service. It's not trivial to setup a bouncer for the new guy who's just worked out how to connect to IRC.

Other chat services effectively prove this true of a solution for the client logging in.

I learned a lot about how far matrix has come along and seems to have solved many of the swipes and gripes against irc.

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

#364

Post by j45 »

nulbyte wrote: post #314
doublerabbit wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but then you need a client/bouncer which costs some sort of resource, whether it being your own computer, VPS or paid service. It's not trivial to setup a bouncer for the new guy who's just worked out how to connect to IRC.

> It's not trivial to setup a bouncer for the new guy who's just worked out how to connect to IRC. As I recall, newbies often figured out how to do this pretty quickly, even before the recent trend of IaaS and free tiers. Shell accounts with bouncers were a quite common offering back in the day.

It also was not uncommon to have Friends help show you how to use irc. Maybe even in person.

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

#365

Post by j45 »

lucideer wrote: post #163
j45 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How old is slack and discord? Slack is just a modern irc interpretation. It literally started running on top of IRC. Discord got popular because it was one of the only chats that kids could access and install in school. It wasn’t a serious tool.

> just a modern irc interpretation This is the point isn't it. If IRC were fit for purpose, we wouldn't need "modern interpretations".

Is it? Could irc not modernize?

Matrix seems more than executing.

What if an interpretation veers wildly of course?

Slack is fine for many things but if I were to look during the pandemic, Teams our executed to meet people where and how they worked.

Slack is also often seen with and without context. Most people have someone pay for their slack for them to keep that precious searchable history. Non profit or free uses uses lost so much value from slack deleting their histories every 90 days unnecessarily.

Irc had bots to help.

Irc if you all me has inspired alternate experiences be it hashtags based, or a central feed like Twitter.

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

#367

Post by jdougan »

Groxx wrote: post #348
jdougan wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, keybinds in gaming oriented VoIP apps can be global, you can press them from anywhere, or at least a select set of apps where an overlay is configured. This includes Discord (at least in the electron app).

As to why? It depends on the game, but Eve Online can get the most complicated. The most complex set up I can recall offhand, was when we were in cross coalition operations, where I had 2 mumbles and a teamspeak up where the teamspeak had 3 separate server tabs. It was my alliance mumble, my coalition mumble, other coalition teamspeak, my corp teamspeak, and half way through the operation we had to change the other coalition teamspeak servers to a backup because of what looked like a ddos. (In eve you have players who join a corporation, who join an alliance, who form a coalition. Coalitions are not internal to the game mechanics and often incorporate multiple timezone and language groups.)

As a side note, the open source mumble is popular because the corp/coalition/alliance IT services can easily configure it to work with external authorization systems, like the SSO provided in the Eve API or in [1]. For small orgs where security is less of a concern, you are probably better off with a discord server.

[1] https://gitlab.com/allianceauth/allianceauth

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

#369

Post by eropple »

Zetice wrote: post #361
boredtofears wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't have to take responsibility for fixing something just because you criticized it. Fixating on the term used is a tad disingenuous. I think most people reading hacker news understands that the IRC ecosystem is being referenced here - not the protocol itself. IRC has been around 30+ years and it still doesn't have any great clients. If you wanted to build a featureful chat client IRC wouldn't even be a good ch…

Sorry but this passive voice over a completely open system is intolerable. Fix it yourself. It annoys me.

Let's put it as simply as possible, because there's the genuine possibility that you don't understand, rather than are just being an acrimonious troll.

You wouldn't be Linux-on-the-desktopping as hard as you are if you didn't want people to use it. As such, if you, as an advocate of a thing, want other people to use it when the alternative is "continue using other things", then the least effective response is "fix it yourself".

I don't need to fix it. I have alternatives that already do what I want. If you want to hector people to use the thing you want them to do, then you had best come correct.

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

#370

Post by eropple »

Zetice wrote: post #318
eropple wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did "solve the problem". I use Slack and Discord to talk to the cohorts who used to be on IRC. Your behavior in this thread is really strange. Discord's a fine tool. So is Slack. I have nothing to fix, and my posts in this thread have been explaining why for me they're fit for purpose when IRC isn't. Why would I "do something about" a situation that isn't a problem for me?

Then why bring up IRC’s lack of a “pleasant” app? Just seems like a problem you can and should solve for yourself, but is otherwise wholly unrelated to the protocol. One doesn’t complain about http because the mobile browser options aren’t to one’s liking.

> Then why bring up IRC’s lack of a “pleasant” app?

Because...I was expressing why it isn't fit for purpose?

> One doesn’t complain about http because the mobile browser options aren’t to one’s liking.

If HTTP was functionally unusable in the application model provided by mobile operating systems, you bet people would complain! But HTTP is stateless. IRC isn't. As such, HTTP is not inherently incompatible with a quality mobile experience. IRC is.

And that's not incumbent upon me to fix it--I have no stake. I'm happy with the tools I have. That's incumbent upon people who want other people to use it to fix: the necessity of making something people want to use in order to get them to use it. You get that this is really basic human-interaction stuff, yeah?

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