I don't really use IRC anymore but at the time I remember really hating loggers. Chats were informal and I really didn't like them showing up in google results and elsewhere. Not everything needs to be saved.
Freenode IRC logging archive Echelog is shutting down
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Re: Freenode IRC logging archive Echelog is shutting down
#42I don't really use IRC anymore but at the time I remember really hating loggers. Chats were informal and I really didn't like them showing up in google results and elsewhere. Not everything needs to be saved.
I'd stay off the internet then.
Re: Freenode IRC logging archive Echelog is shutting down
#43I just wanted to take a moment and share with the HN community that IRC is definitely very alive and kicking! There are great channels for thousands of amazing projects, communities and teams spread across so many great IRC Networks, from Freenode [1] to OFTC [2], to Rizon [3], to DALnet [4], to tildeverse [5], Snoonet [6], Quakenet [7], EFnet [8], IRCnet [9] among other networks [10]. IRC is no longer difficult to u…
Add Bitlbee to the list and you can do magic.
Bitlbee needs some work. I don't think there's a single plugin for it that actually works properly.
Re: Freenode IRC logging archive Echelog is shutting down
#44I just wanted to take a moment and share with the HN community that IRC is definitely very alive and kicking! There are great channels for thousands of amazing projects, communities and teams spread across so many great IRC Networks, from Freenode [1] to OFTC [2], to Rizon [3], to DALnet [4], to tildeverse [5], Snoonet [6], Quakenet [7], EFnet [8], IRCnet [9] among other networks [10]. IRC is no longer difficult to u…
No IRCnet or EFnet mention?
I don't want to be a part of this.
Re: Freenode IRC logging archive Echelog is shutting down
#45I don't really use IRC anymore but at the time I remember really hating loggers. Chats were informal and I really didn't like them showing up in google results and elsewhere. Not everything needs to be saved.
Are you planning to delete this comment in a couple of days?
Re: Freenode IRC logging archive Echelog is shutting down
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
IRC is still, in my experience, the best place to get technical help and discussion for most projects.
It absolutely still is. If I have an in-depth technical question about Rust, I can make a post about it on the Rust subreddit, Stack Overflow, or the Rust community forums, but if I jump in IRC I'll have an answer in under five minutes and an interactive explanation. IRC is the internet of the 90s and 00s. Without all the spam, advertisement, and noise.
Not to mention that often the author and/or contributors of the technology in question may be available to answer advanced questions.
Re: Freenode IRC logging archive Echelog is shutting down
#47So, I'm too young to have ever used IRC. This must be a biggish deal to make it #2 on HN homepage. But can someone put this in perspective of how big a deal this is? On a scale of 'Rando County Legacy ISP-provided email service' to 'Gmail' is shutting down, where does this lie? IRC is not email, etc. but again, never seen this community.
IRC is still used massively. It is a relic of the days before corporations took the internet. When it was was still fun. TBH Discord is the closest modern equivalent and the only thing that discord really does better is the embeds and voice. IRC has a ton of advantages: 1) IRC will run on ancient computers, I was chatting to people on IRC using an Amiga which is 25 years old and will run with virtually no bandwidth.…
> the only thing that discord really does better is the embeds and voice.
For me, the thing that Discord does really well is having a persistent message history, so I can join a server about a topic, see the pinned posts, read an FAQ channel, and learn a bunch without having to ask a question. That may be improved with IRC now, but at least when I was last using it (wow, 2 decades ago?!) that was a real pain point.
Re: Freenode IRC logging archive Echelog is shutting down
#48I just wanted to take a moment and share with the HN community that IRC is definitely very alive and kicking! There are great channels for thousands of amazing projects, communities and teams spread across so many great IRC Networks, from Freenode [1] to OFTC [2], to Rizon [3], to DALnet [4], to tildeverse [5], Snoonet [6], Quakenet [7], EFnet [8], IRCnet [9] among other networks [10]. IRC is no longer difficult to u…
www.dal.net not dal.net
Re: Freenode IRC logging archive Echelog is shutting down
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not just was, is! We still hold 90k concurrent users most of the time, and a couple hundred thousand unique users over reasonable spans of time, maybe 3 months?
I think this would be useful: how many unique users have sent at least one message in the last 24 hours? I'm part of some of the channels you think would be largest on Freenode like #javascript and #nodejs. There may be hundreds of people in the online user list, but it's literally the same 10 people talking every day. There's 10x that number of people talking daily in just Elm's Slack. I'm on three javascript-relate…
Many IRC communities have shrunk. Different reasons. Things like Discord and mumble, combined with more collaboration and multiplayer competition in games took gamers away from IRC and crippled networks like Gamesurge.
Social media, especially things like Twitter and the various short video sharing services took away the "general chat" demographic -- partially because folks who were closer (real-life friends and family) like to feel closer, and folks who are not tend to be younger, and the younger demographic trends towards newer technologies.
Tech stuff has held up on freenode for a while, but as you point out this isn't always the case. I would argue that freenode is probably safe from too much decline for a while yet -- those of us who are "aging people who once used [IRC] in its prime" (I'm 36, guy, "aging" is a bit harsh :)) also tend to be people with a lot of experience in $technical_topic. If you want to ask questions about $technical_topic, and the people with experience are on IRC, that's where you go.
You've pointed out a lot of Javascript-related stuff is not on IRC. Javascript is a relatively new technology (compared to IRC), Node is relatively newer, and Elm newer yet. The boom in web technologies, and the ability to run native applications written in JS has caused that community to surge. It's also relatively easier to get into Javascript than it is to get into (say) C. So you attract more people, and you're going to attract younger people, and you're going to have a really diverse audience for a wide range of topics. All of a sudden a single channel on a chat network doesn't make much sense anymore, and running an IRC network yourself doesn't seem like fun, so you decide to use Discord or Slack. I think this makes a lot of sense for lots of communities.
For other (especially smaller, or very niche) technical communities, IRC is still a good solution. It's not fair to say that "its lunch has been eaten" -- it'll remain relevant until text-based messaging is no longer the most accessible way to communicate. But there are other, different solutions for similar problems that do a better job of catering to specific audiences. And that's just fine.
Unfortunately, it's kind of a PITA to get unique counts from server stats, which are mostly aggregates. So I can't answer that question. But Freenode's a rather active network.
Re: Freenode IRC logging archive Echelog is shutting down
#50I don't really use IRC anymore but at the time I remember really hating loggers. Chats were informal and I really didn't like them showing up in google results and elsewhere. Not everything needs to be saved.
Are you planning to delete this comment in a couple of days?
"not everything" differs from "nothing"