Live data from Hacker News

IRC Will Never Die (2021)

hackaday.com

11–20 of 101 posts

Re: IRC Will Never Die (2021)

#11
post #2

Funny that they mention freenode because it did burn to the ground 2 years after this article. However it was reborn as Libera which is once again doing great. If you don't know the story, Google it. I don't want to drag up the past, it's better forgotten. I don't think IRC will really die, it will become a more fringey thing though. Probably more than it already is.

I would argue that IRC absolutely is already super fringe. People have memories of it, but I'm betting active use of IRC today is limited to very tech people.

Re: IRC Will Never Die (2021)

#12
post #2

Funny that they mention freenode because it did burn to the ground 2 years after this article. However it was reborn as Libera which is once again doing great. If you don't know the story, Google it. I don't want to drag up the past, it's better forgotten. I don't think IRC will really die, it will become a more fringey thing though. Probably more than it already is.

Agreed, waves from DALnet!

Rizon checking in.

Re: IRC Will Never Die (2021)

#13
post #8
post #7

IRC is still my favorite chat system even if my close friends have moved on to fancier systems like discord and Zulip and slack. If I could set technical direction in a company we’d use only IRC and email. Maybe mumble.

IRC is terrible for work collaboration. I say this as a long time IRC user. Conversations are not searchable, and if you're offline you are unable to follow along with what's going on with your colleagues. To make it anywhere near usable, you need to run IRC bouncers, chat loggers, search indexers .. at that point, just use something made for collaboration.

Any company which goes to the lengths of setting up an IRC server would find it trivial to also set up a bouncer and search index for that server.

That said, these days a Matrix Synapse instance would be an easier choice.

Re: IRC Will Never Die (2021)

#14
post #8
post #7

IRC is still my favorite chat system even if my close friends have moved on to fancier systems like discord and Zulip and slack. If I could set technical direction in a company we’d use only IRC and email. Maybe mumble.

IRC is terrible for work collaboration. I say this as a long time IRC user. Conversations are not searchable, and if you're offline you are unable to follow along with what's going on with your colleagues. To make it anywhere near usable, you need to run IRC bouncers, chat loggers, search indexers .. at that point, just use something made for collaboration.

Not to mention:

1) IRC doesn't support any form of message threading. There's some user conventions like "username:" or "@username" to direct a message to a specific person, but there's no way to make a clear distinction between multiple conversations in a channel. (You can make a new channel for the conversation, I guess, but that's even more hostile than usual to other users trying to follow along.)

2) IRC doesn't support messages longer than ~400-500 bytes. There's an internal hard limit of 512 bytes per line in the IRC protocol, and part of that gets silently consumed by fields like the server hostname and channel name. If you try to send a longer message, it's silently truncated. (Your client will probably echo it back as if it all went through, but other users will see it truncated.) Trying to discuss anything longer than a single line of text typically requires users to post it to an online "pastebin" - adding another external tool you need to make IRC work.

3) There's no reliable, standard way to transfer non-text content on IRC. DCC is unreliable, slow, requires one or both users to set up their firewall to allow incoming connections (!), and only transfers files to one user at a time. All of this combines to make IRC incredibly awkward for discussing audiovisual content, like graphical designs or audio/video. Sure, you can upload screenshots or videos to another web site and post links to IRC - but that's yet another external tool you have to bring in.

4) User authentication and authorization in IRC is incredibly crude. The protocol is built around the understanding that users can change their username at any time (!!), with systems like NickServ bolted on after the fact to "protect" names. User permissions are tied to a user's presence in a channel; private channels are implemented with a single shared password. All of this is "good enough" for a lot of social IRC networks, but completely unsuitable for a business setting which demands a higher level of assurance.

A previous rant of mine on IRC's missing features: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40813743

Re: IRC Will Never Die (2021)

#15
post #7

IRC is still my favorite chat system even if my close friends have moved on to fancier systems like discord and Zulip and slack. If I could set technical direction in a company we’d use only IRC and email. Maybe mumble.

Worked at a few places that did just that. One used SIP phones for actual voice chat. Liked it very much.

To respond to the sibling comment: we had text files on a share that we could actually grep. Far better than the inexact, incomplete search functionality that seems to have become normal these days.

Re: IRC Will Never Die (2021)

#16
post #2

Funny that they mention freenode because it did burn to the ground 2 years after this article. However it was reborn as Libera which is once again doing great. If you don't know the story, Google it. I don't want to drag up the past, it's better forgotten. I don't think IRC will really die, it will become a more fringey thing though. Probably more than it already is.

It's not so funny, because this article was written at the time freenode was burning to the ground, and the article suggests that it would be very easy for everyone to move to libera if it turned out to be the better option. And that it worked so well is the point of the article! IRC is highly resilient because it's simple to set up, the clients and servers are free software and can be endlessly and independently con…

IRC is so lightweight that a single-core sub 500MHz system can host 10,000 or more connections, and did back in the day.

Re: IRC Will Never Die (2021)

#17
post #2

Funny that they mention freenode because it did burn to the ground 2 years after this article. However it was reborn as Libera which is once again doing great. If you don't know the story, Google it. I don't want to drag up the past, it's better forgotten. I don't think IRC will really die, it will become a more fringey thing though. Probably more than it already is.

IRC feels more fringe, but it's actually held up surprisingly well. According to the stats, it's currently about half as popular as it was in 2000 when I started[1]. That's better than I would have guessed.

[1] https://netsplit.de/networks/top10.php?year=2024

Re: IRC Will Never Die (2021)

#18
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IRC is terrible for work collaboration. I say this as a long time IRC user. Conversations are not searchable, and if you're offline you are unable to follow along with what's going on with your colleagues. To make it anywhere near usable, you need to run IRC bouncers, chat loggers, search indexers .. at that point, just use something made for collaboration.

Any company which goes to the lengths of setting up an IRC server would find it trivial to also set up a bouncer and search index for that server. That said, these days a Matrix Synapse instance would be an easier choice.

If you start a company and spend a non-trivial amount of your time, effort and money into handcrafting and customizing a perfect IRC server, that company is going nowhere.

Re: IRC Will Never Die (2021)

#19
post #2

Funny that they mention freenode because it did burn to the ground 2 years after this article. However it was reborn as Libera which is once again doing great. If you don't know the story, Google it. I don't want to drag up the past, it's better forgotten. I don't think IRC will really die, it will become a more fringey thing though. Probably more than it already is.

How is it "funny" when the Freenode saga is literally what this article is about?

Re: IRC Will Never Die (2021)

#20
The article makes a solid point about the timelessness of a protocol versus a service. I will never get to relive my memories of CompuServe, but just last weekend I was able to goof around with Microsoft Comic Chat 2.5 under WINE. It connected to a server just fine and it was 1999 all over again. I really wish we would see new Internet (No not web, Internet) protocols. The last one I have seen get any resemblance of traction is the Gemini protocol and that is still a very niche thing.
Post reply on HN