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Why I Live in IRC (2015)

aaronparecki.com

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Re: Why I Live in IRC (2015)

#34
post #26

[flagged]

Counter-example experience: At some point I tried to find an active community to discuss Electrical Engineering. I sampled 8-9 Discords, and they were all dead and all had redundant #general and #offtopic channels.

##electronics on Libera otoh is highly active.

Discord sucks because it's way too fragmented and diluted.

Re: Why I Live in IRC (2015)

#36
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Under 18 but used it for nearly 20 years? Were you born at a negative number?

I was an op when I was under 18, stopped using IRC 15+ years ago, and used it in total for probably 15-20 years. I'm 39 and started at .. Idk, probably 8-9. I think I was an op from 12-16 maybe 17. A lot of ops were people who synced (peered) their stable and moderated servers on good connections with efnet. Like, OC1-3 connections. My friends and I were pretty much apprentice network engineers to a family member who…

Childhood me is envious of childhood you. I had heard about the internet, but didn't get any real access til around when you were already ircopping.

Re: Why I Live in IRC (2015)

#37
post #6

18 years and counting! Still living in IRC. I use the old and humble Irssi as the client with ZNC running on a Debian VM on Linode as the bouncer to maintain a persistent connection. It is simple, reliable, and well established. I initially used to hang out on multiple networks like DALnet, EFnet, etc. but I quickly settled on becoming a regular at Freenode and OFTC because those are where most of the free and open s…

Same here. ZNC on Debian (apt install znc) on an Entrywan instance.

The freenode debacle impacted a handful of my favorite channels. #tcl is noticably quieter and a couple others are still trying to decide whether they're an official channel or not (this affects #channel vs ##channel naming). I'd bet that the number of active users has dropped but I don't have any emperical evidence.

If anyone is considering ZNC, here are a couple suggestions to change to the default config:

1. AllowWeb = false (only enable the web interface if you need it)

2. For each channel, add Buffer = 10000 so that you can have history for more than a day or two (the default is quite small)

3. Add these two lines:

LoadModule = chansaver LoadModule = clearbufferonmsg

to get better history tracking and avoid duplicate messages.

Re: Why I Live in IRC (2015)

#38
Back in the early 1990s up until about early 2000s, i would frequent IRC a bunch. It was so new and fun back then to chat with so many different people across the world; to this day, it remains impressive to me in several ways. Nowadays, i spend my time mostly equally across matrix and the fediverse. While i use fediverse clients quite typically (as they're intended), I use matrix in a few different ways (chat, yes, but also system/task notifications, server "logs", system "dashboard", etc.). But, its quite impressive to the extent that the author uses IRC; very clever and awesome indeed! I hope to stretch my use of matrix even more, but sometimes bridges make things a little annoying. Nevertheless, for me, matrix has replaced irc.

Re: Why I Live in IRC (2015)

#39
The author describes the alerting and notification workflow really well.

We use IRC at work for this purpose. Prometheus alerts flow into channels that anyone is free to join or leave depending on what they're working on at the given moment.

Re: Why I Live in IRC (2015)

#40

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…

these are channels I found to be active and had cool people:

- #darkscience on the darkscience server

- #linux and #indieweb on libera.chat

- #talk on snoonet

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