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Just think of all that information, stuck in the walled garden, away from the prying eyes of search engines or any other forms of public discoverability. Just waiting to get flushed down the drain or shoved into the training data of a future round of AI crapware...
IRC is also a walled garden.
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This is not a feature, this is a limitation. It would've been a feature if Signal offered you a choice of whether the history should be synced up or not (perhaps with a default of "no" for existing users, to maintain the established expectation). As it is, this is a limitation.
In order for Signal to provide this history, said history would have to be stored on their servers, massively nerfing one of their core competitive advantages. This “limitation” is the ultimate advantage from the perspective of Signal’s core competency.
It feels really nice to see stuff like this while the most of the people think Slack, Discord and a few others are the only choices. I recently went through the hassle of deciding on something small for my family + company circle. Mainly considered XMPP and Matrix, and went with Matrix. Didn't know there was such a thing as "always-on" on IRC tho.
Have you had any issue with messages/notifications not be sent/received with Matrix? I wanted to try Matrix for friends and family, but either I would never get the message until I opened the app, or I'd get the notification but my phone wouldn't vibrate. Eventually settled on XMPP with Conversations on Android.
IRC is often romanticized, but after working with its protocol spec, I found it rather unsavory. Its unstructured message format looks like this: :User1 PRIVMSG User2 :Hello, are you receiving this message? While this might look fine at first glance, the lack of more regular structure caused issues. Some messages are easier to parse than others. Each implementation introduced quirks and variations, creating countless…
NATS as an IRC replacement is using the wrong tool for the wrong job.
I've long been thinking about how I'd replace IRC and I keep coming back to another IRC-era protocol that wasn't as popular but was definitely ahead of its time by some amount: Hotline. It wasn't Open like IRC and was limited to Macintosh users for a long time, but it has a lot of what most people are looking for in a "chat system" today. One thing, however, that I think would benefit the protocol designers of the future: Learn from MSN.
MSN separated their Authentication and Chat systems. You ask for a token that identifies you to the chat system from the authentication system. These were two separated protocols that did one thing specifically for each other. I honestly think that separating chat-locus and identity from one another is important.
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The point still stands. Regardless of how easy it might be to access logs, not a single popular Freenode (or otherwise) server I spent years chatting on has an archive online. It might as well have all taken place on Discord. Turns out what matters isn’t how easy it is to access logs but whether anyone cares to do it.
You sure? There are loads. Have you tried looking? Heres an archive searcher for #bitfighter on freenode: https://bitfighter.org/irclogs/search.php
A channel with one day logged in 2024, then nothing for two years, then nine days logged in 2022, five days logged in 2021, etc?
What about big tech channels like, say, nodejs and javascript?
IRC is often romanticized, but after working with its protocol spec, I found it rather unsavory. Its unstructured message format looks like this: :User1 PRIVMSG User2 :Hello, are you receiving this message? While this might look fine at first glance, the lack of more regular structure caused issues. Some messages are easier to parse than others. Each implementation introduced quirks and variations, creating countless…
But from my recollection of writing bad IRC client in the 90s (including in mIRC script after they added support for sockets in the scripting language in mIRC v5.3 released December 1997), the protocol isn't that hard to work with. Once you figured out you needed to send a : in front of your message text, I don't remember any other big gotchas.
It's not XML, and I don't remember any quoting issues, but maybe there's some I forgot. CTCP maybe isn't ideal either. DCC probably doesn't work anymore, but it was a different time when being on the internet meant an expectation that you were a peer and could accept inbound connections.
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But in general IRC is not really archived etc? So just as throw-away as Discord imo.
Being knowingly throwaway meant that any long term knowledge got turned into a blog post, documentation, a forum thread, or a search engine indexable logs-to-html site in the worst case. With discord the message might get pinned if a mod thinks it was useful and remains undiscoverable for the majority of people
IME it doesn't work very well. If you hang around a discord server long enough you see the same conversations happening over and over and over. And the app is not good at helping you finding old conversations (which is why they are repeated endlessly).
It's also very bad at resuming where you left off, so it's incredibly difficult to follow an active thread without missing anything:
https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/18d4tiv/inexpli...
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You sure? There are loads. Have you tried looking? Heres an archive searcher for #bitfighter on freenode: https://bitfighter.org/irclogs/search.php
That's the counter example? A channel with one day logged in 2024, then nothing for two years, then nine days logged in 2022, five days logged in 2021, etc? What about big tech channels like, say, nodejs and javascript?
The point that I am making is that the capability and software exists, even for others to view, if you want. I mean: did you need an account or specialised client for these logs?
Thats the point.
Be the change you want to see if you want archives uploaded. Or, do what others do: grep your local files or znc logs.
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But in general IRC is not really archived etc? So just as throw-away as Discord imo.
Any single client can upload their logs, since it's "archived" in plaintext on every users PC. You can also log from the server; using a multitude of modules; https://docs.inspircd.org/4/modules/log_syslog/ or https://docs.inspircd.org/4/modules/log_json/ if you're using inspircd.
And for IRC, I think this is a good compromise between "everything is public at all times" and "everything is walled off and private at all times".
If you want to have a log of your use, it's possible. If the org running the server wants a log, they can do that too. Is that possible with something like Discord?
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But in general IRC is not really archived etc? So just as throw-away as Discord imo.
However on IRC this is not for technical reasons, but limited interest. Pre-LLM-GenAI gathering information from huge chat logs was quite limited. But different extraction mechanisms always existed. Some people kept logs, some servers/channels had web-archives. Discord tries to keep it exclusive to them. (Focussing on technical side here, whether it's socially wanted is a different big question, which ends with a "it…
grep/recoll. Fast even on ancient machines.