* An actual example session as experienced on gui clients is simply filled with people talking on various channels that the user has selected on prior sessions.
* Clients like hexchat are plain but functional. I'm sure if a designer was hired they could figure out a way to make it prettier and harder to use.
* I don't generally worry about mobile support because I prefer in depth discussion with a real keyboard on a real computer.
* It "failed" because most of the dumb people who don't have anything useful or informative to say prefer to say their nothings via the mobiles and you can't sell people IRC hosting at 10 usd per user per month.
* The only thing it really needs is trivial persistence via a cheap bouncer integrated into clients with fewer steps. As in add credit card number click go.
That's a massive understatement. I'd go as far and say that even if people would try to design a worse chat (and calls) application they'd fail spectacularly.
Yeah - I think all of that supports my point. Aside from security (which most users wouldn't be able to verify in any case) none of those things are relevant to low-traffic chat. i.e. "talk to our live advisors" or "collaborate with another user". The bandwidth and load is tiny and I can imagine handling hundreds or thousands of concurrent users with a traditional architecture and commodity hosting.
Some people prefer to chat on desktop and don't really like the mobile-derived UI and prefer a text-heavy dense layout.
Throw in lightweight resource usage as a requirement and suddenly there are not that many working alternatives anymore.
A company I used to work for used it. I found the client to be really horrendous. It was written in some sort of god-awful Adobe Air thing that used 100% CPU constantly while it ran. Just awful, I can't comprehend why anyone would use a terrible bloated architecture like Air to create what should be a simple lightweight chat system. And the chat program itself had no advantages over any other chat system.
There's hardly any specific criticism here. I'll give my perspective for why I disagree.
They keep me logged in between sessions unless I clear cookies, so when I navigate to chatgpt I go straight to a new chat. There are zero steps for me to get where I want to go. The side nav is simple, shows me a history of chats which is all I care about. Copying code is easy. The layout works well on mobile as well as desktop.
Both Conversations and Monal are abysmal from modern UI/UX standpoint and don’t get even close to something like Whatsapp or Telegram (and those two have lots to improve themselves)
Same can be said about desktop clients.
> The only good thing about that is it should make a thirdparty Teams client relatively straightforward
Who can I throw money at to help make this happen? (Even one that only supported plain text chats and presence would be worth a lot, just so I don't have to have the whole beast running unless I'm actually in a video meeting)
> [server-side history] That's a feature, not a bug.
Whatever your personal feelings on message history are, people and businesses need functionality like usable mobile clients they can receive messages in without keeping the client open continuously, or the ability for administrators to delete messages which have been sent by other users. IRC doesn't, and cannot, provide those features.
> [no attachments] Good, no silly gifs cluttering up the chat.
Also means it's difficult to discuss inherently audiovisual content like graphical designs, or to transfer files -- all things that come up in business contexts.
> [permissions] How fine grained do you need it to be?
It's not that the permissions aren't fine-grained so much as that the entire system is crudely designed. Users' permissions in a channel are mostly tied to their presence in the channel; if you leave and rejoin (or disconnect and reconnect to IRC), any permissions are lost and have to be regranted by another user in the channel. Bans are tied to nicknames (which are volatile) or connection hostnames (which are differently volatile). Invite-only channels use passwords. And so on. It's a mess.
Yes, you can add bots to handle some of that for you -- but having to rely on bolt-on components for basic functionality is a sign of a badly designed service.
It is really that complicated. They have a lot of features, integrations and platforms. I don't believe you understand how a chat client code base could be much more complex than Unreal.
>it was horrible. the standards simply couldn’t keep up. the clients couldn’t keep up.
The best chat application I ever used was Pidgin circa 2008. It was so easy to be able to talk to all my friends across several different protocols in a single program.
I think those are the issues, at least according to the op. I mean, anyone can write a chat app. That tech has existed for ever. Putting the right UX on it is the hard problem good chat apps need to solve.
Hah. They do make a nice chat solution though. I would have enjoyed all the time and effort used for this to have been redirected to a good old tech stack blog, or a feature showcase of why some of their features standout
* Clients like hexchat are plain but functional. I'm sure if a designer was hired they could figure out a way to make it prettier and harder to use.
* I don't generally worry about mobile support because I prefer in depth discussion with a real keyboard on a real computer.
* It "failed" because most of the dumb people who don't have anything useful or informative to say prefer to say their nothings via the mobiles and you can't sell people IRC hosting at 10 usd per user per month.
* The only thing it really needs is trivial persistence via a cheap bouncer integrated into clients with fewer steps. As in add credit card number click go.
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