Many open source projects move to Matrix. There are IRC bridges for it too.
IRC Will Never Die (2021)
41–50 of 101 posts
Re: IRC Will Never Die (2021)
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
IRC is so lightweight that a single-core sub 500MHz system can host 10,000 or more connections, and did back in the day.
Hah, the general issue with IRC was (even without DDoS) the bandwidth. I went to Monash University in Australia, starting in 1994. We had an EFnet server (biggest, or one of the biggest). I was just a student so I don't know the specifics, but it was only allowed to run from 6pm to 6am because otherwise it used most of the University's bandwidth, if not the entire country : At the time, Australia's internet capacity…
In the fall of 96 or 97? I was getting some freshmen setup with computers. I was on the football team so we were on campus (WUSTL) 7 days before school started so almost no one was on campus. We were trying to download navigator from tucows (I think) and I remembered wuarchive still existed and was on campus. We had 100 meg in the buildings and fiber backbone. We pulled NN at 5.5Mb/s... it finished so fast we downloaded it a second time to make sure. And I said "We won't see speeds like that for 7-10 years." I was pretty correct. That's when I realized that live video would be doable but not for a while.
Re: IRC Will Never Die (2021)
#43IRC is still my favorite chat system even if my close friends have moved on to fancier systems like discord and Zulip and slack. If I could set technical direction in a company we’d use only IRC and email. Maybe mumble.
IRC is terrible for work collaboration. I say this as a long time IRC user. Conversations are not searchable, and if you're offline you are unable to follow along with what's going on with your colleagues. To make it anywhere near usable, you need to run IRC bouncers, chat loggers, search indexers .. at that point, just use something made for collaboration.
Running a bouncer and logging is still simpler than the alternatives.
That said, I think the lack of threading is a huge downside.
Re: IRC Will Never Die (2021)
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
IRC is so lightweight that a single-core sub 500MHz system can host 10,000 or more connections, and did back in the day.
Hah, the general issue with IRC was (even without DDoS) the bandwidth. I went to Monash University in Australia, starting in 1994. We had an EFnet server (biggest, or one of the biggest). I was just a student so I don't know the specifics, but it was only allowed to run from 6pm to 6am because otherwise it used most of the University's bandwidth, if not the entire country : At the time, Australia's internet capacity…
>Still, that's insane, the country had less than 100Mbps.
It's easy to take for granted just how much Fucking God Damn Technology we have mundane access to today.
That 14700K or 7800X3D CPU? That's more powerful than entire national supercomputers back in the day.
A 64 gigabyte stick of DDR5 RAM? Bill Gates once said 640 kilobytes is enough for everyone. And you probably needed multiple sticks.
A 20TB hard drive? With helium? Do you understand the bandwidth of a station wagon full of hard drives barreling down the freeway in the 1980s?! Wait, nobody probably even knows what a station wagon is anymore...
1gbit/s internet? 10gbit/s ethernet? We sung the melody of dial up modems conducting international diplomacy better than any politicians.
360Hz liquid crystal display monitor with billions of colors and millions of pixels? We used to completely evacuate air out of glass or ceramic tubes and fire fucking lasers with them to show monotone pictures in neon orange or green.
Modern, minimalist user interfaces? To hell with them, Windows 95 was the pinnacle of human engineered interface design.
...Wait, did we actually devolve? Maybe it was a mistake to make sand think after all.
Re: IRC Will Never Die (2021)
#45What makes IRC special isn't the protocol but the community, and that community has been steadily shrinking month after month, year after year. The average age of regulars continues to go up. Unless its popularity sees some kind of resurgence and the current trends reverse, IRC will most definitely die.
This makes me wonder if there will ever be a day in the distance future where the final Bitcoin node will be turned off forever vanquishing the cryptocurrency to the digital graveyard.
Re: IRC Will Never Die (2021)
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not to mention: 1) IRC doesn't support any form of message threading. There's some user conventions like "username:" or "@username" to direct a message to a specific person, but there's no way to make a clear distinction between multiple conversations in a channel. (You can make a new channel for the conversation, I guess, but that's even more hostile than usual to other users trying to follow along.) 2) IRC doesn't…
1-3 are features. Keep chat messages short. Use git or NFS for sharing files. 4 can be solved by putting the server behind a VPN that does better (2FA) auth and then custom NickServ backed by your auth
Inconveniencing your users because of misplaced ideology is NOT a feature.
Re: IRC Will Never Die (2021)
#47Ircs limitations are its biggest pros. No memes,no videos, no gameification, no shops, just text and thought,or lack thereof.
Re: IRC Will Never Die (2021)
#48Funny that they mention freenode because it did burn to the ground 2 years after this article. However it was reborn as Libera which is once again doing great. If you don't know the story, Google it. I don't want to drag up the past, it's better forgotten. I don't think IRC will really die, it will become a more fringey thing though. Probably more than it already is.
> "I don't think IRC will really die, it will become a more fringey thing though. Probably more than it already is."
Like Gopher? Still out there and bein' used. Very "fringe" now though.
Re: IRC Will Never Die (2021)
#49What makes IRC special isn't the protocol but the community, and that community has been steadily shrinking month after month, year after year. The average age of regulars continues to go up. Unless its popularity sees some kind of resurgence and the current trends reverse, IRC will most definitely die.
Funny, I think the exact opposite. All social spaces are about the people/community, which mostly adapts itself around whatever space they happen to be around, be it a park, shopping map, IRC, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.
What's special about IRC is that it's really easy to set up. If all of the social platforms collapsed, you could set up and use IRC with your group of friends until the next social platform blows up and "everyone" moves to it.
If a partial/regional apocalypse happened, you could set up and run IRC.
Re: IRC Will Never Die (2021)
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hah, the general issue with IRC was (even without DDoS) the bandwidth. I went to Monash University in Australia, starting in 1994. We had an EFnet server (biggest, or one of the biggest). I was just a student so I don't know the specifics, but it was only allowed to run from 6pm to 6am because otherwise it used most of the University's bandwidth, if not the entire country : At the time, Australia's internet capacity…
>Still, that's insane, the country had less than 100Mbps. It's easy to take for granted just how much Fucking God Damn Technology we have mundane access to today. That 14700K or 7800X3D CPU? That's more powerful than entire national supercomputers back in the day. A 64 gigabyte stick of DDR5 RAM? Bill Gates once said 640 kilo bytes is enough for everyone. And you probably needed multiple sticks. A 20TB hard drive? Wi…
And here we are working on systems with dual 400Gbps and sending data out of storage clusters at 5 TiB/s.