71–80 of 101 posts
What 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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you know IRC well enough to want to mandate it for your company, you can probably set the server up in an hour or three. You can then install https://thelounge.chat/ and have your employees log into that for browser and mobile apps vs. native IRC clients. What money would it require? Any leftover PC from the last 15 years can run the server.
Aggressive delegation to third parties is how we end up with all these complex services. A chat system, a ticket service, a git interface, should be pretty trivial to install and maintain. And consistent too.
Earlier 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…
Earlier 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…
It's not 'insane'. Bandwidth goes a long way when you aren't downloading 100Mb JS frameworks and watching cat videos all day.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
IRC was home to a lot of gaming communities, it was basically Discord before that existed. There used to be live commentary in channels (Twitch replaced this). I don’t believe any gamers use it today but fringe-tech communities still use it, I think that’s what the parent is referring to.
Does the Twitch IRC side still work? As their chat is based on IRC. I did participate on a few streams chat with a normal IRC client a few years back. Ah, Xircon, Quakenet and Counter-Strike. Those were the days.
Earlier 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…
Gates has always denied saying this, and no one has ever produced the original quote. It’s more like something IBM would have said about the PC, they’re the ones that created that limit.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
IRC feels more fringe, but it's actually held up surprisingly well. According to the stats, it's currently about half as popular as it was in 2000 when I started[1]. That's better than I would have guessed. [1] https://netsplit.de/networks/top10.php?year=2024
It's probably worth adding that IRC is so simple to stand up and requires such tiny resources there could be many independent small IRCD's running for smaller organizations and we would never know. I can't be the only one that got tired of drama from some circles of people and stood up my own semi-private nodes for a few circles of my friends. NGIRCD can be configured in less than 5 minutes counting obtaining a LetsE…
What 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.
I would say this is another indication of how people who grew up with the internet, and who generally base their "community" and "friends" in corporate digital products, are incapable of pushing back on corporate overreach.
Are you finding it difficult as a young professional to buy a house, keep up with subscriptions, save for retirement? Don't worry, you'll be screwed 10x worse by the time your of retirement age.
The "i've got nothing to hide from constant survielance", "just use chrome" crowd is digging their own financial grave.
Think it's bad now, just wait...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 bl…
The biggest weirdness on IRC compared to all other platforms is that you NEED to be online 24/7 with your client or you'll miss stuff. There is no "backlog" except for the one you see yourself. On the other hand it's a good thing, people can't just join and scroll down 10 years of chat history. But you'll also be completely unfindable unless your client is online.