Read the article, a bit skeptical, but we'll see.
P.S. I been registered on rizon since 2002 - who else is a an oldschool IRC user in here?
IRC.com Bought by London Trust Media, Pledges an IRC Revival
71–80 of 397 posts
Re: IRC.com Bought by London Trust Media, Pledges an IRC Revival
#72I just launched https://superthread.net the other day. It basically replaces IRC with a modern tech stack. Sorry for self promotion, but it’s a bit strange that someone else is having the same idea at the same time.
https://spectrum.chat is also very similar! I love the minimalist approach tho!
Re: IRC.com Bought by London Trust Media, Pledges an IRC Revival
#73IRC will never get popular again. Server-based history and connections shared across devices are just too useful.
Not only that, but passionate IRC people still hold onto the belief that things like TLS are "useless"[1] 1. https://www.quakenet.org/articles/99-trust-is-not-transitive...
It's unfortunate some people don't see the benefit of trying to move their users to TLS, but Quakenet is the exception here. Most IRC users and networks I know encourage TLS usage and do their best to help users and chatrooms use it. I'd even like to see it required for any modern IRC server, just as HTTPS is required for any modern website. The issues brought up in your link are correct but the solution isn't to abandon encryption, just because it's difficult doesn't mean it shouldn't be attempted.
Re: IRC.com Bought by London Trust Media, Pledges an IRC Revival
#74As a routine user of IRC: This scares – nay, terrifies – me. London Trust Media is colossal. They seem to have control over freenode and Snoonet, two networks basically unchallenged in their niche. Snoonet hasn't been doing so well since Discord, but that's another story. They also seem to own Private Internet Access. If a player becomes too big, they'll change the rules of the game. Just look at the state of Interne…
Slack is today's version of a modern accessible IRC client. It doesn't preclude from the issues of slack being solved by another group. edit: For the IRC uninitiated who enjoy drive-by downvoting: Slack is IRC-inspired - the concept of channels, usernames, private messaging and bots.... in slack is almost all directly inherited from IRC.
I'm not sure why everyone is downvoting this. To repeat myself from another thread: give people generous readings. Slack isn't literally a modern accessible IRC client, no, but it's "today's version," i.e., today's equivalent. Slack is absolutely IRC-inspired, and services like IRCCloud[1] suggest that it'd be possible to build most of what Slack "adds" to IRC on top of IRC's existing protocols.
In a lot of ways, I think Slack's biggest advantage has just been ease of use in modern times: you don't need to know anything about downloading a client and configuring it -- even the friendliest IRC clients I've found are still pretty fiddly compared to "enter your team name, your email address, and your password, boom, done." But this seems like it'd be a relatively easy problem to solve.
Re: IRC.com Bought by London Trust Media, Pledges an IRC Revival
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
So... you want to rebuild Slack? Why not just use Slack. I don't imagine the vast majority of people still using IRC want or need any of the things you listed as "common needs of today." I've been using IRC almost daily for a couple decades now and can't think of a single instance of someone saying "you know what we need? persistent logging and profile pictures and a graphical picture of poop!" Don't do this. You're…
You don't hear people saying things like "I want to be able to send/receive messages while offline on IRC" because they just use something else. Just like you don't hear me wishing that PHP or Fortran had certain features. It's not very good evidence.
Except the opposite is true. I know plenty of people who intentionally use IRC because it _doesn't_ do those things. It hasn't been the victim of feature creep. Hell, even networks with services (chanserv, nickserv, etc) are often looked down upon. There's no walled garden, a very low barrier to entry and everyone speaks the same protocol. Think of the mess of incompatibilities you'll end up with, when someone's using ircII and someone else is using mIRC and yet another person is using shiny-new-feature-laden-client. If you'd like to see what that looks like, go back in time six months and connect to a slack IRC gateway. It was a mess (but it was the only way to get /ignore).
IRC is fine.
Re: IRC.com Bought by London Trust Media, Pledges an IRC Revival
#76Long 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 from the newer trendier platforms. Back then people used to engage a lot more before they became curios to put a face on a nickname.
The internet has been inundated with the "average" people who unfortunately are not interested in "aplications" like mIRC/irssi/bitchX. Looks like average people need apps that are simpler to use than IRC, apps that allow them to promote their profile to the next level, have followers and likes statistic. Which is alright, in the end they are just the average people that wont put effort to learn nonclickable platforms like IRC.
The web really exploded when the smartphone came and apps like facebook came also and made the average people go online and understand what internet was for. There was a time when only the nerds understood what internet really was. Nowadays the internet guy is not a "nerd" anymore. Nerd is not perjorative as it once was.
IRC is still open, IRC is still kicking.
If you are on IRC, dont let the shiny and newer take you out from IRC.
Long live IRC
Re: IRC.com Bought by London Trust Media, Pledges an IRC Revival
#77Earlier 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…
"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."
Then why argue for IRC to be updated with features? Why not go somewhere else and leave the cabal alone?
Re: IRC.com Bought by London Trust Media, Pledges an IRC Revival
#78I don't expect anything good to come out of this for the current IRC users. Hopefully they aren't going to play the embrace-extend-extinguish game in the long run to steal the name for their own proprietary protocol.
Why do you think this?
London Trust Media have pretty public and open positions on Net Neutrality, user privacy, and open source software.
They are a major donor to various open source projects, and are the primary sponsor of the FSF's LibrePlanet conference (to name one that I happen to be aware of).
Re: IRC.com Bought by London Trust Media, Pledges an IRC Revival
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good point. I'm a big fan of the federation of different IRC servers, but also like have rich media embeds and drag+drop image uploading, even if that currently means being tied into the discord servers.
(kiwiirc IRC client dev here) This type of thing is down to the clients to put into place and we actually do this now. Drag/drop files, pasting images directly into the client, 1GB files supported, right out of the box. Give it a try! https://kiwiirc.com/nextclient/ I believe other clients are starting to integrate this type of thing too - it's greatly needed
I'll take a look at this over the weekend thanks!
Re: IRC.com Bought by London Trust Media, Pledges an IRC Revival
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
Slack is today's version of a modern accessible IRC client. It doesn't preclude from the issues of slack being solved by another group. edit: For the IRC uninitiated who enjoy drive-by downvoting: Slack is IRC-inspired - the concept of channels, usernames, private messaging and bots.... in slack is almost all directly inherited from IRC.
I'm not sure why everyone is downvoting this. To repeat myself from another thread: give people generous readings. Slack isn't literally a modern accessible IRC client, no, but it's "today's version," i.e., today's equivalent. Slack is absolutely IRC-inspired, and services like IRCCloud[1] suggest that it'd be possible to build most of what Slack "adds" to IRC on top of IRC's existing protocols. [1]: https://www.ircc…
Slack wins in ease of use. Although strangely their sign up process is cumbersome in their own way.
I suspect downvotes are from people who aren't comfortable with the idea of what's new... Is actually old and improving.