261–270 of 397 posts
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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.
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…
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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.
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> 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?
Though setting up an IRC bouncer is not exactly a trivial task. (It's one of the things on my summer to-do list.)
A long time ago many of the founders met on IRC, and after founding this association, they also founded a dedicated IRC channel.
This was nearly twenty years ago.
Time has passed, many new presidents and members have proposed new communication media (slack, zulip, mattermost among the many) and after some initial enthusiasm they all faded, their problems had become evident and their usage has dropped since.
Needless to say, that IRC channel remained. Despite everything.
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 remember channel takeovers.
I remember the flooding and the script kiddies with their obnoxious scripts.
In a way, IRC let people show the worst of themselves, and I didn't stop using it because new technologies were better, I stopped using it because 90% was silly politics and power struggles.
Messaging is not easy. There are teams out there who are working on solving those hard problems full time while having the luxury of having a centralised specification with full control over implementation. IRC won't be ever be able to achieve that without transitioning into a centralised product.
There are reasons why going as centralised product is best. Twitter did the same (it was easy from the technical point of view, hard from community point of view). They managed to up their game in the user experience by doing so.
I'm not sure IRC can even do that at this point, the protocol is in the wild and making additions to it/standardising them, getting clients to adopt the changes would be hard. But it would be the only way for IRC to compete with other solutions.
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 don't use IRC. But I'd never use Slack either in a project I maintain/lead. We need a better alternative.
Spoiler alert: now everybody just uses Telegram