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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

#331

Post by Amezarak »

always_good wrote: post #68
crooked-v wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now teach the other hundreds of thousands of ex-IRC users how to set up their own bouncer servers and get them to actually stick with it for any amount of time.

Exactly. "Just use a good client that's always online" doesn't change the fact that almost everyone else on IRC goes offline when they shut their laptop or into a tunnel and you can't even send them a message while they're offline. IRC has deficiencies that ensure that only a small cabal of power users will endure it. I prefer to be part of communities that are more accessible to more walks of life than the person wh…

> IRC has deficiencies that ensure that only a small cabal of power users will endure it. I prefer to be part of communities that are more accessible to more walks of life than the person who was bothered to install irssi on his spare EC2 instance.

I've been in, and now run, a channel for about twenty years that, at its peak, had about a hundred active users.

Most of those people were normal folks, from all walks of life, many of whom barely knew how to use a computer.

I would argue that it's only power users who want chat history in the first place. Normal people don't want to go back and read god-knows-how-many lines since they last logged in. They just want to chat.

Offline messaging is a valuable feature for everyone and can be improved by services, without needing a bouncer. Many networks have a "memoserv" that does this. Improve the UX of something like that (should be transparent, no different from a normal pm) and you have good offline messaging.

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

#332

Post by TheCycoONE »

xPaw wrote: post #297
TheCycoONE wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'll check it out

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

#333

Post by chx »

rasengan wrote: post #236
ddtaylor wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Society is still learning and it's having growing pains.

Society is fine, thanks. No growing pains.

It's the Nakamoto scheme dealers who have pains (thanks Preston Byrne for the name). It's not even growing any more.

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

#334

Post by schoen »

int0x80 wrote: post #282
schoen wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi zajd, I want to upvote your comment but I don't think I can do that while it calls HN downvoters "bootlickers". Would you consider removing that part?

Do you think he's going to sell his ideas for an upvote?

I thought the big "idea" part of the comment was that investors are distorting markets with huge subsidies. Another idea is that parts of the HN community itself have a disturbing relationship with this practice. But someone can still get those ideas across without calling downvoters "bootlickers"!

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

#335

Post by kchr »

zingmars wrote: post #310
s3krit wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Self hosted and centralised are two separate concepts. IRC is very much a centralised service even if you can host your own servers. Matrix would be a better example of a decentralised protocol.

> IRC is very much a centralised service even if you can host your own servers

IRC being an open protocol and having the option to run your own servers is what makes it decentralized. The various "major" IRC networks (EFnet, Freenode etc) are decentralized too, since they are isolated networks.

Slack offer neither of these - they own all servers, the protocol and controls the API (which is not the same as an open protocol).

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

#336

Post by schoen »

beefhash wrote: post #321
schoen wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can find a working version at https://web.archive.org/web/20170629073046/https://www.quake... The argument is that there's no way to move the whole IRC ecosystem to use TLS (including with enforcement of certificate checks on the client side) and so the security benefits will be radically degraded by patchwork adoption, because if even one channel participant accepts a MITM attack, all channel participants' commu…

> in the common case of a large heterogeneous IRC channel Which does not map all cases. Queries are still far from dead. And you don't want to set up a small IRCd for shady things because that might tick off law enforcement a lot more than sticking to some established network whose security you trust.

Yes, I tried to acknowledge this by writing "Likewise for direct messages with one other user". I think the author of the original anti-TLS piece was too focused on "the common case of a large heterogeneous IRC channel" to the exclusion of other cases, which I agree are very real!

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

#337

Post by _emacsomancer_ »

crtasm wrote: post #319
_emacsomancer_ wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Though setting up an IRC bouncer is not exactly a trivial task. (It's one of the things on my summer to-do list.)

I recommend also trying Weechat running in screen/tmux on your server, connect to it over SSH. Znc+mirc did work for me but things like scrollback and access from multiple devices are much nicer now with just my Weechat instance.

I used znc for a bit, but I'm trying to get weechat up and running (but, of course, using Emacs' ERC as my client) on a Rpi.

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

#338

Post by kemayo »

rasengan wrote: post #303
hamandcheese wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Signal, keybase, iMessage all have a better privacy model.

Signal requires a phone number. Keybase is an identity service. iMessage requires a phone number and is not verifiable. IRC on the other hand allows ephemeral usernames, you have the option to use e2e encryption if you choose, etc.

iMessage doesn't require a phone number. You can use it with just an email address.

I mean, you do need an Apple ID to do it that way. But I don't think there's anything stopping you from creating throwaway Apple IDs.

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

#339

Post by Mirioron »

j45 wrote: post #257
digi_owl wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

Locality, interesting. I'd agree on BBS'. My experience of IRC, thought on efnet was expanding past my local calling area. IM definitely took the bite out of IRC because it was far better at creating beginners that never made it to IRC, and a lot of IRC users got pulled to IM. ICQ, Yahoo, AIM, MSN created a new type of connection.

IRC always felt to me more like a public forum, whereas IM was private conversation.

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

#340

Post by _emacsomancer_ »

dmitriid wrote: post #260
_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.

> Back in the day, lots of 'normal people' used irc too. "Back in the day" they had no choice or little other choice but. And even then "normal people" would prefer things like AIM and ICQ for reasons obvious to anyone except the self-proclaimed not-normal above-average über-men.

But mIRC was (is?) also easy to use.

AIM, Discord etc. have the 'word-processor problem': the protocol and the interface are inexorably intertwined. You're stuck with whatever user interface they provide.

And this 'word-processor problem' is compounded by the 'normal people' issue, or, even worse than that, the 'lowest common user' problem. It's optimisation not for the best or the most powerful or even the prettiest interface, but rather optimisation for ease-of-immediate-use. (I.e. the interface for word-processors, whether LibreOffice or Word, are miserable environments for actually creating in, because they're tailored to not even 'average users' but to 'inexperienced and lazy users' - those who want to be able to sit down and use it without any training.)

With an open standard, you can have good interfaces for 'normal people' and an interface for 'lowest common users' and interfaces for other types of users, and this enables all of these types to be able to interact.

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