Ask HN: Do You Miss IRC? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Do You Miss IRC?

#72

Post by paraiuspau » Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 8:43 AM UTC

rimunroe wrote: post #13

hlandau wrote: post #5

This experience still exists, but you have to find smaller channels where people come to know one another as regulars. The smaller networks and channels still exist and they have a good community vibe. Of course, it's hard to find out about these channels. IME it takes time to find the small channels (or the small networks, there are many networks tiny enough for nobody to know about unless they've been invited). Try…

I met my partner in one such channel about five years ago. We’re getting married this October. A lot of the guest list for our wedding is made of folks we met on IRC.

Congrats! I lost my virginity to a woman I met on IRC. Sounds less romantic than your story, but I loved her very much. I mourn those days, 1998-2000 on dalnet.

Re: Ask HN: Do You Miss IRC?

#73

Post by bjoli » Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 10:02 AM UTC

procinct wrote: post #66

chapium wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many people use gnu screen to connect to a session and never log out.

Until you turn your computer off I suppose. Could always set up a server running screen or tmux and ssh into it each time I suppose.

I have a Raspberry pi 2 with an immutable SD card running weechat in a tmux session. Logging is done to a USB stick. On any occasional power failure it restarts everything and logs me back in.

It has been running since whenever the rpi2 came out, and total downtime since has been under an hour.

Re: Ask HN: Do You Miss IRC?

#74

Post by bjoli » Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 10:04 AM UTC

bdd wrote: post #62

I miss the kind strangers who genuinely cared about helping others without being abrasive jerks. I learned a lot on IRC; made many new friends. This was back in 1994–98 when I was growing up in Turkey. The scene was rather small yet still full of kind enthusiasts. Sure there was some passingly “oh you’re a n00b” messing but it wasn’t toxic. EFNet and DalNet were a bit more different. Maybe less kind but still full of…

You should check out chicken scheme's IRC channel. They taught me scheme and answered all my inane questions with patience. I even found a bug once! Hanging out there has made me a more humble person, really.

Re: Ask HN: Do You Miss IRC?

#75

Post by Carpetsmoker » Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 10:09 AM UTC

1337shadow wrote: post #54

brozaman wrote: post #15

I was born in the 90s so I never used IRC outside work. I used it for work on a daily basis until a couple weeks ago, and I hate it with passion. The vpn drops and you miss messages. You are offline you miss messages, don't want to miss messages? set up a relay (seriously?!). Now I'm on a team which uses slack, and I miss how lightweight hexchat is, but in terms of being able to use it my phone and having something t…

It's funny for me to see some people are still advocating Slack's "convenience". I mean I get it, Internet Chat because accessible without actually learning what a client or server is. And I'm myself in at least 3 slack groups professionally out of a total of 20... But I just know nobody , from a variety of OSes, who doesn't experience the "bug where slack completely looses where you are in time" and then you have to…

I'm not a big fan of Slack for a long list of reasons, but at least I don't have to muck about with finicky undocumented (or semi-documented at best) software just to get a basic usable connection which won't drop any messages.

I think just that goes a long way.

Mattermost might be good (never used it), but being self-hosted means it's a lot harder to set up than just subscribing to Slack. I talked about this before on HN[1]: I think providing a simple hosted SaaS should be a key part of the strategy to displace shitty closed-source products like Slack.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21592195

Re: Ask HN: Do You Miss IRC?

#76

Post by Carpetsmoker » Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 10:10 AM UTC

atomi wrote: post #71

brozaman wrote: post #15

I was born in the 90s so I never used IRC outside work. I used it for work on a daily basis until a couple weeks ago, and I hate it with passion. The vpn drops and you miss messages. You are offline you miss messages, don't want to miss messages? set up a relay (seriously?!). Now I'm on a team which uses slack, and I miss how lightweight hexchat is, but in terms of being able to use it my phone and having something t…

Took me all of 10 minutes to set up irssi on a free google cloud vps many years ago. It's still chugging along. ~ uptime 23:22:27 up 787 days, 15:10, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00 It's not that hard.

This is a lot of work (especially if you're not already familiar with these tools) compared to pretty much any other chat solution out there.

Re: Ask HN: Do You Miss IRC?

#77

Post by comex » Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 10:27 AM UTC

atomi wrote: post #71

brozaman wrote: post #15

I was born in the 90s so I never used IRC outside work. I used it for work on a daily basis until a couple weeks ago, and I hate it with passion. The vpn drops and you miss messages. You are offline you miss messages, don't want to miss messages? set up a relay (seriously?!). Now I'm on a team which uses slack, and I miss how lightweight hexchat is, but in terms of being able to use it my phone and having something t…

Took me all of 10 minutes to set up irssi on a free google cloud vps many years ago. It's still chugging along. ~ uptime 23:22:27 up 787 days, 15:10, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00 It's not that hard.

Not that hard, if you don't care about two things:

- Typing latency

- Access from mobile devices

Many people don't care about those things; good for them. Unfortunately for me, I do.

I can (and do) use a bouncer, which theoretically solves both problems: text entry is handled by my local IRC client rather than every keystroke going through a server, and I can run an IRC client on my phone. Unfortunately, bouncers are a rather poor approximation of true cross-device history/state synchronization; e.g. they don't sync unread messages. And they're generally slow and fiddly for various silly reasons. For example, most bouncers require you to make a separate connection for each IRC network, which is slower, and requires configuring each client device for each network, annoying if you have a lot of networks. Also, long backlogs can overload slow IRC clients, but typically the alternative to long backlogs is losing history, since there's no standard mechanism for clients to request history on demand.

There are also some IRC clients that do "true" state synchronization, like Quassel or Weechat's relay mode, but none with a tolerable iPhone version, last I checked.

Re: Ask HN: Do You Miss IRC?

#78

Post by op00to » Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 12:09 PM UTC

atomi wrote: post #71

brozaman wrote: post #15

I was born in the 90s so I never used IRC outside work. I used it for work on a daily basis until a couple weeks ago, and I hate it with passion. The vpn drops and you miss messages. You are offline you miss messages, don't want to miss messages? set up a relay (seriously?!). Now I'm on a team which uses slack, and I miss how lightweight hexchat is, but in terms of being able to use it my phone and having something t…

Took me all of 10 minutes to set up irssi on a free google cloud vps many years ago. It's still chugging along. ~ uptime 23:22:27 up 787 days, 15:10, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00 It's not that hard.

It is if your work IRC server is inside of the VPN and you travel.

Re: Ask HN: Do You Miss IRC?

#79

Post by eswat » Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 12:17 PM UTC

A bit. A gaming channel that I've been hanging around in since 2003 made the bittersweet move of migrating to Discord as more and more people stopped using IRC.

Given that a lot of InfoSec teams I'm in also use Discord I didn't mind the shift. But my paranoia makes me think that maybe our new home may have a higher chance of imploding due to factors out of our control than when we just stuck on GameSurge.

Re: Ask HN: Do You Miss IRC?

#80

Post by muzani » Sat, Feb 15, 2020, 12:36 PM UTC

We still have IRC channels with 300 people on a slow hour and over a thousand when busy. I don't think it's gone. As much as I hate discord, it still does it better, but IRC is by far the best place to meet strangers.