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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

#291

Post by cup-of-tea »

jan-jakub wrote: post #285
cup-of-tea wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Of course I can do that - and I did, with znc on my vps. But it's not a solution for beginners or less-technical people. Lack of server-side history also makes it basically impossible for new members to read into the conversation history... Adding it to the spec would make it 1000x easier to onboard new users

> But it's not a solution for beginners or less-technical people.

I don't see a problem. You don't give beginners enough credit. We were beginners once and we managed it just fine. If anything beginners today are cleverer than us :)

> Lack of server-side history also makes it basically impossible for new members to read into the conversation history

Is this actually something people do? For one of my channels I had stats generated from the logs and ability to search the entire log. I'm sure that could be trivially setup nowadays with Elasticsearch or something. If you control the server you can guarantee you'll catch every message too and won't lose any in a netsplit.

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

#292

Post by minitech »

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…

> The basis of old internet protocols are simple, open and powerful

> Email, IRC, HTML, FTP

These protocols are anything but simple. “Be liberal in what you accept” was a huge mistake we’re still paying for. E-mail effectively can’t be made private. There’s lots of room for improvement in open protocols. (Start by not making them text-based, please.)

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

#293

Post by kashyapc »

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…

No frelling way you'll get rid of it (https://xkcd.com/1782/).

For the last 10 years, been working on open source software for a living. Been an IRC user for equally long; `mutt` for the last five years. Thank goodness I do that. Nothing comes close to its effectiveness.

Lack of images on IRC is a feature; not a bug, dammit. It keeps me productive and removes utterly distracting crap. I'd be loathe to see IRC showing images and animated poop emojis (although the unicode 'pile-of-poo' renders just alright on my command-line IRC client, `irssi`).

I can handle video chat and in-person communication equally fine. But I prefer the clarity and vigor of the text-only approach.

"Clear writing is a sign of clear thinking."

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

#295

Post by zingmars »

greglindahl wrote: post #256
rasengan wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be happy if it looked like 1995. It was actually decentralized.

IRC, FTP, and SMTP are all decentralized. That's the good part about them.

If IRC is decentralised, then so is Slack and all it's clones. Except they're not.

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

#296

Post by zingmars »

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.

Cloaks aren't reliable and there are a few tricks to uncloak a user anyway.

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

#297

Post by xPaw »

TheCycoONE wrote: post #239
progval wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The Lounge works very well on a mobile: https://github.com/thelounge/thelounge

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

#298

Post by [deleted] »

minitech wrote: post #292
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…

> The basis of old internet protocols are simple, open and powerful > Email, IRC, HTML, FTP These protocols are anything but simple. “Be liberal in what you accept” was a huge mistake we’re still paying for. E-mail effectively can’t be made private. There’s lots of room for improvement in open protocols. (Start by not making them text-based, please.)

[deleted]

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

#299

Post by xPaw »

na85 wrote: post #204
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…

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

The Lounge is a web client, so you can access it from any browser (PWA, push notification support). Since your IRC connection runs on a server, roaming and connection drops is not a problem.

https://github.com/thelounge/thelounge

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

#300

Post by s3krit »

zingmars wrote: post #295
greglindahl wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IRC, FTP, and SMTP are all decentralized. That's the good part about them.

If IRC is decentralised, then so is Slack and all it's clones. Except they're not.

Cool, I look forward to connecting to your Slack server.
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