I don't like the framing on feature vs bug. I think it's a characteristic of IRC that made it nice in some ways, and impractical in other ways. The fact that you knew that people were "on" when they were in the channel, and see exactly how many people where "on" at some point in time was really interesting. Right now all your chat apps are persistent chats so you don't really have that feeling of really being in a "chat room" anymore.
If someone is looking for an ephemeral side-project to work on, it'd be interesting to have something like twitter that works in a similar way: you only see tweets posted when you're online on the page.
Well, I consider stuff like the absence of server-side friend lists, server-rendered embeds and formatted messages a bug at best, though in IRC's case it's simply the lack of ability because the protocol is horribly outdated, modern approaches and limitations could afford a lot of QoL improvements.
Well, IRC worked well enough as a chat app back the day as well. Besides large group chats, I didn't miss any features compared to Teams. And let's be honest, those group chats aren't that productive most of the time.
I wholeheartedly agree here. In addition, IRC seemed more like a reflection of real life given the "synchronous design". Such as:
> so even if you see a conversation from a few hours ago, you can't participate in it.
Mirrored the limitations one would have in-person (i.e., they might have heard about the conversation, but now cannot participate in it, notably because it already occurred and all the same people may not be available -- you would have to start anew!)
Another interesting component of IRC is the explicit nature of people joining a channel -- it was treated the same way someone walked into a physical room; People would greet them and numerous conversations would naturally begin just by the essence of that presence. This is all mostly lost in modern clients.
I would say chat history and asymmetrical scheduling for chat are expectations in this day and age, and the lack of them is one of the biggest reasons people find IRC irritating or difficult. (I ask a question, and if the person fit to answer it isn't logged in right now, it never gets even responded to.)
Every fairly modern chat solution, Skype, Discord, Slack, etc. allows you to see messages while you were offline. Compared to things from the older eras of messaging like AIM and YIM, when generally you couldn't even message someone unless they were online as well.
So it's not surprising to me for IRC loggers to be a relatively more modern element: They're filling in a gap IRC has with modern chat clients.
IRC offered a unique featureset for many years - nothing else offered the same global scale and large-group-oriented chats. People will put up with very poor usability if it's the only product with a feature they need.
I remember IRC a bit differently - mostly with it being tied to dialup. When we were on irc, we were on. We might be "afk" for a bit, but generally would be back soon. If you saw someone's nick on irc, it was very likely that they were online and active. Even with ICQ and AOL, it was pretty apparent if people were online or not. If they weren't online, or you didn't need a quick response you sent them an email.
As DSL and broadband became more popular, chat moved to being more asynchronous. Chat clients started synchronizing message history with the server to make it avaialble on all your devices. It was easier to leave your presence online, even when you were unreachable.
IRC itself still retains a lot of that realtime chat, mainly because of its transient nature. Yes - the channel might be populated with people that aren't actually there, but the conversation is much more real time. Unless you have a bouncer or web client, the chat history starts when you join the channel and ends when you leave. There's no threading (ok, maybe some of the web-based clients will do that), so even if you see a conversation from a few hours ago, you can't participate in it. At best you can start a new conversation referencing the old one. Not everyone in the channel will have that history.
I consider that lack of permanence a feature. When Google Talk came out, I loved the fact that all my chat history was saved and it was available everywhere. Now that all chat clients have that, I find myself preferring the more ephemeral/transient chats.
IRC is also bad because it is too client-side. There is no history: if you're not connected or not in the room, you miss all the messages there. IRC Cloud and similar things half-solve this problem in the ideal situation (eg: nothing fails, such as IRC Cloud connecting to the IRC server), but they are a kludge on top of what is really an inadequate protocol if you want to compare to Slack/Hipchat/etc.
Frequently we will @mention someone in a room that the are not currently in, saying something like "Hm, maybe @person can help with this?" and then they'll get the notification, join the room, read the last bit of conversation, and often provide a solution or something useful. That workflow simply doesn't exist on IRC.
There are a handful of other features that range from really-freaking-nice-to-have to essential, such as user avatars, away status, formatted code blocks, inline image display (upon seeing url), @mentions, @mentions that go to e-mail when you're away, synchronized notifications across multiple platforms, file/image upload (via copy/paste).. Some of these CAN be done with the right IRC client, but they're not universal or standardized.
IRC has shrunken dramatically in popularity now, the user base is a bit limited and topics of discussion are often narrow in focus.
I think that's part of what I'm referring to with that as well.
A dating app that starts with some form of topical (text based open group chat) IRC feature (shot text posts) would likely be a wise move in this current day and time... Or even a twitter clone based on dating profiles... hrmmm.... :P
oh man. I've neer been into irc, but this reminds me of msn and chat days. You know, IMs with online status and not. I hate to be always present in the current ecosystem.
Disagree. 15+ years ago, people used IRC in real time, to chat and hangout online. Async chat sucks, plus we had forums for that kind of thing.
More recently, I've contributed to a number of open source projects that have live chat meetings on IRC. We kept logs of those meetings, but live chat is totally the point.
Licensing, hosting and privacy aside. IRC not having built-in chat history is actually a wonderful feature.
The Discord communities I’ve experienced are a mess of dozens of topic driven channels each with long backscroll and various pins to jump around to various points in the chat history. Conversations between the same set of people are fragmented across numerous topic channels. I find it hard to follow and cumbersome to find/search information.
IRC forces chat to be transient, and any information that should persist or reach a wider audience must be handled intentionally.
I always saw it as a bug tbh, but reading drew's footnote on that right now, I am starting to think you and he are right!
But I think it is more complicated, because it also makes clear that IRC is not an ideal medium for many forms of messaging. It works great for free for all chat, where the discussion happens right now. But it is not great for group chats with friends or when information needs to be disseminated across a community, but I have both of these seen used often.
It just not asynchronous, while at the same time, because of the constant open connection, also not great to use on the go.
It's somehow nice to have a medium for "right here and now", but it sucks to not be able to answer a question or miss important conversation because you didn't look for 10 minutes.
Of course, multi-tier conversation options have helped traditionally, but I think that's also why i never bothered with IRC much, because it was always 3 dozen people idling who always seemed to burst in conversation once you got disconnected.
I almost got into IRC ten years ago, when I was active in a programming community that used it in addition to their message board. The idea of having to keep my computer on all the time in order to stay in the loop, and having to learn yet another set of arcane commands for a chat window, was a big turn off then. I wouldn't even consider it today unless there was a specific need to use it, sorry.
Unfortunately, IRC does not allow a lot of modern features that we take for granted, such as seeing a channel's history upon joining, roles, reacts, or message editing. Last I checked, the latest IRC spec doesn't support most of these either. It might be worth working on something open and new
If someone is looking for an ephemeral side-project to work on, it'd be interesting to have something like twitter that works in a similar way: you only see tweets posted when you're online on the page.
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