111–120 of 180 posts
30 years later and we have reinvented IRC, but worse as you can't use your own client, the protocol may not be public and it's harder to discover channels.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> HN has a very strange hate/love relationship with modern chat systems. > Slack/Discord/whatever: they are proprietary, they are closed-source, they are bad. > IRCCloud (which is proprietary, closed source etc.): oh, it's so good, use it. Who exactly is "HN"? How did you even decide "HN" has opinion X or Y? I'm fine with Discord because its mostly used for gaming. Given the previous options (Ventrilo, TeamSpeak, Mum…
> What I'm not fine with is being forced to use Slack for work-related material. You don't want such sensitive data centralized. You want to host such yourself and immediately: > IRCCloud, whatever it is, probably does not have the same amount of users as the previously mentioned two. But if it uses the IRC protocol (which the name suggests), at least that is open IRCCloud is a centralised, closed-source entity that…
(A very important exception.)
IRCCloud just appears to be akin to a BNC. If Bob decides to use IRCCloud or a BNC that is his choice. The rest of the team or group can still use their preferred IRC client because the protocol is an open standard. Would it be my choice for an IRC client? Hell no. But thanks to the protocol being FOSS: to each their own. Try that with Slack/Discord...
> How is it worse for Slack?
Because whatever gamers discuss is much less privacy sensitive than whatever businesses (with for example other people's data) discuss.
I'm also not really sure why anyone would compare Slack/Discord with IRC or XMPP when its clear that these are so vastly different while there are FOSS, open standard solutions for Slack/Discord in existence such as Mattermost (Slack alternative) and Mumble (Discord alternative). You can't even do audio or video over IRC.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lack of conversation persistence is a real problem. It's 2019 and people expect to have it. If messages disappear into the ether while I'm not actively connected to the room, it's not going to work for participating in a group conversation. Yeah you can set up some always-connected relay on a server and bounce your client through it to still get the conversation backlog when you weren't online, but it's not reasonabl…
Yeah sure, conversation persistence is neat although personally i do not consider a must have. Regardless, my comment was really about how "noob friendly" IRC was/is.
As far as I can tell it'll continue to exist for communities that are on it, or maybe for new ones that are deliberately trying to select for the kind of person who's willing to deal with IRC's limitations. Those are both perfectly valid cases, not everything needs to be aimed at mass market adoption.
But beyond those groups, there are lots of nicer services that most people would prefer to use for one reason or another. And even if the self-hosted and/or free software leaning groups, Matrix looks more promising looking forward.
30 years later and we have reinvented IRC, but worse as you can't use your own client, the protocol may not be public and it's harder to discover channels.
Are you saying these messengers have a feature that splits the group in half at random intervals?
You should really submit a bug report to imessage and friends if they don't do that-- otherwise it degrades the reinvented IRC experience.
I had that thought for months. I'll give you my business Idea for free for the next big social network, since I'd rather work on my game development: Chats based on hashtags. Are you watching the newest Game of Thrones ? Just search for #gameofthrones and enter the chat to talk with others. Chats go bad once too many people participate, so you split chats into channels of ~50. You can upvote messages and once they re…
Would love to hear if you have any ideas on solving that. Besides that, I like the idea.
When I hit my early 30s a few years ago all my friends moved away and had kids. Getting them together even in a virtual form to do anything in a synchronous way has become basically impossible - it leaves me longing for the days of AIM and IRC when it was very easy to make friends online. I haven’t had a decent conversation with a stranger in years.
Ever been to a bar?
Discord is the best thing that happened to me since IRC and I could not be happier. We exchange art, we discuss movies, we play DND together. Obviously it could not replace IRL connections, but it complements them nicely.
No idea why you're being downvoted (my hunch is that HN is extremely biased towards IRC and XMPP). Discord is the lifeblood of a lot of gaming communities and a growing number of IT communities.
Granted, they increased usability significantly by doing this, but it comes at a large cost for people that value freedom and privacy.
The article doesn't cover this, but how do people discover these group chats? All the Discord servers I've joined I've essentially found by word-of-mouth, which doesn't seem very high tech. In the old days you'd find the interesting online forums by "surfing the web".
30 years later and we have reinvented IRC, but worse as you can't use your own client, the protocol may not be public and it's harder to discover channels.
Difficulty of finding channels is sort of the point isn't it? Exclusivity and tightly knit communities?