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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

#271

Post by klez »

frankietwenty9 wrote: post #251
losteric wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ha…

it feel a bit biased when you say that IRC could have a protocol bump, but you wouldn't make the same modifications to hide pictures in Mattermost. Additionally not being able to share images as a feature? I guess everyone will do the three step upload to imgur first. In my world - if I could get away with less different clients I would. It makes it a nightmare to support.

The protocol itself doesn't bar you from implementing image sharing.

Imagine this:

You have a bot in your channel that accepts an "upload-image" command followed by a base64-encoded string representing an image (or a series of these commands if line-lenght is limited, I'm not sure about this part of the IRC protocol). The bot checks that the image is actually an image (to avoid weird injection tricks), saves it on the server and returns a link you can share or sends the link directly to the user/channel of your choosing.

This can be automated with a irc client, of course. Users using old clients will receive an actual link, users of this supposed new client see a clickable preview of the actual image inline.

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

#272

Post by crooked-v »

berti wrote: post #232
crooked-v wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For most people, having multiple clients available, all with their own quirks, is a downside. This goes double when dealing with phones.

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

#273

Post by babbit999 »

A friend introduced me to IRC around mid 90s when internet was getting popular in Sweden. DALnet was the network and it was late hours due to the channels main participants where from overseas. My friend went to the channels IRL get together in the US. Met there his love of his life, married and moved to the US. I think it’s a great story about the impact of internet and IRC was and probably is.

Turning to today, I think IRC can be a big player in the area of IoT. Especially because internet is going into a period of decentralisation. It’s starts with the geeks, like you and I, and later the main caucas will trend on.

Long Live IRC!

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

#274

Post by barbs »

csomar wrote: post #269
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 don't think people want IRC for the lack of functionality. I think they miss IRC because they see in Slack a real threat to decentralization, privacy and openness. I don't use IRC. But I'd never use Slack either in a project I maintain/lead. We need a better alternative.

Matrix?

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

#276

Post by djhworld »

jwilk wrote: post #91
sincerely wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

for instance: https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2018/04/30/metoo/

There is nothing about emoji in this article.

I wish email had this feature. Sometimes I might ask someone to do something, and when they reply like "Done", it would be nice to just react with a thumbs up or something rather than continuing the chain of emails with a "Thank you" etc

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

#277

Post by cup-of-tea »

kuba-orlik wrote: post #270

For me the thing that IRC desperately needs is a set of features that would make it usable on mobile... While constantly switching networks (wifi, 3g etc) it's almost certain I will miss some of the messages. That is a real dealbreaker for me and the reason why we've decided to have an irc->telegram vridge so people can keep up with the conversation on the go. Spoiler alert: now everybody just uses Telegram

Back when I used IRC for work I always ran irssi on a server in screen and ssh'd in. I had a window that picked up any highlight that happened and, of course, logged everything.

I liked this solution. After a while people would understand that you are always idling and probably afk but that you would pick up any messages as soon as you can.

Nowadays you could idle using a raspberry pi or something. It would use less power than your phone. I don't want IRC while I'm out. That's not the point of it.

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

#278

Post by pferde »

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.

You're confusing business with charity. Business should never give out money for free, it wouldn't make sense.

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

#279

Post by stickshift »

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…

This was literally my first comment when I installed Slack for the first time: Isn't this essentially what IRC did for many years?

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

#280

Post by Leszek »

klez wrote: post #271
frankietwenty9 wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it feel a bit biased when you say that IRC could have a protocol bump, but you wouldn't make the same modifications to hide pictures in Mattermost. Additionally not being able to share images as a feature? I guess everyone will do the three step upload to imgur first. In my world - if I could get away with less different clients I would. It makes it a nightmare to support.

The protocol itself doesn't bar you from implementing image sharing. Imagine this: You have a bot in your channel that accepts an "upload-image" command followed by a base64-encoded string representing an image (or a series of these commands if line-lenght is limited, I'm not sure about this part of the IRC protocol). The bot checks that the image is actually an image (to avoid weird injection tricks), saves it on th…

Sounds like you're describing a new protocol.
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