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Why I Live in IRC (2015)

aaronparecki.com

21–30 of 129 posts

Re: Why I Live in IRC (2015)

#22
post #14

I was an ircop on efnet for like half my childhood until they figured out I wasn't 18 and desynced my server. I just could never go back to IRC. I stopped using it probably 15 years ago or more after using it for 20ish years. Got my first job on it, learned linux and networking through it, definitely propelled my career. TOO many bots log entire channels out to public html sites. This is prevalent in everything like…

> TOO many bots log entire channels out to public html sites. This is prevalent in everything like discord etc but the degree to it in IRC is just ridiculous god knows what any of those 1500 bots in a channel are doing.

These sorts of bots are quite rare on Discord, you usually have to make an account to be able to see anything. There have been attempts at standardizing this (like https://www.answeroverflow.com/) but they haven't taken off. Public logs are much more common on IRC than on Discord.

> Freenode etc I'm sure iddn't suffer that drama much if any.

It seems all of the drama hit all at once, due to Andrew Lee's cocaine fueled episode in 2021 which caused hundreds of open source projects to leave the network within the span of a few weeks - https://gist.github.com/joepie91/df80d8d36cd9d1bde46ba018af4...

Re: Why I Live in IRC (2015)

#24
I've tried to get into IRC but the public servers have so many dead channels. On the one channel I did find active someone called me a racial slur because I use Windows.

I wish there were more people using these alternative, somewhat decentralized services that weren't just tech people. Whenever I see some cool new fediverse technology or alternative protocl (e.g gemini), 99% of the conversation is just people talking about the technology itself. I originally joined facebook because I had friends on there, not so we could talk about the tech behind facebook

Re: Why I Live in IRC (2015)

#25

I've tried to get into IRC but the public servers have so many dead channels. On the one channel I did find active someone called me a racial slur because I use Windows. I wish there were more people using these alternative, somewhat decentralized services that weren't just tech people. Whenever I see some cool new fediverse technology or alternative protocl (e.g gemini), 99% of the conversation is just people talkin…

Classic irc!

Idling is very much a key aspect of the irc culture.

Re: Why I Live in IRC (2015)

#28
post #5
post #2

I'd love to know if the author still lives in IRC after the Freenode meltdown.

I could've written this article at that time. I was all about Weechat and IRC in general. Unfortunately, the Freenode situation was what finally made me jump ship. I've been using Discord every since and while I'd still prefer to use IRC, I don't mind it nearly as much as I originally expected to.

It's surprising to me that IRC diehards jumped to Discord and not to hosting Matrix servers.

Re: Why I Live in IRC (2015)

#30
post #10

I still live there. Rizon and Libera baby!

One of the weirdest irc networks I've seen is a rizon adjacent one, irc.sageru.org - its basic premise is forced anonymity implemented serverside.

It's a bit slow. It's not an entirely beautiful place. But it's a fun idea, at its core.

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