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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

#231

Post by prawnsalad »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #169

I'd love to see IRCv3 take off more: https://ircv3.net/irc/ I also want to understand web clients more, do they use WebSockets? Can we spec that out to be part of every IRC server out there?

Most use a websocket library like sockjs or socket.io which uses websockets and falls back to long polling if there's an issue with that.

Some IRC servers are starting to implement native websockets but that introduces several issues, so many networks use a websocket gateway to accept websockets to their network, such as https://github.com/kiwiirc/webircgateway

Then for IRCv3, most clients these days do support their specs in some form of way, and it's growing :)

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

#232

Post by berti »

crooked-v wrote: post #177
berti wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would they need to? IRCCloud does that for them (the joys of SaaS).

Why would a community group pay $5/mo/person to use private servers when they could use Discord for free?

Each member has the option to use the client of their choice (IRCCloud, their own bouncer, web client, desktop applications, etc.), each with varying cost, effort, and convenience. With Discord, everyone is locked into Discord.

P.S. You only need one IRCCloud sub for _all_ the channels + servers you want to lurk in.

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

#233

Post by xkcd-sucks »

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…

If only someone would pay Kanye to promote IRC

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

#234

Post by digi_owl »

j45 wrote: post #214
bengarrr wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But its not really a social network...BBSs were/are great too! Plus BBs let you actually manage content versus just chat and link. IRC is great and always will be but a social network it is not...and I doubt we are gonna see any real revival.

Irc created more new social connections than many networks that came after. Same goes for bbs. We need to find the next thing that truly connects people.

"Locality"?

BBSs were more of the than not local, with some federation in that the operator or someone he trusted would exchange data between the local BBS and some distant BBS.

Similarly IRC used to house a high number of very local channels back when i first came online (and one tried to pick a server on the network that was in one's own nation or a neighboring one to avoid finding oneself on the wrong end of a net split).

Social networks offers much the same via various means (groups on facebook, sub-reddits on reddit, etc).

Honestly IMO, what killed IRC was IM and SMS. This because now the schoolyard cliques could once more ostracize.

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

#235

Post by balladeer »

travbrack wrote: post #226
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…

I agree that IRC is an obsolete protocol, but it's still sad that open standards lost the chat wars. XMPP improves on all of the things you mentioned but it looks like its moment in the sun has passed, and was never really used to its potential in the first place.

I wish open standards, and the tools that facilitated them, were more welcoming to the 'average' crowd. I used to use IRC in the past. I still do but it's just couple of logins a month. Even many of the support channels I used to frequent from OSS have moved to other platforms. Hobby channels etc have moved elsewhere long back.

I faced the same problem with IRC that I am facing with Signal today. Though this analogy doesn't really seem that coherent but I hope you see where I am coming from. No one I would like to communicate with via such apps/platforms seems to use it. IRC is great but I would like to connect it with people I know, are part of something I like or do, or are from the place I belong to. They don't. They have moved to other platforms, long back, or never really used IRC.

I believe a lot of existing IRC users, including me, are still around just because of the nostalgia.

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

#236

Post by rasengan »

ddtaylor wrote: post #209
rasengan wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but at the same time, someone who is unwilling to give second chances to the pioneers who took risks before them -- that's more toxic. I want this society to work. And I refuse to let such a chilling effect of fear of failure stop our society from progressing. We all know that you learn best from mistakes. And we, as a society, have gotten much stronger and more resilient.

People have a dislike for Mark not because he took risks but because he didn't let other people solve the problems they clearly had, which is dangerous. The reason there are so many conspiracy theories about him is because he's made the line between stupid and malicious near impossible to differentiate.

I'm not sure if that is the right way to interpret it.

For example, every single exchange out there is holding people's assets, in trust, and thus, are also making it difficult to distinguish the line between stupid and malicious.

Society is still learning and it's having growing pains. But, these pains, are leading to stronger, more resilient systems.

I think we'll soon start seeing non-custodial exchanges, the way it was meant to be.

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

#237

Post by rasengan »

mjevans wrote: post #120
mynameisvlad wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Of course I mean 'very easy' for someone who is used to the technical side of things. A normal user of GUI webapps likely isn't interested. Then it's not "very easy". It's "mildly complicated" at best. For IRC to succeed it needs to actually be very easy for all users, going down to very basic users who likely have never even heard of the terminal, let alone touched it.

These days I have to point new users to Quassel; there's the 'monolithic' version that behaves like old IRC clients, and there's the client/server version where the quassel "server" acts as a client and various quassel clients connect to that. Note that it doesn't support mobile devices (in theory someone could submit a pull request to change that, but they'd probably need to write an additional QT GUI that worked co…

> doesn't support mobile device

There's a neat app for Android called Quasseldroid!

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.iskrembile...

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

#238

Post by bogomipz »

rasengan wrote: post #191
jacquesm wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's pretty tone-deaf. No matter what the guys qualities are that name is toxic.

Sure, but at the same time, someone who is unwilling to give second chances to the pioneers who took risks before them -- that's more toxic. I want this society to work. And I refuse to let such a chilling effect of fear of failure stop our society from progressing. We all know that you learn best from mistakes. And we, as a society, have gotten much stronger and more resilient.

>"Sure, but at the same time, someone who is unwilling to give second chances to the pioneers who took risks before them -- that's more toxic"

Sorry but taking calculated entrepreneurial risks is not at all the same as being careless. The contempt stems from the latter type of risk not the former. Conflating the two is also toxic.

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

#239

Post by TheCycoONE »

progval wrote: post #180
beefhash wrote: post #17

As a routine user of IRC: This scares – nay, terrifies – me. London Trust Media is colossal. They seem to have control over freenode and Snoonet, two networks basically unchallenged in their niche. Snoonet hasn't been doing so well since Discord, but that's another story. They also seem to own Private Internet Access. If a player becomes too big, they'll change the rules of the game. Just look at the state of Interne…

> server-side storage of history You can do that with a bouncer. Slack and Discord are essentially a chat server with an integrated bouncer. > mobile-friendly data usage How is IRC not mobile-friendly? It only transports the raw text, not even "X is writing a message" notifications. > first class support for emoji Most clients support UTF-8, isn't it only a matter of fonts?

It's not mobile friendly because it requires a persistent connection and eats a lot of battery. That could be fixed with the right bouncer/client combination, but I haven't found it yet.

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

#240

Post by damnyou »

Nadya wrote: post #70
always_good wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't hear people saying things like "I want to be able to send/receive messages while offline on IRC" because they just use something else. Just like you don't hear me wishing that PHP or Fortran had certain features. It's not very good evidence.

>You don't hear people saying things like "I want to be able to send/receive messages while offline on IRC" because they just use something else. Almost. They still use IRC - but they extend functionality "outside of IRC" with bots. You don't hear this because people make bots with .tell commands that supplement this functionality. The next time a user logs in the bot will /msg them something like "You have 1 message…

I hope you're aware of how convoluted that sounds in 2018 :)
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