[deleted]
IRC Will Never Die (2021)
21–30 of 101 posts
Re: IRC Will Never Die (2021)
#22(2021)
Re: IRC Will Never Die (2021)
#23Meh.
I got into IRC multiple times, but I really have no desire to go back to it. The fact that I have to set up a ZNC bouncer if I want messages to show up on multiple devices kind of feels like, well, something from the 90's.
I feel like Matrix is considerably less annoying, while being federated and relatively easy to set up.
I'm happy enough with IRC dying.
Re: IRC Will Never Die (2021)
#24What makes IRC special isn't the protocol but the community, and that community has been steadily shrinking month after month, year after year. The average age of regulars continues to go up. Unless its popularity sees some kind of resurgence and the current trends reverse, IRC will most definitely die.
Re: IRC Will Never Die (2021)
#25is it still in use?
I cant remember the last time I saw a reference to an active channel. Or seen it installed on any system.
Re: IRC Will Never Die (2021)
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Hah, the general issue with IRC was (even without DDoS) the bandwidth.
I went to Monash University in Australia, starting in 1994. We had an EFnet server (biggest, or one of the biggest). I was just a student so I don't know the specifics, but it was only allowed to run from 6pm to 6am because otherwise it used most of the University's bandwidth, if not the entire country:
At the time, Australia's internet capacity overseas was a SINGLE 1.5Mbit link. Telstra did buy a 45Mbit link in late 1995, and then another in early 1996.
Still, that's insane, the country had less than 100Mbps.
I remember working for a web design company in the mid-late 90s and we had servers at a datacenter in Melbourne. I remember downloading Netscape Navigator (1.1n!) and being blown away by how fast it downloaded, and then realizing for the duration of the download I was using something in the order of 5% of the country's international bandwidth.
Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_Australia
Re: IRC Will Never Die (2021)
#27is it still in use? I cant remember the last time I saw a reference to an active channel. Or seen it installed on any system.
To my knowledge, the core of Twitch chat is just IRC[0]. They've obviously extended it a fair bit, but it's probably the largest service I can think of that leans on the protocol.
Re: IRC Will Never Die (2021)
#28is it still in use? I cant remember the last time I saw a reference to an active channel. Or seen it installed on any system.
To my knowledge, the core of Twitch chat is just IRC[0]. They've obviously extended it a fair bit, but it's probably the largest service I can think of that leans on the protocol. [0] https://dev.twitch.tv/docs/chat/
huh. did not know that. thats interesting.
Re: IRC Will Never Die (2021)
#29Funny 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.
But it was already kinda fringe, even back in the late 90's. People would talk on AIM or AOL chat, but it was rarer to find IRC users among the hoi polloi.
Re: IRC Will Never Die (2021)
#30IRC 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.
I was sort of on the fence for whether to keep using IRC, for years. I used to have Trillian and later Pidgin as a multi-network chat client, and when using one of those, it makes perfect sense to idle in IRC channels. Then the networks got so complex that multi-network clients no longer worked, and now everything sucks and I have to open 3 different browser tabs (Google, Slack, Discord) on my workstation, iPad, laptop, etc to keep up with what's going on with my work clients, and remember not to close them. Even with the mobile apps, messages are often delayed or don't generate proper notifications.
Without a doubt, the modern era is worse than the experience I had in the 2000s. But, it's true that threaded conversations make it easier to collaborate. Email and voice calls used to work fine for that, though.
Meanwhile, I discovered https://thelounge.chat/, and since I have to open too many browser tabs already, what's one more? I'm pretty happy with it. It fills in the missing features of IRC like sending files and images, and being a bouncer.