IRC.com Bought by London Trust Media, Pledges an IRC Revival • Hacker News Board

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

#241

Post by losteric » Sat, Jun 23, 2018, 3:08 AM UTC

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…

What functional improvements are fundamentally incompatible with the "old" protocols? Longer lines could have been supported with a minor protocol revision. Giving customers the freedom to use clients that don't render images, or markup, is actually a positive.

I setup Mattermost for my company. The deciding factor between Mattermost and IRC was effort to get non-technical users a nice GUI. Functionally, IRC would have won.

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

#242

Post by tptacek » Sat, Jun 23, 2018, 3:32 AM UTC

balladeer wrote: post #235

travbrack wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

They're not welcoming because they're fundamentally bound by the lowest common denominator of the platform. You can't provide any feature every client doesn't offer, or the feature just generates immense confusion and frustration.

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

#243

Post by tptacek » Sat, Jun 23, 2018, 3:33 AM UTC

jlgaddis wrote: post #218

bitexploder wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> "... IRC has no real place in the world of someone hoping to preserve their privacy." Why is that? IRC supports SSL, of course, and many IRC networks offer "cloaks" (to hide your IP address from other users) and/or permit connections via Tor.

The privacy story for SSL is no better than the privacy story that Slack offers. Basically, you're proposing a level of privacy that only asymptotically approaches the most popular unencrypted web chat program in the world.

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

#244

Post by jlgaddis » Sat, Jun 23, 2018, 3:37 AM UTC

Karunamon wrote: post #212

na85 wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Irc with proper roaming support and push notifications would blow discord or slack out of the water. Newer is not necessarily better.

And logging and services that aren’t hacky god clients and user accounts as first class and... IRC has had literal decades to be improved and only now do people get serious about it after Slack and friends sucked all the oxygen out of the room. Older isn’t necessarily better either. IRC has stagnated hard , about the only thing it has on the competitors is that it’s free.

> ... it’s free.

And doesn't require 8 GB of RAM to run a client.

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

#245

Post by peepeepoopoo » Sat, Jun 23, 2018, 3:41 AM UTC

digi_owl wrote: post #206

_emacsomancer_ wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back in the day, lots of 'normal people' used irc too. I like things with open standards, so that people can use the tools that work for them. Bob can use the Gmail web interface to send and receive email, and Sally can use gnus in Emacs to send and receive email on her own local server.

Only for Google to spam-hole anything sally sends...

It really boggles my mind that a few actors were able to essentially lock down a federated protocol.

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

#246

Post by madprops » Sat, Jun 23, 2018, 3:58 AM UTC

I love IRC. Use it every day. I'm developing my own chat stack though, which supports images, video, and audio changes as core features of it.

This is how an empty room looks like: https://i.imgur.com/ir3qyUp.jpg

Code can be found in https://github.com/madprops/Hue

Been working on it since 2016

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

#247

Post by noddingham » Sat, Jun 23, 2018, 4:05 AM UTC

IRC revival? What do people think Slack, Hipchat, Discord, Stride, etc. are? They're IRC derivatives. I spent my formative years online in IRC rooms so for me I feel like the "revival" has been going on for years.

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

#248

Post by nbsd4life » Sat, Jun 23, 2018, 4:11 AM UTC

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…

IRC has fine support for emojis, works for me on a CLI IRC client.

it's up for your input method to allow inputting them, and up for your fonts to display them, and up for you to not force a stupid encoding.

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

#249

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jun 23, 2018, 4:25 AM UTC

slater wrote: post #2

"IRC is a transcended level of humanity" Just how high are these folks on their own supply?

[deleted]

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

#250

Post by alexchamberlain » Sat, Jun 23, 2018, 4:34 AM UTC

jfoutz wrote: post #224

shitloadofbooks wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you connect with a 1200 baud acoustic coupler modem or are you average person who uses a fibre connection and off-the-shelf router? Do you take a horse and cart to work or are you an average person who drives a car or catches the train? Do you mill your own bread, or are you an average person who eats machine milled and produced bread? Do you pump and sanitize your own water, or are you an average person who turns…

Mass produced cars, bread, and public water are all over 100 years old. It’s funny you only use ancient tech as counter examples for avoiding ancient tech.

Do you still use a landline or are you the "average" person that just has a mobile phone? This may differ by a few demographics, but I think there are more modern examples.