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IRC.com Bought by London Trust Media, Pledges an IRC Revival

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Re: IRC.com Bought by London Trust Media, Pledges an IRC Revival

#181

Post by noeatnosleep »

rasengan wrote: post #148
blibble wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

those are nice observations you have as his patron, but you didn't really answer my question it's not normal for a self-described businessman to give out money for free: so what's his long term plan behind all of this? > For the IRC networks such as freenode, they are a vital network for open source developers and communities which I think we can all agree would be very upsetting if that was to be interrupted. this s…

> it's not normal for a self-described businessman to give out money for free If that’s not normal then I don’t want to ever be normal.

I love this statement.

Re: IRC.com Bought by London Trust Media, Pledges an IRC Revival

#182

Post by codemac »

tptacek wrote: post #174
nopacience wrote: post #76

Long live IRC There will always be new platforms like slack, discord, gitter, and whatever. IRC was and still is great. IRC is simple, its text, its stable. Its simple to program on and a lot can be done above it. IRC is open. The basis of old internet protocols are simple, open and powerful Email, IRC, HTML, FTP And as the article points out, irc has no face. IRC was a time people had to ask for a picture. Different…

I used command line IRC clients in the 1990s. I wrote IRC clients in the 1990s. I'm not interested in going back to IRC, an "open" 7-bit effectively-centralized protocol with line-length limits and lowest-common-denominator clients that can't even show an image. I don't use Mutt to get access to my email, anymore, either. I guess that makes me "average". IRC, FTP, and, yes, SMTP are all bad protocols from the 1980s e…

A protocol existing is better than no protocol at all.

Re: IRC.com Bought by London Trust Media, Pledges an IRC Revival

#183

Post by progval »

xf86alsa wrote: post #84

https://matrix.org is essentially a modern IRC, but federated and completely FOSS. I suggest people drawn to an IRC-like experience without the proprietary nature of Slack and Discord [give it a shot]( https://riot.im ).

Riot is the only stable client officially recommended on Matrix's website, and it's in-browser. So it's not really a viable alternative for a lot of IRC users.

Re: IRC.com Bought by London Trust Media, Pledges an IRC Revival

#184

Post by SubiculumCode »

Pete_D wrote: post #119
bandrami wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> first class support for emoji I'm sorry. Even in 2018 I cannot take seriously any claim that "support for emoji" is being used to make business case decisions.

Times have certainly changed drastically. I remember when Google Talk was announced and the tech crowd of the day embraced it precisely because it didn't have emoticons (or custom fonts and colors, or games, or a host of other features MSN/AIM/etc. had and were beginning to be considered tacky). Maybe it's cyclical, and in a few years we'll be back to minimalism.

:) or nothing.

Re: IRC.com Bought by London Trust Media, Pledges an IRC Revival

#185

Post by _8j50 »

strkek wrote: post #170
_8j50 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you break backwards compatibility? Maybe to an extent. How do you handle clients that don't support it? How do you secure channels and allow some of the current server op/admin (what freenoders call staffer) functionality? By the time you consider that and more you might as well make a new protocol. Let's say someone with an older irc client or who doesn't want e2e messages you,what then? Now your irc conversation…

I can perfectly see this implemented without breaking backwards compatibility, similar to how we have usermodes for "connected via SSL" and channel modes for "requires SSL". It doesn't require breaking backwards compatibility because, as far as outdated clients are concerned, they just "can't enter a channel because they lack a required usermode" or "can't send a message to some user because they lack a required user…

Most of my comment was assuming it was implemented with or without backwards compatibility. You are assuming people will slowly move to the e2e version.

People are still writing clients without tls support. Why would you think e2e support will have better adaptability? People will move away from it when they get enough number of messages that require turning it off because the other party does not support it. Nobody wants to join your channel because you need them to have one of a few clients in a very short list in order to join.

We already have OTR (for quite some time now) and matrix has libolm - things aren't and won't change because the best you can practically implement it is using opportunistic negotiation and that is bad security. Best case scenario(imo),20 years from now 95%+ of irc users will use e2e. That is unacceptable when we already have fully e2e chat today. Let's break compatibility and have a separate network for the new secure protocol. At least that way people that move over don't have to look back. When foss projects move to the new network everything else (again,pure opinion) will follow.

Re: IRC.com Bought by London Trust Media, Pledges an IRC Revival

#186

Post by floatingatoll »

nopacience wrote: post #76

Long live IRC There will always be new platforms like slack, discord, gitter, and whatever. IRC was and still is great. IRC is simple, its text, its stable. Its simple to program on and a lot can be done above it. IRC is open. The basis of old internet protocols are simple, open and powerful Email, IRC, HTML, FTP And as the article points out, irc has no face. IRC was a time people had to ask for a picture. Different…

IRC is dying because no one invests months and years of code into server protocol extensions and client user interface for non-engineer users.

Write an IRCv3 scrollback and search extension, and you’ll win the hearts of millions.

Re: IRC.com Bought by London Trust Media, Pledges an IRC Revival

#187

Post by progval »

csixty4 wrote: post #121

I used to live on IRC, but it's been years since I was a regular user. Are channel takeovers still a thing? That was one of the things that turned me off on it after getting locked out of the channel I called home for most of a decade.

No, channel admins register their channel to a bot (ChanServ) with special privileges over the network, so the bot can never be taken over.

I've been using IRC for about a decade, and almost all networks I have seen have such a bot.

Re: IRC.com Bought by London Trust Media, Pledges an IRC Revival

#188

Post by bitexploder »

codemac wrote: post #182
tptacek wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used command line IRC clients in the 1990s. I wrote IRC clients in the 1990s. I'm not interested in going back to IRC, an "open" 7-bit effectively-centralized protocol with line-length limits and lowest-common-denominator clients that can't even show an image. I don't use Mutt to get access to my email, anymore, either. I guess that makes me "average". IRC, FTP, and, yes, SMTP are all bad protocols from the 1980s e…

A protocol existing is better than no protocol at all.

In the modern age of surveillance some protocols could be actively worse. Sad times, but IRC has no real place in the world of someone hoping to preserve their privacy.

Re: IRC.com Bought by London Trust Media, Pledges an IRC Revival

#189

Post by rasengan »

tptacek wrote: post #174
nopacience wrote: post #76

Long live IRC There will always be new platforms like slack, discord, gitter, and whatever. IRC was and still is great. IRC is simple, its text, its stable. Its simple to program on and a lot can be done above it. IRC is open. The basis of old internet protocols are simple, open and powerful Email, IRC, HTML, FTP And as the article points out, irc has no face. IRC was a time people had to ask for a picture. Different…

I used command line IRC clients in the 1990s. I wrote IRC clients in the 1990s. I'm not interested in going back to IRC, an "open" 7-bit effectively-centralized protocol with line-length limits and lowest-common-denominator clients that can't even show an image. I don't use Mutt to get access to my email, anymore, either. I guess that makes me "average". IRC, FTP, and, yes, SMTP are all bad protocols from the 1980s e…

I would be happy if it looked like 1995. It was actually decentralized.

Re: IRC.com Bought by London Trust Media, Pledges an IRC Revival

#190

Post by kuschku »

spookthesunset wrote: post #156
matthberg wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Embrace Extend Extinguish, the root of Electronic Evils. Hopefully it doesn't happen with IRC as it has with other lovely parts of electronic history. Microsoft was the origin of the term with their browser and OS products of old, yet it has been unfortunately more and more relevant with Google, particularly email and android openness (gmail only features and Google play services, respectively).

That didn't really answer the question that was asked. IRC is an open protocol. Whats your fear? There are some seriously paranoid people on HN these days, and it is rather disenchanting to have to sift through all the negativity. Failure to embrace new things and new ways of doing things is a surefire way to irrelevancy.

London Trust Media owns the networks where almost all users are, and either funds and closely works with most client developers, or directly employees those.

That’s the fear.

The IRC protocol isn’t great, nor worthy of protection. The users, the community are.

If tomorrow freenode and snoonet went down, IRC would be forever changed.

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