IRC is not going anywhere but projects like neovim use gitter primarily while IRC is linked using a bot. They view the IRC chat in gitter.
Dunno if Gitter is better than IRC as I have only used for help and support (for me) but Gitter was far easier to use than IRC. Just Login and start chatting.
I don't think IRC is going anywhere either... We just have alternatives to freenode now in Gitter
it's not very comfortable to use though. Partially because the gitter features don't match how IRC is used 1:1, partially because it seems to have some bugs and sometimes does the simplest possible but uncomfortable thing (which might now get fixed!)
Apropos, does anyone know of a hosting provider with one-click installs of Weechat? It would be nice to have something slightly more self-hosted than irccloud to recommend to the GsoC/GCI students who keep disconnecting from freenode :)
(You'd think with all the Wordpress one-click-installs that this would exists, but I can't find any yet at least.)
Does Gitter have federated servers using a standard protocol and a vast array of programmable extensions? None of these hosted solutions are even in the same league as IRC, and we are worse off for it.
As someone who has written an IRC server implementation, there is no standard protocol. There is an RFC, but no one implements it. Instead, each server uses its own mix of poorly documented pseudo-standards.
I don't know if this still holds true. I've been a IRC user for ~20 years and the current state is a fraction of the fraction of it was once before. Compared with the entire internet, it can already be considered irrelevant, imo.
IRC as general chatting service is outdated. IRC as communication between developers and for tech support is relevant because it's easier and simpler to set up and use.
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