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Ask HN: What's Wrong with IRC?

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Re: Ask HN: What's Wrong with IRC?

#71

Post by esbeeb »

IRC is not mobile-friendly (and I have to regretfully admit we live in a push-notification-requiring sort of world now).

Myself, I needed something IRC-like, which was open-source, and mobile friendly, so I tried Mattermost team server for a few years. What turned me off over time was that it required manual upgrades. I would have preferred something which was a nice, tidy Debian package.

Now I've turned to the prosody XMPP server instead, which is a standard Debian package (and now upgrades itself, if and only if, there are security problems, with Debian's "unattended-upgrades"). It runs on a $5US/month VPS. Setting up all the SSL stuff, and firewalling rules - as it uses multiple ports - did take a few days to figure out!

PS: A similar discussion around merits/demerits of IRC was recently on mastodon here: https://hachyderm.io/@miah/112649146585492861

I made a couple of related comments (WRT prosody, and Mattermost Team server): https://c.im/@sbb/112673859554591548 https://c.im/@sbb/112673727757562126

Re: Ask HN: What's Wrong with IRC?

#72

Post by johnea »

esbeeb wrote: post #71

IRC is not mobile-friendly (and I have to regretfully admit we live in a push-notification-requiring sort of world now). Myself, I needed something IRC-like, which was open-source, and mobile friendly , so I tried Mattermost team server for a few years. What turned me off over time was that it required manual upgrades. I would have preferred something which was a nice, tidy Debian package. Now I've turned to the pros…

Plenty of people use IRC on mobile, not sure what you mean by "not friendly"...

Re: Ask HN: What's Wrong with IRC?

#74

Post by jodrellblank »

xboxnolifes wrote: post #60
jodrellblank wrote: post #51

I spend time in a coding Discord channel, it's a regular many times a day thing for people to paste 1-10 lines of code. With syntax highlighting. That's not possible on IRC, pasting 10 lines is "spam" and gets you complained at, everyone needs their own syntax highlighter, or the sender needs to bodge uploading to a pastebin site and other people need scripts to fetch them or clicking links waiting for a separate pro…

> IRC is for people whose reaction to those is to complain or sneer about how they don't want them. This is the real reason IRC will never achieve wide adoption. The people who use it actively don't want the features that the people who don't do.

Don't want the features, and feel superior for not wanting those features: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40813886

Re: Ask HN: What's Wrong with IRC?

#75

Post by esbeeb »

wepple wrote: post #20

Barriers to use IRC for non-technical people are higher.

Strongly agree that this is a great answer. Anyone who neglects to see the interpersonal persective/psychology of entire demographics of users (considering their needs and wants), focusing only on the technical, is missing a big dimension of the picture here.

Re: Ask HN: What's Wrong with IRC?

#76

Post by palata »

I see plenty of reasons in the other answers, but I think it boils down to: "it's a different philosophy".

IRC is akin to watercooler conversations: people who are around may hear what you say and they may join the discussion, but they don't have to. People who are not around are not expected to ever hear about the conversation (though a colleague could repeat it to them later).

When you talk to colleagues behind a whiteboard, you don't expect everything that was said to be recorded. At the end of the discussion, if deemed necessary, you take a picture of the whiteboard and/or write a summary that you save in a persistent place (typically you send the summary to the participants by email).

Now, in 2024, people (especially tech-savvy people, in my experience) have a hard time living with "old school" technology. "Why should we use email in 2024? Does IRC still exist, though it was invented before I was born?". The IRC UI/UX could have been improved a ton, but people have a different philosophy now. They expect everything to persist, they want official communications to feel like WhatsApp (or Snapchat or TikTok, depending on the age) interactions. Many people reaching university now don't know what a "file" is on their system: they just access "stuff" through "apps".

IRC fundamentally doesn't work like the modern chat apps that modern people are taught to use. You can't add threads to IRC and still call it IRC, because you will end up talking to people who don't have threads and it will break either your or their UX. You can't add reactions for the same reason, or history (because you will expect them to see all your messages, and they will assume that it is fine to miss most of them).

TL;DR: IRC is great, and I love it. Nothing is wrong with it. It is just not being used because that is not how (most) people interact anymore. It does not explain why modern chat apps seemingly must be poorly-written ElectronJS abominations, though. Probably it's cheaper to develop and users just don't give a damn.

Re: Ask HN: What's Wrong with IRC?

#77

Post by cpach »

Arathorn wrote: post #62
steveklabnik wrote: post #9

> Admittedly, I haven't used IRC much and I know the UI/UX isn't the best, I mean, you seem to understand what's wrong. IRC is meaningfully worse to use than Slack/Discord. So people use stuff that's nicer to use. > but that could probably be fixed pretty easily and tacked on to the existing messaging infrastructure? If it were easy, it would have already been done. "The UX isn't great" isn't a recent discovery, it's…

> Element is meaningfully worse to actually use. And it's still the best Matrix client I personally have used. fwiw we’ve spent the last few years fixing this, starting with mobile, and Element X is the result: https://element.io/labs/element-x . it’s more of a whatsapp/imessage/signal replacement rather than a discord replacement right now, but i really hope we fixed the UX this time. (edit: that said, at this point…

TBH, I’m surprised to hear Element (X) described like this.

I thought the space that Matrix was intended for was group chat, similar to IRC, Slack, Discord, Mattermost, Zulip, etc.

Now you say that Element X is a replacement for WhatsApp/iMessage/Signal, which to me is a totally different kind of application.

Basically, I see WhatsApp et al as a better way to send SMS (E2EE) or send vacation pics to my family (without broadcasting them on Instagram) whereas if I would want to discuss a tricky PostgreSQL issue (or whatever) I would kind of expect the project to have some kind of presence on IRC, Slack, Discord or similar.

So now I’m curious about the change of course. Would be very interesting to hear the rationale for this.

Re: Ask HN: What's Wrong with IRC?

#78

Post by crtasm »

duskwuff wrote: post #15

> What's Wrong with IRC? • No support for server-side history, and all that comes with that (usable mobile clients, offline messaging and push notifications to mobile clients, persistent presence in channels, search, editing/deleting messages, auditability, etc). Bouncers are a poor solution, as they aren't part of the IRC server and integrate awkwardly, if at all, with clients. • No support for attachments. (DCC SEN…

Ergo (formerly Oragono) covers some of that. I can't say if it provides a server based search.

> https://ergo.chat/about - Combining the features of an ircd, a services framework, and a bouncer (integrated account management, history storage, and bouncer functionality).

Putting it into SASL-only mode is a couple lines in the config. I'm not sure if you meant poorly supported in clients.

Are there any clients that don't split long messages when sending?

Re: Ask HN: What's Wrong with IRC?

#79

Post by crtasm »

jodrellblank wrote: post #51

I spend time in a coding Discord channel, it's a regular many times a day thing for people to paste 1-10 lines of code. With syntax highlighting. That's not possible on IRC, pasting 10 lines is "spam" and gets you complained at, everyone needs their own syntax highlighter, or the sender needs to bodge uploading to a pastebin site and other people need scripts to fetch them or clicking links waiting for a separate pro…

I see emoji on IRC every day btw :)

Re: Ask HN: What's Wrong with IRC?

#80

Post by EasyMark »

Discord (et. al.)are just better IRC. More options for saving convos, having chat, support for reactions and media, etc. Just does a better job at being IRC than IRC does. Only downside is long term preservation and “openness”. Almost everything is a trade off I suppose.
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