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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)

#381

Post by pepa65 »

scarygliders wrote: post #188
nologic01 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its still somewhat slow with loading existing chats but Matrix has serious potential. It is already doing much better than the fediverse in terms of discovering niche communities.

Agreed. Some rooms have so many user and so much chat history, that my own puny homeserver struggles to join them. I've tried all sorts of tweaks - from tweaking the PostgreSQL service, to using things like noatime etc. on the ext4 filesystem. This has helped immensely, but some rooms, like the Python room on matrix.org, brings my homeserver to its knees :) Perhaps in the future the Synapse devs will improve the code…

So somebody running a Matrix home server needs an excess of 6GB of RAM and 6 devoted cores? And you call that puny??

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

#382

Post by redserk »

j45 wrote: post #364
nulbyte wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I fail to see the value of expending time to configure extra services for functionality that I could get by downloading a client to another service that might not be ideal, but works enough to not care about.

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

#383

Post by Zetice »

boredtofears wrote: post #377
Zetice wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you have everything you need, why did you complain? And insults do you no good here. Would any of the hateful words you wrote above mean anything at all to you if I wrote them?

> If you have everything you need, why did you complain? Because it’s a forum for discussing technology? Why critique anything with that logic. You must be trolling.

Either you have a concern, in which case you can and should do something about it, or you don’t and just commented for no reason.

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

#384

Post by mmercedes »

MildRant wrote: post #359
mmercedes wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discord handing over his billing details certainly made it quicker at least https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattnovak/2023/04/14/fbi-used-d...

Every company will hand over your data if subpoenaed by a law enforcement agency in the country they operate in.

you don't need a company in the country you reside with your billing address on file to run an irc server though

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

#385

Post by Zetice »

boredtofears wrote: post #376
Zetice wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> Passive voice over a completely open system ?? What does that even mean?

[flagged]

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

#386

Post by Zetice »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #327
Zetice wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Huh? Supposed to what? I was just listing a way that Discord is worse than an IRC client, in a way that you can't solve with a log bot. You're imagining whatever standard you think I'm setting. Anyway, the main "other things" are needing direct moderator permission and button-pressing on every server you want to join your log bot to.

Discord isn’t worse than an IRC client because it doesn’t log private chats, it’s superior because it doesn’t log private chats.

And if you thing your “other things” are unique to Discord you’re kidding yourself.

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

#387

Post by eternityforest »

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…

Tinkerers really don't seem to understand how much average people want stuff to just work.

It's almost like how math educators sometimes don't understand that we mostly don't have checkbooks to balance. Math is important, but that doesn't mean I have ever sat down with paper and made a budget by hand.

Everyone always talks about flexibility and modularity and control, but what people want is stuff you just install and it works and has all the features already there.

Maintaining even trivial software can be hard, and people are very good at using what they have even if it's not explicitly meant to do the use case, like the story where the old lady was annoyed at her family for not telling her about the knitting program, which was Excel, that she found and figured out herself.

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

#388

Post by aranjedeath »

scarygliders wrote: post #188
nologic01 wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its still somewhat slow with loading existing chats but Matrix has serious potential. It is already doing much better than the fediverse in terms of discovering niche communities.

Agreed. Some rooms have so many user and so much chat history, that my own puny homeserver struggles to join them. I've tried all sorts of tweaks - from tweaking the PostgreSQL service, to using things like noatime etc. on the ext4 filesystem. This has helped immensely, but some rooms, like the Python room on matrix.org, brings my homeserver to its knees :) Perhaps in the future the Synapse devs will improve the code…

conduit runs on pi zero -- though you can't directly migrate so that is of limited use to you. It would probably fail to join matrixhq or python room but, this is due to obvious resource constraints. Any reasonable horsepower and you won't have an issue.

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

#389

Post by eternityforest »

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…

Anything based on endless scrolling is already inherently shitful for meaningful persistent content. It makes anything into a black hole where information goes to die. But before that, it gives you a sense of anxiety because everything is moving around and you have no fixed reference points, and encourages random idle chatter....

As far as I'm concerned it is not a technology that should exist aside from realtime viewing of feeds, and things meant from random idle chatter.

People are using Discord like as if it's a forum and a wiki in one. Which isn't the worst thing, because it's better than nothing, but I think it would be better with an integrated real forum that auto-posts new topics in the chat.

If you have something you think is worthy of preserving, say it in a paginated forum where people can find it, if you have an ephemeral shitpost, say it in the chat. If you want to scroll through history of ephemeral shitposts and see what's happening, even that should have a calendar based pagination UI.

Old forums used to have shoutboxes. Proboards and phpbb and the like were basically already perfect.

If I was going to do a community platform, I'd just build a forum. The only thing I think I'd change is I'd make it so you could download archives, and I'd consider having a wikipedia style policy of everything being Creative Commons.

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

#390

Post by eternityforest »

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…

Why not PHPBB? Not discourse, the UI is still endless scrolling based and obnoxious.

Using chat as a forum is... Just not a great idea. It seems most remember a strong sense of community on forums. We talked about actual interests and learned things and it was great, and stuff didn't get buried or too disorganized , nor did it feel like any kind of time pressure thing where you had to be on at the right time... Why not just... Do that? It was amazing.

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